A bridge to restoring benefits

Propel is where more than 5 million SNAP households check their EBT balance, which means we can often see a deposit go missing almost as soon as it happens. As changes from HR1, or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, have rolled out, caseloads have been falling across most states, and more of our users are opening the Propel app to find their deposit never arrived.

For a family counting on that money to put food on the table, the disruption is not a minor inconvenience but a crisis, made worse by systems that rarely give a straight answer. According to a report from the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, 38% of Americans would face difficulty absorbing an emergency expense of $400, including a financial shock like a missed SNAP payment.

In May 2026 we ran a limited pilot in Colorado to learn three things:

1. When a deposit doesn't arrive, is the cause more likely to be procedural (meaning missed paperwork, notices, and interviews) or a real change in the household's eligibility?
2. If the cause is procedural, what assistance helps a household restore their benefits (and what kinds of help could be automated at scale)?
3. Can same-day cash meaningfully bridge the gap between a missed deposit and when benefits are restored?

Over the course of a month we referred hundreds of users to Colorado resources to restore their cases. I had the opportunity to work directly with seven households whose deposits had not arrived, and a consistent picture emerged from those conversations. All seven families were able to get their SNAP benefits restored during the course of our conversations.

Impact on families#impact-on-families

In Colorado Springs, a mother's recertification had been approved and the letter she received said that $685 would arrive on May 3. Her deposit never arrived. By the morning we reached her, she had already pawned her laptop to buy gas and milk for her two children. "We don't even know what we're going to have for dinner," she told us, "I guess we're just going to eat potatoes for the next few days."

In Denver, a disabled grandmother raising two grandchildren had mailed her recertification before the deadline, but the county never recorded receiving it. Her case closed automatically without any notice, and she didn't discover the closure until May 1 when her deposit never arrived. In the days before our call she was buying her grandchildren milk on an over-the-counter card meant for her prescriptions.

The remaining cases followed similar patterns of both personal and procedural barriers to completing recertifications on time: a homeless man without a permanent address in Grand Junction learned his benefits had stopped only when the deposit failed to load, a woman whose U-Haul containing everything she owned was stolen the same week her recertification was due, and a brother navigated the system on behalf of his sibling with a severe cognitive impairment.

Every one of these households remained eligible for SNAP, and none had lost their benefits because their economic circumstances had actually changed. What they experienced instead was procedural friction, what researchers call administrative burden: a missed notice, a form that was never processed, or a response window that closed during the worst week of someone's year.

None of this represents a failure of any particular state or county, but is the result of a highly complex federal program wherein recertifications, interim reports, mailed notices, and time-limited response windows turn the ordinary work of staying enrolled into a tightrope act, where a single missed deadline or a single piece of mail that never lands can end a family's benefits even while they remain fully eligible.

Our Approach#our-approach

We showed an in-app messaging to Colorado users whose predicted deposit had not arrived, led them to a short screener, and offered a phone call. Because I am a former Colorado SNAP administrator, I called each household that opted in and spent fifteen minutes learning about their case, and identified where the closure appeared to be procedural. After the call we sent a grocery gift card the same day as a “benefit bridge” fund. These were either $50 or half of the missed monthly benefit, whichever was larger, and they came with no conditions attached since the goal was to stabilize families during their benefits gap rather than to adjudicate the case.

Formally restoring the cases took two to three weeks from the time of intervention. The gift cards reached households within hours of our intake call, addressing a very stark, immediate need. For a mother in El Paso County, that was the difference between going without a meal or a full set of groceries while her case was restored.

Pilot results#pilot-results

What the pilot showed is promising: a missed deposit is detectable in close to real time, a procedural closure is usually identifiable in a fifteen-minute conversation, and the resulting gap can be bridged the same day. After a bridge payment is made, participants were able to restore their benefits in under 30 days.

This initial experiment was intentionally a very small (n=7), human-led pilot, which limits what we can conclude from early results. Because every household received both the bridge funds and direct navigation support from someone who knows the system, we also cannot yet isolate which element drove the restorations. We are running a follow-up analysis to see how often people who simply clicked through to state contact information saw their benefits restored on their own.

What's next#whats-next

Identifying the missed deposit, understanding why it happened, guiding the household toward the right next step, and providing a bridge payment in the meantime, is repeatable. It is also the kind of structured, empathetic interaction that current AI systems are increasingly able to support, provided a human stays in the loop for high stakes cases where judgment, escalation, or simple reassurance must come from a human.

We are currently building tools to automate this support at scale and guide affected households to the right next step to restore their case.

We’re shifting our focus to another state, in partnership with these families every day, including navigators and frontline organizations that encounter procedural closures constantly but rarely have a fast way to diagnose them or a bridge mechanism to pair with the fix.

This was a modest pilot, and we see it as the beginning of a larger effort. If you work in SNAP administration, benefits navigation, or emergency cash relief and would like to compare notes, or to be part of expanding this work, we would love to hear from you at gov@propel.app.