Lori Kersey, West Virginia Watch

DELBARTON, WV — On 10 days each month, Lilly Hall reports to Delbarton Town Hall for an 8-hour workday, doing whatever town officials ask. On a given day, she organizes files, takes out the trash or keeps the town’s restrooms stocked with toilet paper and paper towels.

Hall, 59, doesn’t get paid money for her work. She’s doing it to keep getting monthly benefits assistance from the federal food assistance program SNAP, often referred to as food stamps.

With some exceptions, recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have been required to do at least 80 hours per month of work, training or volunteering. Under Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the work requirements for SNAP were expanded beginning last fall.

The law extended the upper age limit for work requirements from 54 to 64. It also removed exceptions for being homeless, a veteran or a former foster care youth under age 25. The state Department of Human Services said late last year the expanded work requirements would affect 36,000 West Virginia residents.

Proponents of work requirements tout the importance of work and self-sufficiency, but Delbarton, with a population of 422 as of 2020, has few job opportunities. Hall has turned to volunteering for the city to meet the SNAP requirements. Her husband was a security guard for a coal company before he was diagnosed with cancer last year. They live with their daughter, 27. The family also receives help from a local food bank.

“I ain’t got no problem with it,” Hall said of meeting the work requirements. “Now, like I said, where it’s going to be this heat wave that we’re in now, I’m hoping I don’t get shoved outside to do anything. If they say ‘outside,’ I’m like ‘nope, I’m going inside to work.’”

Cynthia Kirkhart, the executive director of Facing Hunger Foodbank, which supports a food pantry in Delbarton, said Hall is an example of SNAP recipients trying to do all the right things amid challenges.

“(SNAP recipients) have been doing all the right things,” she said. “I think there’s a real value in our state, our legislators, really focusing on what this state has available, what the very specific challenges are in our state, and us not trying to fit into a cookie cutter version of other places.

“Because at a federal administration level, we’re trying to meet those highly touted expectations of getting people back to work: you have to have jobs, you have to have transportation, you have to have childcare,” Kirkhart said.

While Hall has kept her SNAP benefits, thousands of other people have lost theirs since Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill into law in July 2025. As of March, West Virginia’s SNAP enrollment has decreased by more than 14,000 people, dropping from 270,722 in July 2025 to 256,385 in March, according to data compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Meanwhile, the state’s unemployment rate averaged 4.2% in July 2025, increased to 4.7% in February, and was 3.6% in May 2026, according to Workforce West Virginia. The unemployment rate accounts for people who are without jobs and actively seeking employment.

The West Virginia Department of Human Services did not respond to West Virginia Watch’s question about the reasons for the decline in SNAP enrollment.

Helen Comer, of Yawkey, in Lincoln County, started SNAP benefits after she quit her job at a bank to care for her ailing parents. She described the caretaking experience as “two and a half years of no sleep.”

“They were up all the time,” she said. “Dad was up all night. Mom was up all day. Dad had a catheter, so we were (doing) middle-of-the-night hospital runs. Dad kept threatening to run away. When I did sleep, it was like cat naps and complete exhaustion.”

Comer’s mother died in October 2024 and her dad died in April 2025. When SNAP reviewed her case in January, her benefits were decreased to $24 per month because she’s under 65 and not working. Comer was still so exhausted she suspected she may have Lyme disease, but a test came back negative.

She was eventually diagnosed with a blood clot, something she thinks she got from sitting with her dad.

“They said it was huge, so it was impacting my kidneys,” Comer said. “So all this time I was sick, and I didn’t know it… I just thought it was exhaustion. I mean, no sleep for years.”

In April, when Comer’s SNAP case was picked for quality review, she decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble of going through her bank statements and retirement account information to prove to the state she should keep getting the $24 a month in SNAP benefits.

Comer, 62, took an early retirement earlier this year. Since her SNAP benefits were discontinued, she’s been living off of credit and selling her belongings. She said she’s fortunate she doesn’t have a lot of expenses.

She said she wanted to share her story about SNAP because the rules don’t leave room for nuances in situations like hers.

“I just felt like they need to know that it’s not black and white, you know?” Comer said. “Just because you’re under 65 and maybe you don’t have a doctor’s note. There are circumstances… It’s just not that simple.”

State could be made to pay more for SNAP beginning next year

If newly released numbers from the federal government don’t change, West Virginia will be on the hook to pay about $27 million more for SNAP beginning in federal fiscal year 2028, which starts next year.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states with a payment error rate higher than 6% will be required to share the cost of benefits with the federal government beginning Oct. 1, 2027. The higher a state’s payment error rate, the higher a cost share they will be required to pay. States with extremely high payment error rates may delay implementation of the cost share.

West Virginia’s SNAP program had a payment error rate of 6.69% for 2025, according to the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Administration. With that number, the state would be required to pay 5% of the cost of food benefits, or about $27 million.

States can choose to base their cost share on the 2025 payment error rate or the 2026 rate, which means the state will not know if it will pay a cost share or how much until the 2026 numbers are released, typically in the summer.

Payment errors are different from intentional fraud. According to the Department of Agriculture, they’re often unintentional mistakes by recipients or the state agency, like a family not updating their income or the agency miscalculating the family’s income.

The possibility of the state paying more for SNAP benefits in fiscal year 2028 was largely left out of finance committee meetings during West Virginia’s 2026 regular legislative session.

Janie Cole, commissioner of the state Bureau for Family Services, told lawmakers during May interim meetings that the state has implemented quality control and education measures to keep the error rate down. The state’s error rate has decreased from 10.98% in 2023 to 9.43% in 2024, she said.

Earlier this year, the state of West Virginia spent $876,000 on an artificial intelligence program meant to decrease the number of mistake SNAP payments.

Cole said she expects the state’s error rate to continue to trend downward and be below 6% when the 2026 numbers are released.

“’I’m confident that the things that we have done will get us below (6%). We might, I would say that… it’s going to be teetering, but we’re doing everything we can.”

Ann Moore, a spokesperson for Gov. Patrick Morrisey, told West Virginia Watch that the state projects it is on track to fall below the 6% threshold for 2026.

“We are actively monitoring these figures and continue to implement strategies to ensure accuracy in our SNAP administration,” Moore wrote in an email.

Seth DiStefano, senior policy outreach director at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, said as West Virginia “frantically” tries to decrease its SNAP error rate to avoid paying a cost share, there’s concern it could be denying complex cases, often involving children.

Since the One Big Beautiful Act was implemented in July 2025, more than 800,000 children have lost their food assistance benefits in the 13 states that have available data, according to the Center and Budget and Policy Priorities. West Virginia is not one of the states that had available data on child SNAP cases, but there’s reason to believe children here are losing their benefits, DiStefano said.

“You’ve got grandparents raising grandkids, you’ve got uncles and aunts raising nieces and nephews,” he said. “Those particular types of cases are more complicated and can generate more errors even if people are perfectly eligible to be on the program. Just denying them outright does not count to your error rate, right? So, there’s a real concern that that’s happening, not just here, but all over the country, in the rush to get the error rate down.”

Concerns about cost share implementation deadline

DiStefano said it’s unfair that states with higher payment error rates have more time than West Virginia to correct their error rates before having to take on a portion of the cost sharing.

He called on Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., to use her seniority and Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., to use his influence on the Agriculture committee to give all states equal time to lower their payment error rates.

“If either one of them wanted to put all states on a level playing field and have this implemented in October of 2029, they could absolutely do it,” DiStefano said. “And they should do it. I want to make that abundantly clear. That would take some of the pressure off and give states a little bit more time if everybody was just on the same footing.”

A spokesperson for Capito said that: “Reforms included in the Working Families Tax Cuts were designed to promote accountability for states’ significant mismanagement.

“Sen. Capito continues to work with state partners to ensure the states’ error rates decrease so that West Virginians are not held accountable for the states’ mismanagement. Putting all states on the same field could cause West Virginia’s cost-sharing requirement to rise, and West Virginians should not have to offset the poor management of other states,” Capito’s office said.

Justice’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

DiStefano said the state doesn’t have much time to lower its SNAP error rate. The 2026 federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30. State lawmakers will have to start planning in January for the fiscal year 2028 budget.

“So they’re really bound by the numbers that the United States Department of Agriculture released (June 24) and there’s not much more time left for West Virginia to continue to drive down their error rates in the fiscal year 2026,” he said.

And there’s reason to believe that West Virginia’s error rate won’t improve when the 2026 numbers are released, DiStefano said. That number will include the government shutdown in fall 2025.

“The November 2025 government shutdown is not going to help error rates,” DiStefano said. “While states have been working, West Virginia has been working pretty frantically to get these error rates down. There are some very good reasons to believe that the error rates for fiscal year 2026, once they’re released about this time next year, aren’t going to be any better, and likely could be worse.”

West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.