Editor’s note: An article in last week’s The Smoky Mountain News titled “ What $144 million looks like” examined how President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill impacted SNAP and Medicaid recipients. This week, SMN examines how the legislation impacts county governments in Western North Carolina.
Somewhere inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the feds are crunching numbers to determine how accurately North Carolina distributed Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments to its eligible residents in Fiscal Year 2026.
Those number-crunchers are analyzing data from state and federal agencies for quality control purposes. They want to make sure the right people were paid the right amount of money for food and nutrition assistance.
The USDA’s website states, “Through quality control, USDA helps state agencies identify the root causes of their payment errors and assist them in developing a corrective action plan to improve the accuracy of their eligibility and benefit determinations.”