If your concern is about fraud, and making sure the poorest receive funds, block grants are the opposite of what we should do. They allow states to redirect the money away from the neediest.
OTOH, there is very persuasive evidence that SNAP really helps people.
academic.oup.com/restud/artic...

The WaPO editorial equates error rates with fraud, and applaud Trump laws that will penalize states for error rates. Either they don't know that is incorrect, or they don't care. Here, @pamherd.bsky.social explains what error rates actually mean.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-big-be...

Shout out to @willroyce.bsky.social —an excellent researcher who later corroborated my id and had collected some valuable screenshots before they disappeared!

Seems like basically everyone whose actual work/investigations they cited is saying something similar.

I also don't know how you write a piece arguing that the government is over-counting poverty by not accounting for in-kind benefits...

... and never once mention the Supplemental Poverty Measure?

(Also saying Medicaid = income because money is fungible is really wrongheaded)

Additionally, saying they "*would* also receive" instead of "*could* also receive" is badly misleading. For TANF and housing vouchers, only ~20-25% of eligible families receive benefits!

Gonna email WSJ requesting correction, but first I want to figure out how much this family would lose in SNAP benefits if they actually received that amt of $ in rental assistance -- they would not be able to receive those amts concurrently, as the article states.

In Easton, CT (ZIP code 06612), the median household income is $190,000. Very high!

Except ~12% of children living in the ZIP code live in poverty. Ray Dalio's money won't go to any of them.

Within ZIP code inequality is real! @billionaires

Also, really neither here nor there, but the blog post above uses en dashes to bracket interrupters instead of em dashes. Irked me.

This comes days after OPM announced the creation of a U.S. Tech Force where "early-career engineers" will work with "to tackle our nation’s top technical challenges."

I know one place they could start!

The result of allocating money based on ZIP codes’ median incomes rather than actual household income:

INELIGIBLE: Household making $30k in South Boston (median income $156,000, child poverty rate ~26%)

ELIGIBLE: Household making $500k in Yonkers (median income $142,000, child poverty rate ~3%)

I even know how to left-, right-, *and* center-align three items all on the same line. AMA

The result of allocating money based on ZIP codes’ median incomes rather than actual household income:

INELIGIBLE: Household making $30k in South Boston (median income $156,000, child poverty rate ~26%)

ELIGIBLE: Household making $500k in Yonkers (median income $142,000, child poverty rate ~3%)