Arizona’s state welfare agency dropped more than 3 million calls from food stamp applicants over 18 months, then denied benefits to more than half of those who could not complete a required phone interview — according to data obtained by KJZZ through a public records request filed with the federal government.
The Department of Economic Security’s own internal figures, submitted to the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a condition of the state’s telephone-interview waiver, show that only 13 percent of calls to DES between October 2024 and March 2026 ended in a completed eligibility interview. The agency attributed more than 3 million dropped connections to “call center error” and “lack of call center capacity.” Average hold time was 23 minutes; a completed interview, once reached, took over an hour and 13 minutes. Under state policy, applicants who could not finish the interview within 30 days had their case denied.
DES denied 54.5 percent of new SNAP applicants and 53.7 percent of people seeking to renew existing benefits for failing to complete that required interview — the same interview the agency was routinely unable to answer.
The data arrives in the middle of an enrollment collapse that has made Arizona a national outlier. The state shed roughly 55 percent of its SNAP beneficiaries year over year — far exceeding every other state. Close to 200,000 of those who lost benefits were children. Because SNAP enrollment automatically qualifies children for free school lunch programs, advocates warn that the cuts are rippling into classrooms: families cut from the rolls must reapply separately for school meals their children previously received automatically.
Arizona Republican lawmakers have attributed the decline to fraud cleanup. “People who shouldn’t have been on it in the first place,” state Sen. John Kavanagh said in April. But DES’s own accounting undercuts that framing — denials were triggered by unreachable phone lines, not ineligibility findings.
Kelley Murphy, policy director with the Arizona Early Childhood Alliance, called the call-center data “astonishing.” “Families who are eligible who need help aren’t getting it because the system…is creating a barrier to them,” Murphy told KJZZ. “All we did was kick them out of the system we had in place to help them.”
The crisis has a two-part root: federal law changes and state budget decisions that left DES without capacity to implement them. Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” in July 2025, which expanded SNAP work requirements and required states to cover a larger share of administrative costs. Nationally, enrollment fell from 42.2 million in May 2025 to 36.6 million in May 2026 — a 13 percent drop the Congressional Budget Office had not projected until 2030. Arizona’s plunge was compounded by state-level cuts: DES eliminated roughly 160 eligibility specialist positions, a 40 percent decline since July 2024, after federal grants were cut. Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, allocated $7.5 million to DES in December to hire more than 100 workers and increase overtime on the backlog, and requested $48.4 million more in her 2027 budget.
The agency also faces a structural incentive to pare its rolls regardless of eligibility. Under HR 1, states whose SNAP payment-error rates remain above 6 percent face federal penalties. Arizona’s rate stands at 8.8 percent; noncompliance could cost the state $195.4 million — more than double what it spends to run the program, according to ProPublica.
Joseph Palomino, executive director of the Arizona Center for Economic Progress, told ProPublica that Arizona’s experience is a preview. “Arizona is just the alarm bell. This is likely going to happen in every state.”
Food banks say they have no way to fill the void. “We know that schools can’t fill this gap. We know that food banks can’t fill this gap,” Carolyn Vega, a policy analyst with Share Our Strength, told the Associated Press.
Arizona’s next interim report to USDA on the phone-interview waiver is due November 2027. Federal officials warned as recently as 2024 that they could discontinue the waiver if its operation “proves problematic.”