Guam’s food stamp office closed out fiscal year 2025 with the worst on-time record of any Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program office in the country. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 60.33 percent of the territory’s SNAP applications were processed within the federal deadline, the lowest rate among the 53 state and territorial agencies…

A form that decides whether a surviving spouse, dependent child, or other family member of a veteran receives ongoing VA survivor benefits currently runs 20 pages and takes roughly 40 minutes to complete. The Department of Veterans Affairs has proposed cutting that same document to seven pages and a 25-minute session, a change moving through…

The Department of Veterans Affairs is proposing to cut its main disability compensation application from 15 pages down to five, and shave the time it takes to fill it out from roughly 25 minutes to 15. For a military family living on a fixed VA check, a shorter, clearer form is not a small thing:…

A veteran who left active duty this month could see the government’s first disability check land weeks earlier than veterans who separated a year ago. President Trump signed Executive Order 14426 on September 8, 2026, directing the Department of War and the Department of Veterans Affairs to share military records automatically instead of only on…

When a veteran files a disability compensation claim with the Department of Veterans Affairs, the number that decides how long a household waits for its first check is the processing time. That number has been falling. The Department of Veterans Affairs now says the average time it takes to decide a disability claim has dropped…

The federal government just told 43 states and the District of Columbia that before anyone loses Medicaid over a new work requirement, the state has to warn them it exists. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services built that sequencing directly into the rule creating Medicaid’s new community engagement requirement, which will eventually require many…

More than a third of the people who applied for food assistance in Georgia last year waited longer than federal law allows before the state told them whether they would get help. According to new data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Administration, Georgia processed just 61.24% of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program…

Federal rules updated this year let a household of four bring home as much as $61,050 a year, or $5,088 in a single month, and still qualify for reduced-price meals at school. That threshold sits well above what most people picture when they hear “poverty guideline,” and the gap is intentional: the reduced-price cutoff is…

A federal guarantee that once reimbursed households after thieves drained their food assistance through cloned payment cards expired at the end of 2024, and nothing in Washington has replaced it since. For a family on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, that gap means a card skimmed at a corner store can wipe out a month…

Every SNAP household that pays rent or a mortgage can subtract housing costs from the income figure used to calculate a monthly benefit, but for most families that subtraction stops at a fixed dollar ceiling. One category of applicants faces no ceiling at all: households that include someone 60 or older. As federal grocery-benefit rules…