Congress let the program that replaced stolen SNAP benefits expire on December 20, 2024, and it has not come back since. For a household whose EBT card gets skimmed or cloned today, that means there is no federal check waiting at the end of a claim form in nearly every state in the country. Only California and Maryland still reimburse victims out of their own money, according to the Congressional Research Service and the two states’ own benefit agencies. Everywhere else, whatever a thief pulls off a SNAP card in 2026 is gone for good.
How the Federal Replacement Program Ended
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 created a temporary, first-of-its-kind rule letting states use federal money to replace SNAP benefits stolen through card skimming, cloning, and similar schemes. It originally covered thefts between October 1, 2022, and September 30, 2024, and Congress pushed that deadline back once, to December 20, 2024, in a stopgap funding bill. A follow-up proposal to extend the authority through September 30, 2028 was drafted into a later continuing resolution, but Congress dropped it, and the funding bill that actually passed left the extension out.
The Congressional Research Service reports that by the time the clock ran out, state agencies had approved more than 450,000 claims and replaced roughly $211.8 million in stolen benefits nationwide. CRS is direct about what comes next: “under SNAP’s permanent law, there is no federal funding” to replace benefits stolen from an EBT card. The 2022 law was a carve-out, not a standing right, and once it lapsed, SNAP went back to having none of the protections that cover a stolen credit or debit card. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Administration still confirms on its own site that “congressional authority to replace stolen benefits expired on Dec. 20, 2024,” with no update since indicating it has returned.
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California and Maryland Are the Only States Still Paying
California never fully stopped. The Governor’s Office announced in January 2026 that when a theft is reported and confirmed by a county caseworker, the county reimburses the victim, and those reimbursements are “largely paid for by the state” — no federal authority required. The state has also been driving the underlying theft rate down: chip-and-tap EBT cards, rolled out starting in February 2025, plus forced PIN resets on compromised accounts, cut reported EBT theft by about 83% between January 2024 and November 2025.
Maryland runs its own parallel system. Its Department of Human Services operates a live EBT Theft Reimbursement claims portal where a cardholder files an attestation form and gets a decision within 10 business days; DHS says it replaces 100% of benefits it confirms were stolen. A handful of other states — Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, Oklahoma, and Alabama among them — are rolling out chip-enabled cards to cut theft going forward, but that is a prevention measure, not a promise to make a victim whole after the fact. As of this year, California and Maryland remain the only two states actually cutting reimbursement checks from their own budgets once a theft has already happened.
What a Skimmed Card Costs a Household Everywhere Else
The gap matters because SNAP cards were never covered the way a bank card is. CRS notes that the federal consumer protections limiting a cardholder’s liability for unauthorized purchases — the rules that make a bank eat the loss on a stolen debit or credit card — specifically do not apply to EBT transactions. A household in, say, Ohio or Texas whose SNAP balance gets drained by a cloned card has no bank-style backstop and, since December 2024, no federal replacement program either. States can choose to use their Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant to cover stolen TANF cash benefits, but CRS is clear that nothing requires them to.
That leaves prevention as the only real defense for households outside California and Maryland: changing a card’s PIN regularly, avoiding easy-to-guess numbers, checking an EBT balance for unfamiliar charges, and reporting suspected theft immediately to a state agency in case a claim window still applies locally. For everyone else, the outcome is the one CRS spelled out when the temporary authority lapsed — under the program’s permanent rules, a skimmed SNAP card is treated the same as cash pulled from someone’s pocket: once it’s gone, there is no federal mechanism to get it back.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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