It’s amazing, and somewhat depressing, that this year marks two full decades since Hurricane Katrina blew through the central Gulf Coast and inundated the city of New Orleans once its defective levees broke from the strain of the storm surge. Just acknowledging that time span has a way of making one feel quite old.
But a memory from just before Katrina’s arrival — a couple of weeks earlier — remains relatively fresh.
It’s of a newspaper article from the New Orleans Times-Picayune about efforts by the accounting firm of Alvarez and Marsal to stanch the fiscal bleeding of the New Orleans public school system, which at the time was the worst in the nation.
The accountant in charge of the forensic audit and attempted cleanup of the system was specifically talking about the utterly broken payroll of the bloated district, and he was saying at least 20 percent or so of the money leaving its treasury was being paid to people who did no work. He said through the imposition of normal fiscal controls, he thought it was possible to reduce the fraud to 10 percent, but to completely stamp it out, he knew of but one remedy, which he didn’t think was possible in the real world.
Namely, to stop all the paychecks from going in the mail, and force all the payees to show up and be interviewed in order to collect. In that way, the accountant said, they’d be able to do a granular accounting and separate the wheat from the chaff.
“Yeah, right,” I remember thinking. “It’d take a miracle to make this possible.”
Well, it wasn’t quite a miracle, but when those levees broke, so did New Orleans. And in the wake of Katrina, the entity that had been the New Orleans school system went away, to be replaced by, essentially, an ecosystem of charter schools.
And New Orleans isn’t the worst school system in America anymore. It isn’t the best, either, but it’s a hell of a lot better than it used to be. And while I won’t make the case that the books are clean, there is no current perception that systematic payroll fraud is a standing feature of public education in the Big Easy.
Silver linings abound if you know where to look.
Similarly, we’ve got the full-on reset of the SNAP food-stamps program, which is now underway, and that could never have happened but for the Schumer Sombrero Shutdown and the Democrat Media Complex’s landing on SNAP as the alarmist narrative of choice. (RELATED: Dems Take Away Free Food From the Snapanese at Great Political Risk)
On Thursday, as you might have seen, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that the Trump administration is going to run a full reset of the SNAP program. Its recipients are going to have to reapply because that’s the fastest and cleanest method of scraping off the layabouts and fraudsters, not to mention illegal aliens, among its astonishing and disgraceful 45 million recipients. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 297: Democrats Cave, Republicans Win Government Shutdown Saga: Can Republicans Keep Winning?)
BREAKING: Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to OVERHAUL entire SNAP program after major fraud exposed
– 186,000 dead people receiving benefits
– 500,000 recipients are getting double benefits
– every recipient will need to reapply to verify “they can’t survive without it”… pic.twitter.com/J2UE23KMTa— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 14, 2025
SNAP fraud is out of control, and the numbers we HAVE prove it.
Data from just 29 states uncovered nearly 200,000 people with dead people’s social security numbers… Meanwhile, 21 states are suing to keep their data hidden.
Why block transparency unless the truth is worse than… pic.twitter.com/XAjHKncCfp
— Secretary Brooke Rollins (@SecRollins) November 13, 2025
The 200,000 surprisingly spry corpses pulling down SNAP funding just in the red states willing to open up their SNAP rolls are really a drop in the bucket. The program’s accounting system has been broken, almost certainly intentionally (Cloward-Piven strategy, anyone), for decades, and this is just one of several lines of fraud plaguing the program.
But as Streiff noted at RedState over the weekend, there was even more going on before Rollins decided to blow things up.
When President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, he not only funded the government for the remainder of the year, he made the largest cuts to SNAP in its history. It included a $186 billion reduction to SNAP spending and included new work requirements and other restrictions on who receives benefits.
Let’s take a look at the changes.
- Age limit increased: Able-bodied adults aged 18-64 must work at least 80 hours per month or be engaged in education, a training program, or volunteering to remain eligible for SNAP benefits beyond three months in a three-year period. Previously, the upper age limit was 54.
- Exemptions removed: Previously, people falling in the ABAWD category, which stands for Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents, were only allowed to enroll in SNAP for three months in three years. There were exceptions for veterans, the homeless, and kids aging out of foster care. Those exemptions have been removed.
- Caregiver exemption narrowed: The exemption to the time limit for caregivers of children under age 18 has been changed to children under 14.
- Waiver criteria narrowed: Areas with an unemployment rate over 10 percent (except Alaska and Hawaii) may qualify for a waiver from the work requirements. Previously, a waiver could be obtained by the state certifying that certain areas lacked sufficient jobs. That waiver was eliminated, and states were told to use Bureau of Labor Statistics data to apply for waivers.
Other changes will also hit hard.
- Federal Cost Share Reduced. In the past, the federal government picked up the tab for 75 percent of administrative costs. Under the OBBA, the federal share is 50 percent.
- End of Benefits for Most Non-Citizens. SNAP changes will cut benefits for roughly 250,000 refugees and other humanitarian visa holders.
Perhaps Rollins would have been able to go further in reforming the program without the shutdown, but as Deb Heine notes at American Greatness, that wasn’t her take…
Rollins has repeatedly described SNAP as “broken and corrupt,” citing widespread fraud uncovered during investigations.
She has also pointed out in interviews that the government shutdown exposed how the program had been corrupted during the Biden years.
President Trump commented on the explosion of food stamp fraud earlier this month on Truth Social.
“SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office (Due to the fact that they were haphazardly “handed” to anyone for the asking, as opposed to just those in need, which is the purpose of SNAP!), will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Trump posted on Nov. 4.
Hundreds of enraging videos posted on social media accounts like “EBT of TikTok” have proliferated online in recent weeks showcasing SNAP recipients who shamelessly tout their enormous grocery store hauls, and in some cases, brazenly detail how they cheat the system.
“The fact that this spotlight has shined on SNAP has allowed us to talk about it,” Rollins said on Newsmax TV’s “Rob Schmitt Tonight.”
I’m going to chalk this up as a nice potential win for the American people, and I’d like to thank Chuck Schumer, Hakeem “Temu Obama” Jeffries, and the rest of the stupid communists in the Democrat Party for opening the door to reform by shining a spotlight on the fiscal disaster of the SNAP program.
Now that they’ve done us this favor, we’ll get to see their inevitable double-down when they demand that SNAP fraud be re-enabled or else they’ll filibuster the appropriations bills or other budget measures. Except this toothpaste won’t go back in the tube. Sorry, guys.
And good for Rollins, who seems to be of a new breed of Republicans who actually took Rahm Emanuel seriously in his admonition never to let a crisis go to waste.
If SNAP makes the kind of improvement toward competence and taxpayer ROI that the New Orleans schools did after Katrina, it will have been a great boon for the American people. Maybe we can erect a statue of Schumer as the unwitting savior of the program.
READ MORE from Scott McKay:
Bush Republicanism Can’t Win the Votes We Need to Save America
The Dog That Didn’t Bark and the Bombshell That Didn’t Explode
Trump and the GOP Won the Shutdown. Let’s Make Sure Trophies Are Taken.
, 2025-11-18 03:04:00, 
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