Blue States Love Food Stamp Funding but Refuse to Tell Washington How It’s Spent

E veryone claims to be against “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federal programs — that is, until someone actually tries to do something about it.

Earlier this year, the Trump Agriculture Department approached the 50 states, which administer the approximately $100 billion federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called food stamps. The federal government pays the bill for SNAP, but each state has its own fund that administers the program and collects data on it.

The feds wanted the states to report Social Security numbers, birth dates, and addresses for the 42 million Americans — that’s one out of every eight people — who benefit from the program. The goal was to identify ineligible recipients.

Every red state with a Republican governor responded positively to the release of the information (along with North Carolina, where the Democratic governor had no power to block it). But 22 Democrat-led states sued to block any release, arguing that it would violate privacy laws. The Democrat-led states expressed fears that the data would be shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and be used to round up illegal aliens.

But SNAP is clearly a program ripe for abuse — and that should be a matter of public debate and disclosure. One’s illegal status should not provide a cover to continue to receive SNAP benefits — in some cases illegally.

Administering SNAP is a nightmare. Washington foots the bill for 100 percent of SNAP’s benefits, while states capture the political upside of appearing generous with broad benefit expansions that don’t involve states spending any of their own money. Clearly, a better approach would be to block-grant SNAP money to states and then have them gradually pick up the tab for benefits that flow from their eligibility choices.

So Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says she will start withholding SNAP money: “NO DATA, NO MONEY — it’s that simple,” she posted on social media.

Democrats are already pushing back, with Representative Angie Craig of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, accusing Rollins of “weaponizing hunger.”

Rollins responds that the data provided by the 28 states that have cooperated show that someone is using the benefits intended for 186,000 people who are dead and that half a million people are getting benefits more than once.

The Government Accountability Office estimates that, overall, the federal government made $528 billion in improper payments involving multiple programs in 2021 and 2022. Some of the payments were the result of honest mistakes. But many came about because grifters and fraudsters filed false claims and stole taxpayer money.

But the GAO admits it has understated the problem. Its numbers exclude improper payments in programs like food stamps because the federal government doesn’t report them, despite being required to by law.

What the Agriculture Department is attempting to do is merely align management of the SNAP program with that of other federal programs that already have proper audit trails and estimates on fraud.

The states that are refusing to cooperate by turning over their SNAP data are also the ones with the most generous SNAP programs, so it’s likely the abuses in those states are far greater than in the states that have reported their data — and thus potentially embarrassing to the Democratic officials who run those states.

So now we know at least one reason why government officials aren’t keen on finding out if taxpayer money is being wasted.