NYC’s on-time processing rate for food stamps hit 19% low in December before rebounding: ‘Not where we want to be’
New York City’s welfare agency failed to process more than three-fourths of all food stamp applications filed in December within a 30-day timeframe mandated by state law, a top official in Mayor Adams’ administration said Wednesday.
Jill Berry, first deputy commissioner of the Department of Social Services, disclosed the food stamp “timeliness rate” during a City Council hearing, showing her agency processed just 19.2% of all applications submitted in the last month of 2022 within 30 days.
Since the December low, Berry testified that her agency has rebounded.
In February, the latest month for which data is available, her agency’s Human Resources Administration processed 49.9% of food stamp applications within the 30-day window, she testified.
While on the right track, Berry said, “We still have ways to go.”
“That is not where we want to be,” she told Council members of the February rate, “but it is a huge amount of progress since December, and we are continuing to make progress.”
Adams’ preliminary management report, released in February, set as a goal for the administration to achieve a 90.6% food stamp processing timeliness rate by July 1, the end of this fiscal year. By comparison, the food stamp processing rate as of this past October was 42.3%, according to the preliminary management report.
The administration’s incremental progress comes as food stamp application processing has emerged as a crisis for the city’s most vulnerable residents.
Due to the processing delays, thousands of low-income New Yorkers have had to wait for months on end to receive their food stamps, officially called SNAP benefits. The benefits, which are typically uploaded on debit cards, can award a household of three upward of $740 to spend on groceries.
As first reported by the Daily News, a group of local SNAP recipients filed a class action lawsuit against the Adams administration in January, alleging it is violating state and federal laws by failing to process their benefits on time. In the suit, they recounted stories of having to skip meals or only eat potatoes for days due to the processing delays.
The processing hiccups have been attributed to a sharp uptick in food stamp applications during the pandemic and steep staff shortages in the Human Resources Administration ranks.
In Wednesday’s hearing, Berry testified her agency is moving in the right direction because it has been able to fill a significant number of vacancies in recent months. She said there are currently 815 eligibility specialists on the agency’s payroll working exclusively with processing of SNAP and other low-income benefits, like cash assistance.
Berry’s testimony comes as the mayor and Democrats in the City Council remain at loggerheads over next fiscal year’s municipal budget.
The mayor has rolled out budget-cutting measures — or Programs to Eliminate the Gap, as he calls them — that would rein in spending at virtually all city agencies, including the Human Resources Administration. Citing concern about the city’s fiscal health driven by the local migrant crisis, the mayor’s preliminary budget bid also proposed lowering funding levels for the Human Resources Administration.
Council Democrats have vehemently opposed the proposed cuts, arguing the city can afford to fund social safety net programs and care for the tens of thousands of migrants who have arrived since last spring.
In tandem with Wednesday’s hearing, members of the Council’s Progressive Caucus gathered in City Hall Park for a rally against the mayor’s budgetary vision.
“We reject this mayor’s defunding of our social safety net infrastructure,” Brooklyn Councilwoman Shahana Hanif, co-chair of the caucus, said at the rally. “He is defunding safety.”
