Arizona senator proposes bill to reduce SNAP payment errors
Bill requires monthly or quarterly reviews of recipients’ eligibility
Arizona’s SNAP error rate may cost the state $139 million by 2028
An Arizona senator is looking to decrease the state’s error rate for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments to avoid paying more money to the federal government in the future.
Sen. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, pre-filed a bill that would direct the Department of Economic Security to work with three state agencies and four federal agencies to conduct monthly or quarterly reviews of individuals’ eligibility information for changes in circumstances. Such reviews would include earnings of $3,000 or more from gambling, employment status, changes in residency, incarceration and changes in income or wages.
The bill would also require the Department of Economic Security to publish the amounts of money that were obtained from noncompliance, fraud investigations and the amount of improper payments, among other requirements.
At least monthly, the Department of Health Services and the Department of Economic Security would review information from federal sources to assess a recipient’s continued eligibility for SNAP. Those include earned income information, supplemental security income and pension information. It also includes employment information, child support enforcement data and national fleeing felon information maintained by the FBI.
“It attempts to get rid of errors and cheating on SNAP,” Kavanagh said. “And, as we found out just recently, if we don’t do this, it’s gonna cost the state a lot more administrative money.”
The federal government funds 100% of SNAP benefits, but both the state and federal governments pay 50% of the administrative costs of the program. Now, under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, states may have to pay more money in their share if the state’s error rate is above the federal error rate of 6%.
Arizona’s error rate is 8.84% for Fiscal Year 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. According to an Arizona Joint Legislative Budget Committee analysis of the federal budget bill and its impact on Arizona’s state budget, the error rate is expected to increase to 10.4%.
If the state’s error rate is between 8% and 10% in either Fiscal Year 2025 or 2026, the state would be responsible for 10% of the SNAP benefit cost, or to the tune of about $139 million in Fiscal Year 2028. If the error rate increases from 10% to 13.3%, the state would pay $208 million in FY2028. But during the first two years of implementation, if the error rate is above 13.3%, the state would not be required to contribute.
“I’m suspecting the governor will not be so quick to veto this bill now that there’s a penalty for maintaining our higher than permitted level of error,” Kavanagh said.
FBI agents seized illegal gambling machines from Native American casinos in Arizona in 1992
The Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation blocked the agents, leading to a three-week standoff
Arizona’s legalized sports betting has seen a rise in gambling addiction cases
As dawn broke on May 12, 1992, teams of FBI agents and U.S. marshals in fleets of trucks rolled out into the desert toward Native American reservations across the state, under orders from U.S. Attorney Linda Akers to confiscate illegal electronic gambling machines from five tribal casinos.
Although the casinos were within the bounds of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, they implemented slot machines without proper authorization. One by one, the federal agents seized hundreds of video gambling machines from the casinos with little resistance.
Until they reached the casino on Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation.
Federal agents, with 349 confiscated slot machines in tow, were ready to file out through the casino parking lot when they found themselves barricaded. Members of the reservation’s Yavapai tribe assembled a wall of cars, trucks, heavy machinery and their bodies to block the sole access road. The confrontation began a three-week standoff.
Only when former Gov. Fife Symington arrived five hours later to negotiate a truce with Yavapai Nation President Clinton Pattea were the federal agents permitted to leave – without the confiscated machines.
The Fort McDowell standoff led to Arizona’s first set of agreements permitting tribes’ use of electronic gambling machines.
‘Reminiscent of a Hollywood movie’
The Fort McDowell stand-off is just one incident in Arizona’s long and complicated history with gambling. That history has been thrown into sharp relief as news broke Thursday of a sweeping federal investigation, dubbed Operation Royal Flush, into illegal sports gambling by the Department of Justice.
On Thursday, federal prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York unsealed a sweeping indictment charging 31 suspects across 11 states that spanned years, including current and former NBA players and coaches, along with members of the New York City La Cosa Nostra crime families. Officials say it netted $7 million in illegal profits. They are charged with using wireless technology to cheat in high-stakes card games. In a press conference Thursday, FBI Director Kash Patel said the card games led to tens of millions of dollars in fraud.
Former NBA players, including Hall of Fame point guard Chauncey Billups, who won the NBA Sportsmanship Award in 2009, are among the people charged, along with New York City’s four major mafia crime families: the Bonannos, Genoveses, Luccheses and Gambinos, officials said.
“The investigative work that culminated with this morning’s operation are reminiscent of a Hollywood movie,” said Ricky Patel, the special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations, who has led the ongoing probe.
The mafia family members have been charged with violent crimes, according to officials. According to the indictment, Zhen Hu – also known as “Jonathan Chan,” “Jonathan Hu,” “Scruli” and “Stanley” – and Thomas Gerlado, known as “Juice,” punched a man in the face to get him to pay back his debt.
According to the indictment, Ammar Awawdeh, also known as “Flapper Poker;” Osman Hoti, who went by the nickname “Albanian Bruce;” John Mazzola, also known as “John South;” and Nicholaa Minucci arranged and committed gunpoint robbery on a co-conspirator to steal a machine.
Charlotte Hornets guard Terry Rozier, also known as “Scary Terry,” is accused of “wagering in connection with NBA games or providing non-public information relating to NBA games to others,” according to the indictment.
On March 23, 2023, 30 bets totaling $13,759 were placed on Rozier in just 46 minutes ahead of an NBA regular-season game between the Hornets and New Orleans Pelicans, prosecutors said. All the bets were put on Rozier’s unders, assuming he wouldn’t equal or surpass the betting lines set on him, according to the indictment.
All 30 bets won after Rozier left the game just 10 minutes in due to a foot issue. The event was under federal investigation in July, according to prosecutors.
Thursday’s indictment is not the first time in 2025 a former NBA star has been under fire from federal investigators. The FBI arrested former Arizona superstar and 11-year NBA veteran Gilbert Arenas on July 30 in connection with illegal high-stakes poker games.
Since being released on a $50,000 bond, Arenas has posted multiple comments about the case, suggesting that he “snitched” to avoid legal penalties, including a video posted to TikTok on Friday with the song “Snitching” by Pop Smoke featuring Quavo and Future.
A long and complicated history
Arizona has had an intricate relationship with gambling throughout its history – even preceding its membership into the U.S.
We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort located in the heart of Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, is where in May of 1992 a weeks-long stand-off ensued between tribe members and federal officials over gambling machines. (Photo courtesy of We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort)
In 1907, before Arizona became “State 48,” Territorial Gov. Joseph Henry Kibbey demanded that the 24th Territorial Legislature outlaw any form of gambling throughout the territory, saying it was a public evil and “an impediment to statehood for Arizona.”
Eugene Brady O’Neill and George W.P. Hunt, two members of the Territorial Council, followed suit and introduced two anti-gambling bills outlining punishment for conducting or permitting gambling.
In true Wild West nature, many gambling establishments and practices continued after Arizona gained statehood in 1912, despite the anti-gambling provision in its constitution.
Decades later, as the federal government targeted organized crime and cracked down on gambling, many of the last bastions of gambling in Arizona closed their doors.
On Nov. 7, 1950, Arizona voters overwhelmingly voted against a statute to create an Arizona department to “regulate, license, and authorize gambling operations.”
Arizonans rejoined the gambling scene when the Arizona State Lottery, established in 1980 as the first state lottery west of the Mississippi River, sold its first tickets on July 1, 1981, for a scratch-off game called Scratch it Rich.
Arizonans purchased all 21.4 million Scratch it Rich tickets in just 10 days.
As the Arizona Lottery expanded over the next decade, including its first draw-based game, The Pick, in 1984, so did the federal government’s willingness to permit gambling on reservations.
Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulation Act in 1988 to “recognize gaming as a way to promote tribal economic development, self-sufficiency and strong tribal government,” according to the Arizona Department of Gaming website.
The act outlined that a state must allow tribes to run gaming on reservations if it is permitted off-reservation, and that a tribe that wants to “engage in Class III casino-style gaming must first sign a Tribal-State Gaming Compact” with the state. Class III includes slot machines, blackjack and other casino games.
In the early 1990s, many existing Native American bingo halls installed slot machines without the required signed compacts.
While the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation website says “tribes were waiting to sign gaming compacts with the state government,” Symington called upon the U.S. Attorney’s Office and incited the raids, believing reservations in Arizona should not have casinos because the state disallowed such activity elsewhere.
Arizona permitted the lottery, dog and horse races and charity bingo games off-reservation at that time, according to the Department of Gaming.
Following the raid of Fort McDowell Casino, now known as We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort, and the three-week standoff, Symington met with Pattea and representatives of 15 other Arizona tribes to sign Arizona’s first gaming compacts on Nov. 25, 1992.
While the raid and ensuing standoff resulted in the destruction of the original 349 confiscated gambling machines, the new agreements allowed casinos to reopen with 250 new machines anywhere on the reservations.
From those agreements, gambling expanded in Arizona through a voter-approved state initiative in 2002 and again under former Gov. Doug Ducey, who signed HB 2772 into law in 2021.
Although legal sports gambling has become ubiquitous in much of the country, it did not stop the suspects in the latest indictment from resorting to illegal practices, prosecutors said.
“Despite the recent widespread legalization of sports betting, unlicensed bookmakers or ‘bookies’ also offered sports betting services to bettors,” according to the indictment. “Bookies frequently accepted bets on bespoke betting websites that allowed users to place various types of wagers on sporting contests based on publicly available betting lines. Unlike legal sportsbooks, bookies typically ‘settled up’ the bettors’ wagers offline, generally through cash, peer-to-peer payments or cryptocurrency transactions.”
‘These casinos and these apps aren’t charities’
In its long and contentious history, whenever opposition to gambling arose, it often did so out of a fear of its corrupting influence.
A counselor at the National Council on Problem Gambling helpline said she has witnessed that corrupting influence firsthand. Most of the people who call her are men who got in over their heads betting tens of thousands of dollars with money they didn’t have. They often jeopardize their jobs or houses through gambling.
“What are they doing to try and keep you coming back?” said Sarah, the counselor, who declined to use her last name because she wasn’t given permission to speak to the press. “Do they give you free play or some sort of credit when you join the app? That’s not an accident. They’re not being generous, these casinos and these apps aren’t charities.”
Since sports betting became legal in Arizona, the state Department of Gaming has safeguarded for patrons and taken enforcement actions against unlawful operations, according to Director Jackie Johnson in the department’s fiscal 2025 report. According to the report, there were 124 serious incidents in the fiscal year.
Of the 22 federally recognized Indigenous tribes in Arizona, 16 of them have operating casinos. According to the report, 88% of winnings from casinos in Indigenous communities contribute to the Arizona Benefits Fund.
Since 2003, the fund has contributed over $2.3 billion to education, emergency preparedness and wildlife conservation in the state.
Despite its deleterious effects, sports gambling continues to captivate bettors here in Arizona and across the country.
The rise of sports gambling on mobile devices has led to an increase in gambling addiction, according to a February study from UC San Diego Today. Total sports wagers skyrocketed from $4.9 billion in 2017 to $121.1 billion in 2023, with 94% of wagers during 2023 placed online.
This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Kory Langhofer started Statecraft, an Arizona-based political and government law firm, in 2015. Now, after close to a decade spent litigating on behalf of high-profile national and state Republicans, Langhofer reflects on the hostile transformation of political law.
How did you get to where you are now?
Honestly, there’s a lot of luck involved in it. I’d always liked politics … I was into it, but how do you do that? It’s very hard to do more than a one-off case in politics.
I started practicing law in New York for a little bit. Then, I was a federal prosecutor here. I’d been doing that for a couple years, and a good friend of mine who was interning at the US Attorney’s Office at the time – he and I have birthdays that are really similar to each other – so we were sitting in my back patio smoking cigars, as it happens, for our birthday, celebrating getting old. And he asked what I was gonna do after the US Attorney’s Office. I was like, I have no idea.
And he said, well, you should think about building Republican political practice, because, as it happens, all of the successful Republican attorneys either have just retired or become judges. So, I looked into it, and I’ll be damned, he was right. An intergenerational opening, I happened to be lucky.
Since you’ve entered the arena, how has political law changed?
It used to be fun … and it was pretty collegial. No one was trying to get someone else disbarred. I didn’t get any death threats. I think everyone who did it enjoyed it. And I don’t think that’s true now … It feels like a grind, and the cases are so adversarial. There’s always some sort of personal attack, at least in Arizona. I think it’s also true in other swing states. The purple states have it the worst.
I actually think the industry has changed, and the clients have changed. It used to be that the political people would have to win the campaign, and then the lawyers would do whatever cleanup was necessary, if necessary. Now it feels like about half of the Republican Party lawyering is thought of as being like the primary move, right. You’re not like messaging and knocking on doors, you’re litigating. Paradoxically, I should be like, fantastic, well, I’ll make more money. I have a bigger role in the campaign. I think that’s the wrong way of doing it. Like, I think it’s ineffective. And the best way, when you campaign, is to persuade voters that you’ll be a good politician, a good officeholder, instead of just suing the s*** out of everyone.
I don’t know how long that lasts. It’s already lasted longer than I expected it to. But how long can it go? Like, two more cycles, five more cycles, 10 more? Do we see an end? There aren’t really early signs of it breaking.
Where do you pinpoint the shift?
I think 2020 was a complete watershed. Relationships between lawyers completely soured after that on the two sides of the aisle. The silver lining is that it has also made almost every judge in the country very aware of political lawsuits. It has made every judge in the country very skeptical of political lawsuits on both sides. My own sense is that, basically, the courtroom is closed for all but exceptional cases at this point.
What have you experienced in the way of hostility?
When I get really good voicemails, I’ll send them to my family group chat. They’re funny. Usually they’re funny. I did have to send one to the FBI. And they knocked on the guy’s door, and they were like, stop it. Apparently, he lived below a soup shop in Manhattan. But he was fond of calling me at like two in the morning and sending me many sick messages. And eventually it got so bad that the FBI was like, OK, yeah, no.
Langhofer plays a voicemail he sent to the family group chat.
“Hi Kory, it’s Trevor. You just hung up on me. I just want to let you know that I think you’re a coward and a piece of s***, and I think you should rot in hell for eternity for abandoning President Trump and this country in the time of need. You should f***ing suffer.”
It’s not illegal. He’s not saying I will kill you, right? Like I have no reasonable fear.
We quit a certain engagement, and my phone started ringing with random people who would just be like, Why are you quitting? A lot of them said, “What have you done in your life? What kind of blackmail material do they have on you that you would give up and sell our country out to the left?” You’re just like, do you think that’s what happened? Do you think they caught me with a smoking gun? These are all people on the right. This isn’t the left. I get the same amount of hate mail from both sides
I don’t understand the psychology of it. They’re like, “You know what I’m gonna do right now. I’m going to look up this guy I’ve never met, I’m going to call him, I’m going to say some really mean things. That’ll show him.” What do you accomplish with that? Emails are actually pretty funny too. Why did you spend all this time writing this email?
How has your experience colored what you deem a good faith case? How judicious are you in choosing what you take on?
We probably turn away more cases than we take now. We think it’s important for clients long term, and for our own sanity that, when we show up and say, Judge, we think X, that they’re not thinking, ‘Aren’t you the guy who was in here last year and he said something really stupid? Why should I listen to you this time?” It’s important to have a minimum threshold quality.
There’s quite a few factors. First of all, a reasonable chance of winning. You can’t just waste time on these things, even if someone is like, I don’t care, I’ll shower you with money. If I can’t see a way of winning this, like we’re not doing it.
If it’s a post election dispute, we have a simple standard, which is, if you win, will it change the outcome? Does it matter if you win? A lot of people want to litigate tiny little things. This polling place closed for one hour because the power went out, or someone pulled the fire alarm … It might have interfered with someone’s right to vote, but did you lose by two votes? Is that why you lost? So we use the word materiality. If the issue isn’t material to the outcome, we don’t care.
A third criteria is quality of life, because the nature of the practice has changed so much. Even when you get a good paying client who is reputable, and there is a good point. There are engagements where you’re just like, I can’t do this anymore. It’s so stressful. So you have to think of your own sanity, I suppose.
What do you think makes a good election or political attorney?
If you are going to lose a case, the client has to hear it from you before the judge says it. You have to be able to assess the strength of your own case.
What insights have you gathered in past litigation?
There are unwritten rules. I’m comfortable calling them laws. They govern things like whether certain cases are worth filing, whether you have credible clients. You won’t find any of that written down and to the extent it is written down, it often says the opposite. Like if a lawyer takes a case, it doesn’t mean they endorse a client’s position. People don’t actually believe that.
If you have a client that is constantly saying things that are believed to be false, and then that client says something that is true, then it’s the boy who cried wolf problem. There is an unwritten law that the judges will assess the totality of people that are before them.
What do you think will be some of the existential challenges in this next election cycle?
There’s a new norm of prosecuting political opponents. I don’t mean that as a jab at the Democrats because they’ve been the ones doing it so far. I expect that if Republicans take law enforcement positions, they will be just as overzealous and maybe more so. I don’t know how you get off that train once it’s left the station. It feels like it’s careening out of control. As a consequence, it’s very unsafe to be involved in politics.
What are your goals for the next 10 years? Do you want to stay in political law?
If it stays like this, I definitely won’t be doing this in 10 years. It’s not sustainable with this tone and rancor. I don’t know what I’d be doing instead, but this is not hospitable.
What is something the average person might not know about you?
I’ve gotten really into biking. I went for a six week trip near the Camino de Santiago in Spain. I rode it on a mountain bike. I took a super pretty route. And that was great. You have to get away from it sometimes. This industry will drive you crazy if you let it.
What ethos guides you?
Professionally, we really value disagreement. Tom (Thomas Basile, Langhofer’s law partner) disagrees with me all the time, constantly. And embarrassingly, he’s usually right.
We want autonomous thought. I think that makes the workplace more interesting, but it significantly increases accuracy for our assessments and therefore helps clients make good decisions.
I don’t think I could say I have an ethos personally. Get to the end of the day and go to bed, that’s my personal ethos.
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