Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Snap Shutdown topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
DHS: 690,000 Tennesseans face missed SNAP benefits unless federal funds resume
Summary
The Department of Human Services told the Finance, Ways, and Means Committee that roughly 690,000 SNAP recipients could miss benefits at the start of the next month amid a federal shutdown and that the state lacks an overnight replacement mechanism for EBT card distributions.
Leader Lambert pressed Commissioner Clarence Carter about the immediate implications of a federal shutdown for SNAP recipients. Carter said the department manages eligibility but the federal vendor loads funds to electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, and without federal action those new monthly benefits will not be loaded.
"We have 690,000 Tennesseans that are on our SNAP rolls. And as of Saturday, they would not receive benefits," Commissioner Clarence Carter told the committee. He said the state's monthly SNAP outlay is about $145,000,000 and that the existing delivery mechanism is dependent on federal systems and vendor lines of credit that cannot be re-created overnight.
Multiple members asked whether state TANF reserves or discretionary funds could be used to bridge the gap. Carter replied that Tennessee had already obligated its TANF reserve and that even if money were available, creating an alternate distribution mechanism for hundreds of thousands of households would be complex and time consuming. "To put a mechanism like that in place ... it would be a massive and timely undertaking," he said.
DHS said it is coordinating with the governor's office, faith and community groups and nonprofits to publish a statewide resource map (feedtennessee.org) listing local feeding options and to encourage community distributions. Agency staff said they are exploring additional possibilities and will follow up with the legislature, but cautioned that the most practicable near‑term mitigations rely on volunteer and nonprofit networks.
Committee members pressed DHS to evaluate creative approaches — for example, issuing vouchers or partnering with grocers — and the department said it would examine feasibility while warning that practical constraints (vendor acceptance, security and statewide scale) make such approaches difficult on short notice. The committee asked DHS to return with options and analyses.
