Minnesota county officials are concerned about changes to food assistance benefits under the tax and spending package President Trump signed into law on Friday, which could mean property tax hikes due to increased costs to local governments administering the program. 

The so-called "big, beautiful bill" that cleared Congress cuts $186 billion over 10 years in spending for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which supports low-income families to afford food. It establishes more stringent rules, like expanded work requirements, and shifts costs associated with the program to states depending on how accurately they disperse payments. 

More than 450,000 Minnesotans receive SNAP. If states have an error rate below 6%, the federal government will continue to provide all of the funding for that food assistance. States will be on the hook for up to 15% of those benefits if they are above that threshold, like Minnesota was last year. 

The law also slashes the amount the federal government reimburses for administrative costs by half, so now only a quarter of that work is covered. 

Those changes acutely impact the state's 87 counties, said Julie Ring, the executive director for the Association of Minnesota Counties, because those local governments administer the program. Minnesota is one of just 10 states that operate in this way. 

"The only flexible money that counties can raise to cover additional costs passed down from the federal government are your property taxes," Ring said in an interview. "And county commissioners don't like raising property taxes. So I think there's a real concern about how they're going to balance real dollar cuts and shifts, increased workload and complexity, and try to not raise property taxes in an unsustainable way."

The changes affect counties large and small, urban and rural. The average estimated property tax increase across the state is 3.25%, Ring said, but some places could see much higher. For example, an earlier analysis of the House version of the bill before the Senate made its own changes and sent it back to the lower chamber estimated Ramsey County could see an increase as high as 10%.

"That's for those two SNAP [funding changes]," Ring said of the estimate. "That's not taking into account workload. That's not taking into account the increased workload on the Medicaid side, which is substantial."

Local officials who manage health and human services described the changes as an added administrative burden that they neither have the staff nor the technology to manage. They also worry about the ripple effects.

"There's also unintended consequences every time Medicaid and SNAP are cut that reliably increase child protection [services] about nine to 12 months later, so out-of-home placements are likely to increase," said Melissa Huberty, the human services administrator for Stearns County. "It's not going to save taxpayer dollars if it goes like it has every time in history."

Barb Dahl, the health and human services director for Scott County, explained that the error rate is based on a random sampling of cases and can range from overpayment to underpayment, which is sometimes due to a missing signature on a form or delayed paperwork. 

New costs for SNAP add pressure to already strained budgets, she added. 

"I think we're trying to figure out how to manage increased costs that we've seen over the last several years and do that in a way that really creates efficiency and ultimately delivers service for those who need it," Dahl said. "This compounds and really magnifies the issue to probably a level that I haven't seen in the 25 years I've been doing this work."

Food shelves on the front lines of fighting hunger in Minnesota are also bracing for the impact. Georgi Nguyen, director of basic needs at Keystone Community Services in St. Paul said they already had to hire more staff and increase their food budget by 50% to accommodate the record number of visitors — 52,000 — that came through their doors last year.

Across the state, more people than ever visited a food shelf in 2024. 

"Having to do that year to year to year, that's not possible. We cannot fill the gap that a federal nutrition program is meant to support," Nguyen said. "That's just not doable."