More than 60,000 Connecticut residents have lost federal food assistance since H.R.1, or the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” passed in July 2025. State lawmakers promised help — but it’s proven to be easier said than done.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Keith Phaneuf to discuss his article, “Lamont’s plan to send gift cards to former SNAP recipients stalls,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read the story here.
WSHU: Hello, Keith. This summer, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont (D) announced that 25,000 former SNAP recipients would be receiving $300 grocery gift cards. Less than 1500 gift cards have been distributed. You've investigated this. What do state officials say is responsible?
KP: Well, Ebong, it looks like the Department of Social Services, which was working with nonprofit community action agencies, was particularly slow in getting the community action agencies the personal information on the card recipients. In other words, when an individual goes to the community action agency to pick up the cards, it would be nice to know if the community action agency would have a list of all the recipients and all their contact information, just so they could confirm it. The Lamont administration did not get that out the door in a timely fashion, so it basically tied the action agency's hands.
WSHU: So basically, what's the situation now? Is it going to speed up? Because these people have been waiting for quite a while, anticipating these $300 gift cards, and these are people who are having a hard time right now and have to go to food pantries.
KP: Keep in mind that the Department of Social Services is, I think, a very overworked agency, and I should have added in my initial response that they were trying to make sure they said that they were not going to run afoul of federal authorities in terms of whether they were giving out any private information about SNAP recipients. The problem is there's not an easy answer. For your next question, which is what happens next, all we're getting right now from the Lamont administration is we're going to move as quickly as we can. But if you don't have this data assembled, you might think it's just nice and easy and quick to put together. That's not always the case. I think we're going to be watching them in the coming weeks. I think because the governor is in the midst of a re-election campaign, there's going to be a lot of pressure on them to absolutely get this out the door before early November. But right now, we don't have an estimate other than we're going as fast as we can, which I don't even think you can call that an estimate.
WSHU: Now, this is an election period here, so there's GOP criticism. What are the Republicans saying?
KP: Well, the Republicans at this point are simply saying the administration's not taking this seriously, and unfortunately, the governor is somewhat vulnerable in this area because of his track record. Governor Lamont's a fiscal moderate. He has been very wary in the past about trying to use state dollars to backfill or mitigate cuts to federal human service programs. That's not to say he hasn't done it, but to say it runs opposite to some of his political beliefs, and it's led to criticism from within his own party, and I'll just give you a couple quick examples. Take us back in history. In 2022, there was a lot of pressure from rank-and-file lawmakers from both parties for us to use state dollars to increase winter heating assistance. We mostly distribute federal LIHEAP dollars. If you remember, 2022 is when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Home heating oil prices were skyrocketing. The governor at first did not want to do anything until he was starting to take heat from both sides of the aisle, saying it's not the compassionate approach. So he agreed to put $30 million of state money on top of the federal. However, we never spent a single penny of it. People found out after the winter. Basically, we set the limits on the grants we gave to each household to basically make sure we would only spend federal money and not spend state. So that stuck in a lot of people's memories.
Then, when we had a federal government shutdown and the SNAP program stalled in the fall of 2025, the governor took a lot of criticism from progressives in his party for only contributing money to food pantries, even though they said we can only solve about 1/7 of the problem, basically until the last minute, he waited and waited over a month while people were struggling in food pantries and couldn't keep up. And then this most recent one, when he did announce that he was going to do the grocery store gift cards, he made the announcement in June, and then he was supposed to start the distribution in early August. That came only after again he'd been called out by people in his own party at the time he was in a battle for the Democratic nomination, facing a primary challenge from State Representative Josh Elliott, who basically put out a statement saying, "When the governor says maybe, he means no.” So when you look at the whole history, people are not ready to give the Lamont administration the benefit of the doubt anymore.
WSHU: In the meantime, advocates are quite upset that this program has not taken off the way they expected.
KP: I think that's more than fair. Like I said, when you look at the totality of it, the feeling is that this simply has not been a priority for the Lamont administration, and that all too often a compromise is offered simply to take the political heat off the governor from the left. I should point out that the governor's opponent, Senator Ryan Fazio, a Republican from Greenwich, does not favor using state funds to cover nutrition assistance that's been cut by the federal government. But Fazio's argument is, I'm upfront about that. I'm not trying to create the impression that I'm doing something, and that I'm not. The governor has taken some criticism from Republicans, but the bulk has come from his own party, who feel that given the massive surpluses, this shouldn't be that difficult to do, quite frankly.
