On Thursday, August 6, the Senate Agriculture Committee tried to advance a farm bill. It failed by one vote.
Tommy Tuberville sits on that committee. He was at the markup. He was present for other parts of the meeting.
He was not in the room for the final vote.
How one empty chair killed it
The bill went down 10-11.
Tuberville did vote — by proxy, in favor. But proxy votes don't count toward the final majority in committee. You have to be in the room.
Republicans were already short. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has been hospitalized and in rehabilitation since June. That was one seat Republicans couldn't fill no matter what.
Tuberville's was a seat they could have.
As the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported, "Republicans were without a majority in the room" because of McConnell's absence, and Tuberville "was also not present during the final vote on the bill, allowing Democrats to win the vote against the bill by one vote."
His office did not respond to requests for comment.
What Alabama lost when the bill died
This is not a procedural footnote. The farm bill sets the rules for crop insurance, disaster payments, conservation programs, marketing assistance, and rural development.
It has not been reauthorized since 2018. Farmers have been operating on extensions for years.
The bill that died on Thursday included things farm groups had been fighting for. The National Corn Growers Association said it was "extremely disappointed," calling it a bill that "was particularly important to corn growers," and warned: "We are running out of time in this Congress."
American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall said the "stakes are too high" for another year without a farm bill.
Chairman John Boozman, the Arkansas Republican who wrote the bill, said struggling farmers were being held "hostage." He also warned exactly what failure would mean:
"Should this legislation be defeated today, current law will remain in effect, and states who poorly administer SNAP programs will begin to pay for the portion of the benefit cost next year."
Remember that sentence. It matters enormously for Alabama, and Tuberville knows it better than almost anyone in that room.
The bill he skipped was about a bill he voted for
The whole fight was over SNAP — food assistance.
Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states with SNAP payment error rates above 6% have to start paying a share of their residents' food benefits. Democrats wanted a two-year delay so states could get ready. Boozman offered one year as a compromise and called it his "best and final offer." Democrats said no. The bill died.
Here's the part Alabamians should sit with.
Tuberville voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 1, 2025. That's the law that created this cost-shift in the first place.
And Alabama is one of the states it hits hardest. According to Alabama Daily News, Alabama's SNAP error rate for fiscal year 2025 was 9.52% — up from 8.32% the year before. That puts the state in the 10% cost-share tier. Beginning October 1, 2027, Alabama would owe roughly $174 million to cover its share of food benefit costs.
About 670,000 Alabamians get SNAP. 300,000 of them are children.
So: Tuberville voted for the law that put a $174 million bill on Alabama's desk. Then he sat on the committee handling the relief. Then he wasn't in the room when the vote came.
And he's running to be the one who pays it
Tuberville is not running for re-election to the Senate. He is running for governor of Alabama.
If he wins, he is the person who has to find that $174 million. He would be governor when the bill comes due.
His plan for fixing Alabama's error rate, per Alabama Daily News, is to use AI. He said he and his team plan to use artificial intelligence to bring the rate down to around 5%. The reporting notes he offered no implementation details and no evidence of coordination with the state Department of Human Resources.
That's the plan. Artificial intelligence, no details, for a number that just went the wrong direction two years running.
This is the job, and he keeps not doing it
Skipping the vote is not a one-time thing with Tuberville. It's the shape of his entire Senate career.
In 2023 he spent ten months holding up more than 450 military promotions — generals and admirals included — to protest an unrelated Pentagon policy. He dropped the holds without winning a single policy change.
He has told Alabamians that Social Security is a scam, which we wrote about when he called it a "Ponzi scheme" while collecting about $93,000 in benefits from it.
He has been caught voting in Florida while claiming to live in Alabama.
Now the farm bill — the single most important piece of legislation for the state he wants to govern — failed by one vote, in a room he had walked out of.
What happens next
The committee recessed rather than adjourned, so it can take the bill up again when the Senate returns from its August recess. Ranking member Amy Klobuchar said she is "committed to continuing to work on the bill."
Meanwhile, current law stays in effect. The cost-share requirement is still coming. Alabama farmers still have no farm bill. And 670,000 Alabamians on SNAP, including 300,000 kids, are still in the middle of a fight their senator declined to show up for.
Alabama deserves a senator who is in the room.
Update, August 22: Alabama's food banks asked him by name. He didn't answer.
Thirteen days after Tuberville missed that vote, the people who have to catch Alabamians when they fall came to a microphone and asked him for help.
On Wednesday, August 19, at the Community Food Bank of Central Alabama in Bessemer, all eight of Alabama's food banks and their partners publicly called on Tuberville and Sen. Katie Britt to win the state a two-year waiver — a delay of the $174 million cost share until fiscal year 2029, the same relief other states already got.
Their ask is not for money. It is for time.
Michael Ledger, CEO of Feeding the Gulf Coast, explained what the penalty is actually punishing:
"I want to be clear about what that score means. We are talking about penalties to states because of administrative errors. Administrative errors are not fraud. Fraud only runs 1% to 2%."
That is the whole thing in two sentences. Alabama is not being fined for cheating. It is being fined for paperwork.
Ledger also gave the line that became the headline:
"I like to think of SNAP as a dam and we're dealing with the overflow. If the dam breaks, we're in big trouble. For every one meal our food bank provides, SNAP provides nine."
Nine to one. That is the ratio anyone should keep in mind who thinks charity can absorb this. Alabama's food banks are not a backup system for SNAP. They are the overflow channel, and they are already running full.
Nicole Williams, CEO of the Community Food Bank of Central Alabama, put the same point to WSFA:
"We are a critical safety net, but we were never built to replace the federal nutrition support that lets families buy groceries consistently and with dignity."
One of Alabama's two senators can actually do this. It isn't Britt.
Here is the part that turns this from a policy story into an accountability story.
Any waiver has to be written into the 2026 farm bill. AL.com asked both senators about it.
Britt's office answered — and its answer was, in effect, not my committee:
"Senator Britt does not sit on the Senate Agriculture Committee and therefore will have no opportunity to offer amendments to the farm bill until it advances to the Senate floor."
That happens to be true. Britt is not on Agriculture. She cannot offer an amendment in that room.
Tommy Tuberville is on Agriculture. He is the one member of Alabama's Senate delegation who sits in the room where this amendment would be written, offered and voted on.
AL.com asked him for comment. He did not respond before publication.
So the tally now reads: he voted for the law that created the $174 million bill. He was absent for the committee vote on the fix. And when Alabama's food banks called on him by name, his office said nothing — while the senator who can't help was the one who bothered to reply.
Alabama is being penalized for not being bad enough
Here is the part of this law that ought to make anyone angry, whatever they think about food stamps.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act sets the state's share of SNAP costs on a sliding scale tied to its payment error rate:
- 6% to 7.99% → the state pays 5% of benefit costs
- 8% to 9.99% → the state pays 10%
- 10% or higher → the state pays 15%
CBPP's state-by-state table put Alabama's projected bill at $172 million a year, based on its 2024 error rate. Alabama's own legislative analysts put the current figure at $174 million. Either way, the state is nowhere near the 6% line that would keep it at zero.
But the law also wrote in an escape hatch — and it only opens for the states with the worst records. A state whose error rate was 13.33% or higher in 2025 gets its bill pushed back to 2029. Alaska, whose rate topped 23%, got the delay. So did Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington, D.C.
Alabama's rate was 9.52%. Too high to avoid the penalty. Too low to qualify for the grace period.
The state is being charged $174 million a year because it administers SNAP better than Alaska does.
This is not a hostile reading of the law. It is what budget analysts across the spectrum say it does. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, walking through the provision, put it flatly:
"In effect, this rewards states with the worst payment accuracy while penalizing states with lower error rates. As some critics have noted, this could even temporarily encourage states to make more mistakes."
Tuberville voted for that law.
The government is driving the error rate up, then billing Alabama for it
Michael Ledger said the penalty punishes administrative errors, not fraud. He's right, and it goes further than that: more than half the dollar value of SNAP errors in 2022 was the fault of the state agency, not the participant. These are data-entry and eligibility-system mistakes.
Here's what makes the timing indefensible. Alabama's bill will be set by its fiscal 2025 and 2026 error rates — years in which the federal government made errors dramatically more likely:
- USDA treated the megabill's sweeping SNAP changes as effective the day it was signed, July 4, 2025 — but waited nearly two months to tell states that. The 120-day grace period for errors caused by a change in law was already running, and states didn't know.
- On the new immigration eligibility restrictions, USDA didn't give states the information they needed until October 31, 2025 — then informed them the grace period ended the next day. A federal judge found that so unreasonable he extended the hold-harmless period by injunction.
- Then the 43-day government shutdown hit. For the first time ever, households didn't get their November benefits. States were ordered not to issue benefits, then ordered to issue partial ones, then handed a corrected formula the following day — after at least one state had already paid out on the wrong math.
- And starting October 1, 2026, federal reimbursement for state administrative costs — including the money states would use to fix their error rates — gets cut from 50% to 25%.
One more thing worth knowing: the error rate counts overpayments. It does not count cases where a state wrongly denies or cuts off an eligible family, and there is no penalty for that at all. So the only pressure the law creates runs one direction — toward more paperwork, more denials, fewer people fed.
Which is exactly what Alabama is seeing.
The damage has already started
The cost-share doesn't hit until October 2027. The rest of the law is hitting now.
Between July 2025 and May 2026, 81,800 Alabamians lost their SNAP benefits — an 11% drop in enrollment, according to the Alabama Political Reporter. 23,300 of them were children.
And the state has no plan for the bill that's coming. Kirk Fulford, deputy director of Alabama's Legislative Services Agency, said it in nine words:
"We don't have $174 million."
That figure is more than $20 million larger than the entire annual budget of the Alabama Department of Human Resources — the agency that runs SNAP. If the state has to pay, lawmakers have to find it in the fiscal year 2027 budget.
Food bank leaders laid out the three ways this ends: Congress grants the two-year extension, Alabama finds $174 million, or Alabama loses its SNAP program.
Meanwhile, hunger in the state is already going the wrong way. Feeding America counted about 919,000 Alabamians — roughly 1 in 5 residents — as food insecure in 2024. For children it was 1 in 4. All 67 counties were affected.
At Leaf Pantry and Urban Farm in Midfield, executive director Veronica Smoke is watching it arrive:
"The SNAP benefits are reduced. We see it. The need doesn't disappear. It just shifts."
Her pantry served 1,850 people a month last year. This year it is serving more than 3,000.
It would take grocery stores down with it
The part of this that has gotten the least attention is what happens to the businesses on the other side of the checkout counter.
Ellie Taylor, president and CEO of the Alabama Grocers Association, told the press conference her group has identified 117 Alabama grocery stores at risk of closing if the state's SNAP program isn't funded. 61% of them are in low-income areas. 68% are in rural communities.
The math is not complicated. Many independent grocers take 20% to 40% of their retail sales through SNAP. For some it runs as high as 60%. Take that away and the store doesn't shrink — it closes.
And in much of rural Alabama, that store is the only one.
"Once a grocery store closes in rural Alabama, it is extremely difficult to replace. We should not be creating new food deserts while trying to improve the administration of a nutrition program," Taylor said.
Read that last clause again, because it is the cleanest description of what this law does. To fix a paperwork error rate, it threatens to close the only grocery store in a hundred-odd Alabama towns.
This is a farm bill problem, in a farm state, in front of a senator who sits on the Agriculture Committee and wants to be governor.
What's actually being asked of him
Strip away the acronyms and the fiscal years, and the request from Alabama's food banks is small.
They are not asking Tuberville to repeal the law he voted for. They are not asking him to defend food stamps. They are asking him to get Alabama the same two-year delay that seven other places already have, in a farm bill his own committee is still writing — and to be there when it's voted on.
He is asking Alabamians to make him governor. If he wins, he is the man who has to find the $174 million he voted to charge them — in the same budget year the bill comes due.
Eight food banks, a grocers association and a Midfield food pantry have now said out loud what they need from him. His colleague who cannot help them answered the phone. He didn't.
The committee comes back after recess. The amendment has to be offered by someone who sits on it.
That's him.
Source
Alex Angle, "Senate panel, with Tuberville absent, fails to advance farm bill amid SNAP stalemate," Alabama Daily News, via The Decatur Daily, August 8, 2026. Additional reporting from Cami Koons, Iowa Capital Dispatch.
Update sources: "If the dam breaks, we're in big trouble": Tuberville, Britt urged to back Alabama SNAP waiver — AL.com, August 21, 2026, by Michaela Yielding; "We're asking for equal treatment": Food bank leaders ask for more time to lower SNAP error rate before fees take effect — WSFA, August 19, 2026; Katie Bergh and Dottie Rosenbaum, "Congressional Delay of SNAP Cost Shift Urgently Needed to Protect Food Assistance for Low-Income Families" — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, January 8, 2026; "81,800 Alabamians dropped from SNAP as state faces potential funding crisis" — Alabama Political Reporter, July 23, 2026.
