By Alison Kuznitz, July 15, 2026
BOSTON — Days after Gov. Maura Healey signed the new state budget, food security advocates are already asking for supplemental funding to shore up the workforce that helps vulnerable residents access Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
In their budgets, both Healey and the Senate sought about $148 million for caseworkers at the Department of Transitional Assistance. But the compromise budget that Healey signed last week incorporated a lower funding level, about $122 million, that was supported in the House budget.
“To be honest, we’re still not sure what happened in the final budget,” said Leran Minc, Project Bread’s director of public policy. “It was very surprising.”
Nearly one in seven Massachusetts residents receive SNAP benefits, including children, older adults, people with disabilities and veterans. But despite rising food insecurity, advocates say DTA is serving fewer residents due to stiffening federal eligibility parameters — plus a strained state workforce that cannot keep up with the paperwork and phone calls to certify households eligible for SNAP benefits.
Marking a record high, around 40% of Massachusetts households last year experienced food insecurity, according to a report from the Greater Boston Food Bank and Mass General Brigham.
MassBudget Reference:
The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute and the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center have warned that approximately 150 DTA caseworkers could be laid off at the $122 million funding level, creating greater turmoil for residents whose calls to seek SNAP benefits or update personal information have gone largely unanswered.
“I think that if the administration is committed to not laying anyone off, the pathway that we see where that’s most fruitful is for some sort of supplemental budget that’s passed for FY27 sometime in the next few months,” said Adam Jones, a senior policy analyst at MassBudget. He added, “I think that the baseline needs to be somewhere in the $26 million range and then above that to actually kind of get our call success rate higher than it currently is.”
