The city has failed to process thousands of expedited food stamp applications within a legally required timeframe this year, leaving some of the city’s most vulnerable residents without consistent access to meals, according to data reviewed by the Daily News.
The processing delays are prompting a cadre of watchdog groups, led by the Legal Aid Society, to call for Adams’ administration to be held in contempt of a 2005 court order that requires the city to process applications for the Expedited Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as E-SNAP, within seven days. If the issue isn’t remedied rapidly, the groups — which filed a lawsuit that led to the 2005 decree — say the administration should face stiff fines.
E-SNAP benefits provide hundreds of dollars per month for eligible households, and beneficiaries rely on them to afford food. Legal Aid said the processing delays have resulted in some of the city’s poorest residents scrounging to feed themselves and their children for weeks and even months.
“People are being forced to go to food pantries, people are reaching out to family and friends, they’re depending on people to get them through, and, in some instances, they’re going hungry — they’re not able to buy food,” Emily Lundgren, a Legal Aid attorney, said of the impacts of the processing delays. “We’ve talked to people who can’t take medication that requires food because they don’t have food … It’s really having widespread impact beyond just the not having food part. It has these huge consequences on people’s health and emotional well-being.”
The new processing data reviewed by The News is contained in Manhattan Federal Court papers filed Monday by Legal Aid and three other watchdog groups as part of the 2005 case that established the seven-day rule. The three other organizations are the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, the Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation and the New York Legal Assistance Group.
While the city by federal and state law has 30 days to process applications for regular food stamps, E-SNAP benefits are on a shorter timeline as they’re reserved for people at severe risk of food instability. One of the eligibility requirements for E-SNAP is that applicants must earn less than $150 per month and have less than $100 in savings.
Still, the Human Resources Administration, which oversees the city’s public assistance programs, failed to process 160 out of 200 E-SNAP applications within the seven-day timeframe in March, the data provided by the agency shows.
Just between April and June, the HRA failed to process another 6,340 E-SNAP applications within the seven-day timeframe, the data also shows. That means nearly half of all E-SNAP applications weren’t processed on time in that stretch.
Attorneys for Legal Aid and the other groups wrote that the processing rate stayed roughly the same through September, the latest month for which HRA has provided data. In total, from April through September, at least 13,700 E-SNAP claims weren’t processed on time, according to the data.
Struggling New Yorkers
One resident impacted by the E-SNAP snafu is Laquena Watson.
The Far Rockaway, Queens, resident applied for the program on June 12 after her maternity leave compensation from her city government job expired. As a single mom with a newborn and a 13-year-old, Watson told The News she felt she couldn’t go back to work immediately at the time and hoped E-SNAP could help her afford food for her family in the interim.
But it took until mid-August before she finally received her benefits.
“Those two months were very stressful,” Watson, who has since returned to work, said in an interview last week. “I wasn’t able to buy food, I wasn’t able to buy milk or formula. I had a newborn, and I didn’t have any income.”
‘Failure to comply’
In addition to asking for the administration to be held in contempt, Legal Aid and the other groups requested in their filing that a judge order the HRA to immediately come up with a corrective action plan to ensure processing is sped up so that the city comes into compliance with the 2005 rule within 90 days.
If the city fails, the groups said the judge should order the administration to pay restitution, potentially as much as $500 to every E-SNAP applicant who did not get their claims processed on time.
“They have not demonstrated any willingness to come into compliance,” Lundgren, the Legal Aid lawyer, said of the administration. “We are at our wits’ end. We have no other choice, I think, than to now go and say, ‘We need the court’s assistance to get HRA to comply with their obligation.'”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services, which oversees the HRA, blasted Legal Aid and the other groups for asking the court for a contempt finding.
“It is incredibly disappointing to see key stakeholders use the courts when we have in fact been working very closely with them to be transparent in our efforts to prioritize the timely processing of critical benefits despite the historic increase in post-pandemic need,” the spokeswoman, Neha Sharma, said in a statement, pointing to data showing that the HRA’s food stamp caseloads are at their highest in five years.
According to Legal Aid’s court papers, the HRA acknowledged its “failure to comply” with the seven-day rule in a December 2022 letter, though.
The letter, which was included in the new court filing, says the processing delays are the result of “significant staff resignations and retirements” that have left the agency’s ranks depleted, with a dearth of employees on hand to handle E-SNAP applications. It’s unlikely that the HRA will add significantly more staff anytime soon, as the mayor has enacted a hiring freeze across the city government due to budgetary concerns.
Still, Sharma said in her statement that the HRA “continues to aggressively hire and train staff” to beef up food stamp application processing. Asked how that’s possible given the hiring stop, Sharma said later that her agency is able to keep adding staff because it has received an “exemption” to Adams’ freeze for posts related to processing of public assistance benefits.
Missing data
On top of the processing issues, Legal Aid’s filing charges the Adams administration has violated rules around reporting on timeliness rates for E-SNAP.
Under the 2005 rule, the HRA is supposed to provide quarterly reports to Legal Aid on how many E-SNAP applications have not been processed within the seven-day window.
But Legal Aid wrote that the HRA did not provide a single such quarterly report between March 2020 and this past September.
The September report the agency finally forked over revealed the severe processing delays that the groups are now saying warrant a contempt finding by the court.
To boot, Legal Aid said the September report was incomplete as it did not, for instance, show how long it took before applicants got their E-SNAP benefits if their claims had been pending for more than seven days.
Another omission from the September report was information on timeliness rates for the processing of “immediate needs grants,” a type of cash assistance that’s supposed to be paid out on the same day a claim is filed if the applicant has “an emergency which requires urgent assistance.”
Like with the E-SNAP reporting issue, Legal Aid and the other groups wrote they have not received any data on processing of immediate needs grants since March 2020. That means it’s entirely unclear how many applications for that benefit have fallen outside of the same-day processing window over the past 44 months.
Legal Aid and the other groups said that requiring the administration to get back to complying with the reporting requirements should be part of the corrective action plan they’re asking the court to impose.
The Adams administration isn’t just struggling to process E-SNAP applications on time.
As first reported by The News, a Manhattan Federal Court judge ruled in July that the administration must figure out a way to process applications for regular SNAP and cash assistance benefits on time after data showed tens of thousands of claims have not been approved within the requisite 30-day window this year.
The judge, Jennifer Rearden, ruled that the administration has until March 31, 2024 to come up with a plan to ensure all such applications are cleared within the legally required time window.
