Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Tuesday threatened to withhold SNAP funding from states that don’t provide the government with data about the immigration status of recipients.
Rollins said during a Cabinet meeting that the Trump administration’s request from February is intended to root out fraud in SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps, to protect benefits for those who need them and also ensure taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted.
She said that 29 Republican-led states have complied with the data request, which resulted in the discovery of several types of fraud, such as benefits being paid to dead people or recipients using the Social Security numbers of dead people, as well as duplicate benefits being paid to a recipient registered in multiple states.
“Twenty-nine states said yes, not surprisingly, the red states, and that’s where all of that data, that fraud, comes from. But 21 states, including California, New York and Minnesota – blue states – continue to say no,” Rollins said.
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“So as of next week, we have and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply, and they tell us and allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and to protect the American taxpayer.”
Rollins said that about 800,000 of the roughly 42 million Americans participating in SNAP have moved off the program’s rolls since President Donald Trump took office in January.
SNAP was embroiled in the politics of the recent government shutdown, which at 43 days was the longest in U.S. history, after the Trump administration halted benefits in October and partially resumed benefits in November before the shutdown ended on Nov. 12.
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The program is the largest federally funded nutrition assistance program and USDA data showed that federal SNAP spending totaled $99.8 billion in fiscal year 2024, when there were an average of 41.7 million participants per month who received benefits averaging $187.20 per month.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted in a report released on Tuesday that hundreds of millions of dollars may be stolen from SNAP recipients’ accounts each year through tactics like card skimming or cloning, phishing scams, bot attacks and stolen numbers.
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States reported replacing more than $320 million in stolen SNAP benefits between October 2022 and December 2024, and state SNAP agencies provided funds to replace stolen benefits when recipients reported a theft that could be substantiated.
The GAO said that some SNAP recipients may not have been aware that they could file a claim over the stolen benefits, and by law recipients were limited to filing two claims per year.
As a result, the GAO said the estimate of losses may not truly reflect the full extent of theft from the program. After December 2024, states are no longer able to replace stolen SNAP benefits with federal funds.
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