FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 12, 2026

Press Contact:

Vincent Errichetti

(617) 922-1824

Press@johndeatonforsenate.com

I Grew Up on Food Stamps. That’s Exactly Why Massachusetts Must Stop the Fraud.



I know what it’s like to need help. As a kid, my family relied on food stamps - what we now call SNAP - to keep food on the table. I remember what that assistance meant to a family that had nowhere else to turn. That’s not an abstraction to me. It’s not a talking point. It’s my childhood.

So when I read the headlines about $1.4 billion in improper SNAP payments flowing out of Massachusetts over the last four years, with roughly $300 million in federal penalties now headed for taxpayers as a result, I don’t hear a story about bureaucratic error rates. I hear a story about betrayal. Betrayal of the taxpayers footing the bill; and betrayal of the kids who are supposed to be the whole point of this program.

Every dollar lost to fraud, waste, or sloppy oversight is a dollar that didn’t reach a hungry child. That’s the part too many politicians on Beacon Hill, and in Washington, refuse to say out loud. This isn’t a fight between “compassion” and “cruelty.” It’s the opposite. Real compassion means guarding this program fiercely enough that it’s still there - funded, trusted, and intact - for the next kid whose family is counting on it the way mine did. Every scandal, every fraud ring, every ignored audit finding gives ammunition to the people in Washington who’d rather gut SNAP altogether than fix it. Waste isn’t a victimless bureaucratic footnote. It is the single biggest threat to this program’s own survival.

And Massachusetts has let it get out of hand. The state’s SNAP payment error rate has climbed into double digits; among the highest in the country, while enrollment has surged. Federal officials have made clear that states with elevated error rates are going to start sharing in the cost of that failure starting in fiscal year 2028. That’s not a partisan attack line. That’s the design of the law. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have already uncovered fraud rings running millions of dollars through Massachusetts storefronts, trafficking benefits meant for hungry families. The state’s own Department of Transitional Assistance is simultaneously facing staffing cuts that advocates warn will make it even harder to catch errors before they happen. We are cutting the referees while the game gets worse.

Here’s what should trouble every Massachusetts resident, regardless of party: we already voted to do something about accountability on Beacon Hill, and our own government is ignoring us.

In 2024, nearly 72 percent of Massachusetts voters - a landslide by any standard - approved Question 1, authorizing the state auditor to finally audit the Legislature itself. Nearly two years later, that audit still hasn’t happened. Legislative leaders have slow-walked it, litigated it, and thrown up procedural roadblocks at every turn. When 72 percent of voters agree on something and the people in power simply refuse to comply, that’s not a legislative disagreement. That’s a government telling its own citizens their vote doesn’t matter.

That is what one-party rule looks like in practice. When one party has held uncontested power on Beacon Hill for as long as most of us can remember, there is no opposing check, no rival caucus with the leverage to force a floor vote, no real fear of losing the majority. Accountability becomes optional because nobody with power has to fear the alternative. A $1.4 billion oversight failure and a two-year-old, voter-mandated audit sitting on a shelf are not separate stories. They’re the same story: what happens when the people who spend the money are also the people who get to decide whether anyone checks their work.

This doesn’t have to be a partisan fight, and it shouldn’t be one. Protecting SNAP for the families who genuinely need it and demanding basic financial accountability from the Legislature are not opposing goals. They’re the same goal. You cannot claim to care about low-income kids while tolerating a system so poorly overseen that hundreds of millions of dollars meant for them are lost to error and abuse instead. You cannot claim to respect the will of the voters while a 72 percent mandate collects dust because the people it targets get to decide whether to comply with it.

I didn’t grow up wealthy. I grew up needing exactly the kind of help SNAP is supposed to provide. That’s why I take it more seriously, not less, when I see it being run into the ground by neglect and unaccountable power. Massachusetts taxpayers deserve a state government that actually enforces the laws voters pass. And the kids depending on this program today - the ones living the childhood I once lived - deserve a system that protects every dollar meant for them instead of losing it to fraud nobody was watching for.

Enforce the audit. Fix the oversight. Stop pretending this is someone else’s problem. The voters already told Beacon Hill what they wanted. It’s time someone in power actually listened.

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