WASHINGTON — Congress cut the food stamp program to save the federal government money, but those changes will cost every Minnesotan who owns a home, farm or any other property in the form of higher property taxes.
The reason higher property tax bills are on the horizon is that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — which locked many of President Donald Trump’s priorities into law — shifts more of the cost of running the program to Minnesota's counties. It also forces the state and all 87 county governments to pay for some of the benefits to about 440,000 Minnesota food stamp recipients.
“This will certainly strain our local budgets past capacity,” Blue Earth County Commissioner Kevin Papp said of the cost shifts.
Julie Ring, executive director of the Association of Minnesota Counties, estimated that the average property tax hike will be 3.25%. But that will vary, depending on how many food stamp recipients are in a county.
For example, Blue Earth and Scott counties could see property rate hikes of 2.93% while Ramsey County’s property taxes could increase by 8.42%, the association says.
In the budget act, Congress expanded SNAP’s current work requirements to “able-bodied” individuals ages 18-64, parents of minor children ages 14 and up, veterans and the homeless.
Those new work requirements may throw even working people off of benefits if they do not report their eligibility properly.
The new regulations are expected to end benefits for 45,000 Minnesotans, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Yet county officials will have the same amount of work to do because they must still try to enroll all who apply — even those who no longer qualify for food stamps — Ring said. “We don’t anticipate our workload going down,” she said. “Even when reimbursements and caseloads go down.”
A costly ‘error rate’
Seventeen Minnesota counties are currently exempt from the work requirements because they documented a lack of jobs. But those counties would no longer be exempt under the new SNAP regulations. They are Aitkin, Carlton, Cass, Clearwater, Hubbard, Isanti, Itasca, Kanabec, Koochiching, Lake of the Woods, Mahnomen, Mille Lacs, Morrison, Norman, Pine, Todd and Wadena counties.
Congress also cut the federal share of the cost of administering the food stamp program from 50% to 25%.
Since Minnesota is one of 12 states in which counties run the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the official name for food stamps, those counties will now have to spend more money administering the program, even as the paperwork for signing up recipients has increased.
“As we look at stricter requirements, that will take more work,” Papp said.
The bill also punishes states with high “error rates” for the first time, shifting part of the cost of the benefit to those states.
The SNAP payment error rate reflects the combined rate of overpayments and underpayments in SNAP benefits and is not considered fraud but rather a measure of administrative accuracy. The national error rate in 2024 was nearly 11%.
But under the budget act, any state with an error rate that’s higher than 6% would be penalized. Minnesota had an 8.9% error rate in 2024. If that stays the same, the state would have to pay 10% of the cost of benefits, or about $86 million.
Unfortunately for the state’s counties, half of that cost would be shifted to them.
“What Republicans in Congress did is they actually just shifted the cost of the SNAP program to the states depending on the error rates, and in Minnesota by mandate those costs shift to the county,” said Rep. Angie Craig, D-2nd District.
Polk County Commissioner Joan Lee agrees. “The counties are going to bear the brunt of it,” she said.
Lee said the cost of administering the program in Polk County has been from $40,000 to $50,000 a year. “Doubling that is going to bring it to $100,000,” she said.
And counties will suffer an even greater financial impact, too.
The cost for the counties to begin paying a portion of SNAP benefits will be high and have a much higher impact than the cutting of federal money to administer the program.
In Ramsey County, for instance, the Association of Minnesota Counties estimated that administrative costs would rise by about $4.7 million, and the new requirement to share in the cost of benefits would be an additional $14.4 million.
U.S. Rep. Michelle Fischbach, R-7th District, who like most Republican lawmakers supported the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in a highly partisan vote, said cost shifting to the counties “is going to be the state government’s choice.”
“They need to get their fraud under control and then pick up those dollars, because it does not have to be shifted to counties,” Fischbach said.
U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad, R-1st District, who like Fischbach was interviewed at Farmfest last week, was also supportive of the changes to SNAP.
“It is high time in our state and country that we get a handle on the waste, fraud and abuse,” he said. “We have 9% error rates … We need to do something about it.”
‘This hits everybody’
Lee, a retired dairy farmer, said her county will soon begin work on its 2026 budget amid uncertainty.
She said half of Polk County’s property taxes come from agricultural land, and she’s concerned about the impact of property tax hikes on the county’s farmers.
“But this hits everybody that owns property,” Lee said.
The SNAP program has historically been supported by the nation’s farmers, and it’s run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Usually, changes to SNAP are made in a massive five-year farm bill that reauthorizes all USDA programs. But the last farm bill expired in 2023 and Congress has struggled to approve a new one.
Although the budget act contained $66 billion to shore up farm safety net programs — a move that was welcomed by Minnesota farmers — those same farmers decried the SNAP cuts.
“SNAP is ultimately buying crops that we produce, that we grow,” said Kyle Jore, a soybean farmer in Thief River Falls. “It’s not like we have anything against it, and it’s actually a benefit.”
There’s hope in farm country that Congress might move on a “skinny” farm bill this year that would complement the agriculture provisions in the budget act. That would provide Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee, like Craig, the opportunity to try to roll back some of the food stamp cuts.
“Basically, they gutted a title of the farm bill to plus up others,” Craig said of the budget act.
MinnPost data reporter Shadi Bushra contributed to this story.
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.