NYC Council says mayor's office has done an 'inadequate job' aiding food stamp applicants

Members of the New York City Council skewered Adams administration officials on Wednesday for what they said was a failure to address ongoing delays in processing food stamp and cash assistance applications — failures that have left about 30,000 households waiting more than a month for aid.

“The situation has gotten catastrophic,” Councilmember Lincoln Restler said during a hearing of the Council's general welfare committee. “This administration has done an absolutely inadequate job in staffing the agency to meet the needs of the most vulnerable New Yorkers. It is beyond disheartening and disturbing, it is causing anguish for our neighbors each and every day.”

Administrators from the Department of Social Services said more people are seeking help, but the agency has fewer staff to assist them. During more than two hours of testimony, DSS officials couldn’t answer how many additional workers they needed to eliminate the backlog or whether they were retaining the staff they were hiring.

The hearing comes as recently released city data shows the processing rates for the two public benefits programs plunged to their worst numbers in a decade last fiscal year, with 6 out of 10 applicants to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as
SNAP, are waiting beyond the federally required 30-day deadline. Cash assistance processing rates were worse, with 7 out of 10 applicants experiencing delays, according to the Mayor’s Management Report released earlier this month.

“It kind of sounds like you guys don’t know how to get out of this crisis — that to me is really unacceptable,” said Councilmember Althea Stevens.

Marricka Scott-McFadden, the DSS deputy commissioner for intergovernmental and legislative affairs, said the agency is deploying workers within the department, offering voluntary overtime on nights and weekends, and has hired more than 700 new workers this year.

“This is not taken lightly,” she told councilmembers. “Daily, weekly conversations and meetings are had in order to try and do better at this, we acknowledge that we do need to do better.”

But workers who sort through applications blamed a new system the social services agency began using in 2019 to process SNAP benefits for causing technical glitches and limiting how many cases they can process in a day.

“We went from doing anywhere from 30-plus cases to now maybe five to eight cases, maybe 10 on a day-to-day basis,” said Helen Chandler, a SNAP eligibility specialist in the Bronx. “We do have a system that’s failing.”

DSS officials said that as of Aug. 31, about 30,000 households were waiting more than 30 days to receive cash assistance or SNAP benefits. Of those, 4,000 were waiting more than two months and 300 were delayed by more than 90 days, according to additional numbers provided by the Legal Aid Society.

“It’s hard enough as an adult to have to reach out and ask for help, it’s much more difficult to need that help and then to have to grovel to get it,” said Willie Woods, who has waited more than four months for food stamps, in testimony on Wednesday. “That’s what a lot of us are down to right now, groveling, and we’re still not getting the help we need.”

Woods said without food assistance, he’s fallen $2,000 behind on his rent. Since he suffers from Crohn's disease, he needs to be on a specific diet and can’t rely on food pantries.

“Last couple of months I’ve been on about two meals a day,” he added.

Agency officials said in the last fiscal year they received an average of 40,000 cash assistance applications a month, compared to pre-pandemic levels where 23,000 applied monthly in fiscal year 2019. Another 40,000 SNAP applications were submitted on average every month in 2023, up from 25,000 in fiscal year 2019.

“There is an incredible need that has started in the pandemic and not abated in this city,” said Rebecca Chew, chief program officer for the Human Resources Administration, which is part of the city’s Department of Social Services.

The city has until March 2024 to comply with a federal court order, stemming from a class action lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Society and the New York Legal Assistance Group over processing delays in SNAP and cash assistance benefits.

“It seems like the agency is not prioritizing SNAP benefit applicants in the way they should be, and that’s worrisome,” said Councilmember Diana Ayala, who chairs the general welfare committee.

“We’re talking about a substantial amount of applications that have not been completed… that’s horrible,” Ayala added. “That’s a capital F with a whole lot of red lines under it. How do you justify that?”