A federal watchdog review released September 24, 2026, found that veterans who asked the Department of Veterans Affairs to pay for medical care outside its own hospitals waited an average of about 12 days to learn whether that request was approved. VA’s own rule calls for that decision within three business days. The Veterans Affairs…

Every disability compensation decision the Department of Veterans Affairs makes is supposed to get checked against the same question: was it correct. The agency says 94 percent of them were, the highest rate it has reported in two years. The figure appeared inside a September 22 update that also announced faster claims processing, and VA…

USDA calls it a demonstration project when a state asks to bar SNAP shoppers from buying soda or candy. A federal court in Washington called it something else this summer: exceeding the agency’s authority under the wrong section of federal law. That distinction is why five states that once had approved SNAP purchase restrictions still…

Between June 2025 and June 2026, the number of Texans receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits fell by 646,356, according to USDA’s state-level participation table. The state’s SNAP caseload measured 3,457,259 people in June 2025 and 2,810,903 in June 2026, a decline of about 18.7 percent. Texas’s decline is steeper in percentage terms than the…

More than 270,000 veterans have newly enrolled in VA health care so far in 2026, according to a Sept. 22 tally from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The agency released the figure alongside a broader report on disability-claims processing, framing new enrollment as one part of a larger push to move more veterans into VA…

New Mexico is receiving $74 million in federal money to expand specialty care, maternal health services and behavioral health treatment across its rural communities. The award draws on the Rural Health Transformation Program, a five-year initiative built into last year’s tax law, and New Mexico is one of the states now drawing on its share.…

The federal government resets the income line for free and reduced-price school meals every spring, and this year’s update moves the free-meal ceiling for a household of four to $42,900 a year. That guideline governs school cafeterias nationwide from July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027. A family whose income falls at or under the…

Washington, D.C.’s food-stamp program posted a combined payment error rate of 18.66% for fiscal year 2025, the second-highest rate in the country. Only Alaska, at 23.15%, scored worse among the 53 state and territorial SNAP programs the U.S. Department of Agriculture reviewed. New Mexico, at 16.81%, came closest to the District’s number without passing it.…

South Dakota posted the lowest food-stamp payment error rate in the country for fiscal year 2025, at 2.47%. It was one of only nine states that kept a combined error rate under 6% last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s newest accuracy count for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. That threshold carries more…

124,381 fewer people were enrolled in Georgia’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in June 2026 than in May 2026, according to USDA’s state-level participation table. The state’s SNAP count fell from 1,320,870 people to 1,196,489 in a single month, a decline of about 9.4 percent. USDA marks both May and June 2026 as preliminary for Georgia,…