For two years, a household whose food-assistance benefits were drained by thieves could get the money back from the federal government. That safety net is gone. The authority that let states replace electronically stolen Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits with federal dollars expired at the end of 2024 and was never renewed, leaving victims of card skimming and cloning with no federal recourse. As the theft continues, low-income families, many of them older adults on fixed incomes, are absorbing losses of grocery money they cannot easily replace. The lapse is quiet, technical, and financially brutal for the people it touches.
The authority that expired at the end of 2024
The replacement program was a temporary fix, not a permanent feature of SNAP. Congress created it in a 2022 spending law after a surge in electronic benefit theft, and it required states to reimburse households whose benefits were stolen through skimming devices, cloned cards, and phishing scams. The reimbursement came from federal funds and was capped at a set amount per household in a given period.
That authority had an expiration date. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the statutory authority to replace stolen benefits expired on December 20, 2024, and benefits stolen on or after December 21, 2024 are no longer eligible for replacement with federal funds. When Congress passed its next funding bill, it did not include an extension, so the program simply ended on schedule rather than being deliberately repealed.
The distinction matters for anyone tracking the issue: this was not a policy anyone voted to kill, but a temporary measure that lapsed because lawmakers did not act to continue it. The result is the same either way. A family whose EBT card is emptied today has no federal claim to file, regardless of how the theft occurred or how much was taken.
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How the benefits were being stolen in the first place
The thefts that prompted the program are largely low-tech and devastatingly effective. Criminals attach skimming devices to point-of-sale terminals and ATMs to capture card numbers and PINs, then clone the magnetic-stripe cards that SNAP still relies on and drain the accounts the moment monthly benefits load. Because EBT cards lack the chip technology that protects most bank cards, they are an easy target, and a stolen benefit is spent before the rightful recipient reaches the checkout line.
The federal government has tried to harden the system around the edges rather than replace the cards. USDA has pushed states to adopt safeguards such as letting recipients lock and unlock their cards and freeze out-of-state transactions, tools that can blunt skimming but do not eliminate it. Those protections put more of the burden on recipients to guard their own accounts, a shift that is harder for older or less tech-comfortable users to manage.
The scale of the problem did not shrink when the reimbursement program ended. Reporting on the aftermath found that more than $14 million in benefits were stolen from New York recipients alone after the replacement program lapsed, money that under the old rules would have been restored and now simply vanishes from household budgets.
What victims are left with now
The federal door is closed, but a few narrow ones remain open. Claims for benefits stolen during the covered window, roughly October 2022 through December 20, 2024, can still be filed in some states, subject to each state’s plan and deadlines. Beyond that window, replacement now depends entirely on whether a given state chooses to spend its own money, and most do not have a standing program to do so.
The USDA tracks the wind-down publicly. Its dashboard on replacement of stolen benefits shows the states that have stopped accepting claims and the totals reimbursed before the authority ended. For current theft, the practical advice from advocates is prevention: change the PIN often, lock the card between purchases where the state allows it, and spend benefits soon after they load rather than leaving a full month’s balance exposed.
The deeper problem is structural and unresolved. Federal watchdogs have projected that hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits could be stolen in the years after the program lapsed, losses that now fall on the households least able to absorb them. Until Congress either renews the replacement authority or forces a move to chip-enabled cards, the people relying on SNAP to eat are also the ones fully exposed to its theft, with no promise of getting a single dollar back.
The fix a few states are betting on: chip-enabled cards
The theft is low-tech because the cards are, and the most concrete response has been to modernize the plastic itself. California became the first state to issue chip-enabled, tap-to-pay EBT cards, mailing them to CalFresh households beginning in January 2025 and moving SNAP off the magnetic stripe that skimmers copy onto the same EMV chip that has guarded ordinary bank cards for years. California’s Department of Social Services documented the switch as a direct answer to the skimming epidemic, and reimbursements for stolen benefits in the state fell sharply once the secure cards were in circulation.
The upgrade is spreading, but slowly and voluntarily: Oklahoma began issuing chip cards in January 2026 and Alabama followed the next month, while most states remain on skimmable stripes. The stakes of that lag are large. More than $600 million in SNAP benefits were reported stolen in 2025 nationwide, and with the federal replacement authority gone, every dollar taken in a stripe-only state now stays lost. The uncomfortable reality for recipients is that whether their groceries are protected depends less on any federal safeguard than on whether their own state has bothered to reissue the card.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team.
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