WASHINGTON — When the government announced Monday that 10% of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits were paid in error last year, Republicans proudly declared that they were on top of the problem.

“This is exactly why we need to get the One Big Beautiful Bill to the President’s desk,” the top Republicans on committees overseeing SNAP said in a joint statement. “Its historic reforms will give states skin in the game on SNAP benefits and ensure they have a real incentive to improve oversight and stop improper payments before they happen.”

But a funny thing happened to the Big Beautiful Bill before the Senate passed it on Tuesday. In an apparent effort to win over Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the provision cracking down on erroneous SNAP payments was changed so that states with the highest error rates, such as Alaska, would be exempt for one or two years.

“Did we make some changes in the SNAP provisions that will allow for a delay, that will allow for greater flexibility to the state? Absolutely,” Murkowski told reporters after the vote, explaining why she voted for a bill she doesn’t like.

Forcing states to share the cost of SNAP benefits would fundamentally alter the program, giving states strong incentives to cut enrollment. It was the most aggressive SNAP cut in the original House version of the Big Beautiful Bill; the Senate version would allow states to avoid the burden entirely by keeping their error rates beneath 6%.

But the change made to win over Murkowski would exempt several states and appear to create an incentive for other states to make even more erroneous benefit payments, potentially adding to the $100 billion annual cost of the program.

“You can deliberately jack up your error rate and then get a two-year delay,” Bobby Kogan, a budget expert with the liberal Center for American Progress, said in an interview. “The purpose was to delay the cuts to Alaska and they did it in a way that makes no conceptual sense.”

The SNAP switcheroo was one of several last-minute changes Senate Republicans made before passing their bill on Tuesday within mere hours of its text being finalized as Republicans rush to beat a self-imposed July 4 deadline. The broader bill consists of $4 trillion in tax cuts that are only partially paid for with cuts to SNAP and Medicaid.

Because Senate Republicans passed the bill using a special “budget reconciliation” process that doesn’t allow “extraneous” provisions — such as policies directly targeting individual states with only incidental budgetary effects — they had to write the Alaska SNAP carveout so that it didn’t look so obvious. So the bill would delay the crackdown for any state with an error rate above 13.3%. (To make it even less obvious, instead of setting the threshold at 13.3%, the text says the exemption applies for states whose error rates exceed 20% when multiplied by 1.5.)

According to the SNAP error rate numbers posted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture this week, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and the District of Columbia would win a delay of the cost-sharing burden if it were based on 2024 error rates.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said he told his state’s governor to let him know that Hawaii, with a SNAP error rate of 6.8%, could be missing out.

“Just had to text Governor @DrJoshGreen 10 states are exempt from food assistance cuts. They are the ones with the MOST ERRORS in administering the program. And because he did good work in reducing the error rate by 15 percent, we are not exempt,” Schatz said on social media.

A spokesperson for Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The warped SNAP cost-sharing provision will likely be a point of contention among House Republicans who are already upset that the Senate changed a number of provisions from the version that passed the House in May. Nevertheless, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said the House would pass the bill this week and send it to President Donald Trump’s desk.

During a meeting of the House Rules Committee ahead of a likely vote on Wednesday, Republicans refused to defend the proposal.

“You’d have to sit down with the senators to figure out why they did that,” House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) said, before adding he knew it had been done to win Senate votes.

“It’s just an absurd policy,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said. “Why would you penalize a state for having a lower error rate and encourage them to have a higher error rate? Which I can read the provision to do nothing else. So let’s just call balls and strikes here. That was a ball, and it wasn’t even close.”