Trump Admin Warns Blue States: Give Us Food Stamp Data Or We Cut Off Funds

At a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins delivered a sweeping update on the nation’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), revealing what she called “rampant fraud” and announcing a dramatic escalation in the administration’s effort to force state compliance with federal oversight.

Rollins said that under the president’s tenure, “about 800,000” Americans have already moved off SNAP, a program serving 42 million people, and she argued the trend underscores the need to restore integrity to a system she said has been “abused for far too long.”

Rollins detailed new findings from the department’s data-matching initiative — an effort she said was repeatedly obstructed by blue states. “We found 500,000 people receiving benefits more than twice,” she said. “We had a couple of people receiving benefits in six states.” She noted that in February, USDA asked all 50 states to submit their SNAP recipient data so the federal government could help identify fraud. Twenty-one states, including California, New York, and Minnesota, refused. As a result, Rollins announced the administration will withhold federal funds from those states beginning next week unless they provide the data and “allow us to partner with them to protect the American taxpayer.”

The secretary also contrasted the current crackdown with the previous administration, stating that President Biden — “working to buy [the] election a year ago,” in her words — expanded the food-stamp budget by 40 percent.

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The confrontation over state cooperation intensified in mid-November when Rollins disclosed an alarming figure: 186,000 deceased individuals were receiving SNAP benefits, a number she said far exceeded the initial estimate of 5,000 in a single month. Rollins explained that on her first day in office, she asked states to share basic personal data for all SNAP recipients — names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses — asserting the information was needed both to identify fraud and to ensure benefits were not going to illegal immigrants. She claimed Democrats opposed data-sharing because, in her view, their political strategy “depends on protecting illegal aliens.”

According to Rollins, 29 mostly red states complied, and the fraud numbers identified so far come only from those data sets. “Can you imagine when we get our hands on the blue-state data?” she said. She argued that full transparency will enable USDA to rebuild the program from the ground up, require every recipient to reapply, and make certain SNAP is reserved for Americans who “literally cannot survive without it.”