The Trump administration says it will begin withholding federal money tied to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) from most Democratic-controlled states as soon as next week unless those states turn over detailed information about people receiving food aid, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday.
Rollins told fellow Cabinet members that the Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been seeking data from all 50 states since February, including the names and immigration status of SNAP recipients, which she said is needed to “root out fraud” in the nation’s largest nutrition assistance program. While most Republican-led states have complied, more than 20 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia have refused and in many cases have sued to block the request, arguing it is overbroad, invasive and illegal.
After Rollins’ remarks drew alarm from governors and anti-hunger advocates, a USDA spokesperson clarified that the department is targeting federal funds that help states administer the program, not the benefits that families use to buy food.
States and the federal government split the cost of running SNAP, while the federal government pays the full cost of monthly benefits. Cutting off administrative funds could still disrupt or delay aid if states are unable to process applications, maintain eligibility systems or staff local offices without federal support, state officials and policy experts warned.
The USDA has not publicly detailed how soon or in what order funds would be cut, which specific pots of administrative money are at risk, or how long states would have before full suspensions took effect.
At least 22 states and the District of Columbia have sued to block the data demand, saying USDA’s request for large data files on millions of residents violates privacy protections and goes well beyond what is needed to verify eligibility. Many of those suits are coordinated in federal court in California, where a San Francisco-based judge has issued an order temporarily barring the administration from collecting the information from the suing states while the cases proceed.
Democratic officials say they already check whether people qualify for food stamps and share targeted information when necessary, but have never been required to hand over bulk, personally identifiable data at the scale USDA is now seeking.
“As you know, they’ve been gathering databases that are— people should deserve privacy, whether they’re a SNAP recipient or not. It should not be information that gets gathered by and then disseminated by the federal government. But we’re obviously following all the rules around SNAP. We always have nothing that they’re requesting would reveal anything that’s untoward about the program. And again, this is all about effectuating a policy that’s bad for the United States, bad for the state of Illinois. All we’re trying to do is feed people. And everybody in the United States deserves to have a decent three squares a day, and SNAP is really not very much money to provide to people,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said.
Experts note that while some fraud exists in SNAP, much of it involves organized schemes to steal or clone benefit cards or to obtain them under false identities, not widespread cheating by ordinary recipients. The department has not released clear evidence that Democratic-led states have higher fraud rates or that the sweeping data request is proportionate to the problem it is trying to solve.
Roughly 42 million people nationwide rely on SNAP to buy groceries each month, and the program costs around 100 billion dollars a year. Traditionally, SNAP has drawn bipartisan support and has often been shielded from the fiercest partisan fights. But this year, it has become a central flashpoint in Trump’s second term agenda, including a GOP “Big Beautiful Bill” that tightened work requirements and further limited eligibility for many legal immigrants.
