Here’s why Georgia officials say there’s a “severe” SNAP delay across the state

After being put on notice by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Georgia Department of Human Services has submitted a corrective action plan (CAP) to deal with what federal officials call a “severe” lack of compliance with regulations.

The issues in question were focused on an ongoing backlog for approving and processing applications for the state’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, popularly known as food stamps.

On Nov. 21, Georgia officials were given 30 days to come up with a plan to fix the issue. In previous publication by Channel 2 Action News, it was reported that officials had not yet submitted the plan by deadline, as informed by the Department. Thursday, a DHS spokeswoman clarified that the plan was submitted on Dec. 21, on the day of the deadline.

A new plan was submitted to the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service. Channel 2 Action News obtained a copy of it on Thursday.

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According to the plan submitted for approval by the Georgia Department of Human Services, there were two “root causes” of the backlog and delays.

The first listed was essentially a lack of staff.

“Case processing functions are divided between applications and renewals,” the report from DHS reads. “For the past months, the State Agency has been focused on completing a backlog of renewals.”

To deal with the need to complete renewal applications versus new benefit requests, DHS “moved approximately 200 veteran staff from completing applications to completing renewals,” which they said had caused their application processing timeliness to drop below a required 95% rate.

To address this issue of moving staff, DHS said they’ll “methodically move veteran staff who are currently processing renewals” back to initial applications once the renewal backlog goes down.

In terms of immediacy, there was not a specific other strategy listed in the CAP to deal with this particular root cause.

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The second cause described by DHS officials in their corrective plan said issues with SNAP backlogs are partly due to a slowdown from training new staff.

DHS said they’d “hired 1,182 new staff since January 1, 2023. With the Public Health Emergency unwinding,” they instead had staff focus on completing Medicaid re-determinations, so most of the new staff hired were not trained on SNAP determinations first.

As a result, “newly hired staff became proficient in Medicaid and were unable to assist in processing SNAP cases until they were trained.” DHS said it was a statewide issue. To address it, any staff hired after Dec. 23 will be trained on SNAP processing first, to assist with the timeliness rate issues highlighted by the USDA.

According to DHS, “It takes three months to train a caseworker in SNAP. What we’ll typically do is hire a worker, train them for three months, let them work for three months with on-the-job support, and then train them in their second program.”

Going forward, the department said the movement of staff from one application process to the other will continue. Staffing will not be adjusted back to application processing until the renewal backlog has been fully dealt with.

“We’ll do this when the renewal backlog decreases,” a DHS spokeswoman told Channel 2 Action News. “Due to fluctuations, we will always have a portion of our workforce that we shift back and forth between applications and renewals.”

DHS said in their proposed plan to USDA that their goals for both of the issues would be to improve processing times by 5-6%.

In terms of the Medicaid unwinding in Georgia, U.S. Secretary of Health Xavier Becerra recently sent a letter to Georgia officials regarding the removal of about 150,000 children from state-provided healthcare.

While the state is enacting changes to address needs in the SNAP program, officials pushed back on the letter sent by Becerra on Dec. 18, telling Channel 2 Action News instead that “Georgia has taken considerable action to streamline processes; utilize innovations, Georgia-centric solutions, and waivers to benefit Medicaid recipients” and that the state was “following the process initiated and mandated by the Biden-Harris administration, which has once again missed an opportunity to urge families to fill out their paperwork.”

In the meantime, the DHS said they’ve provided $54 million from the state budget for funding “to support a surge team of 99 contracted caseworkers to process Medicaid renewals,” as of Dec. 18.

Channel 2 Action News has reached out to the USDA to see when they may approve or reject the plan. Channel 2 Action News has also reached out to DHS regarding clarity on how the staffing needs for the application and renewal process for SNAP will operate moving forward.

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