Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Tuesday warned that some Democratic-leaning states may see funding halted if they do not share their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) data with the federal government.
During a Cabinet meeting at the White House, Rollins said that the administration “has begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states” next week “until they comply.” She added that 29 Republican-leaning states provided SNAP data to her department but that 21 “blue states continue to say no,” listing New York, California, and Minnesota as among them.
Earlier this year, Rollins asked for all 50 states’ SNAP data to ensure that no fraud or abuse exists in the program, also known as food stamps.
The states that have not complied must help the administration “root out this fraud … to protect the American taxpayer,” Rollins said Tuesday, adding that SNAP expenditures increased by 40 percent during the previous administration.
The Epoch Times contacted the governors’ offices for Minnesota, California, and New York for comment but did not hear back by publication time.
If the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) moves to rescind federal funding to the nearly two-dozen states, it will likely face legal challenges. Democratic attorneys general from 21 states filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in November over guidance that the states alleged illegally blocks authorized food aid to certain legal immigrants.
State officials said in their lawsuit that the USDA had sent out guidance on Oct. 31 that was incorrect in asserting that certain categories of non-citizens who are lawfully in the United States cannot receive SNAP benefits.
“The Guidance is arbitrary and capricious because the Defendants failed to provide a reasoned explanation for why the agency was changing its position as to whether individuals who have had the following status were subject to the five-year waiting period: Refugees, Individuals Granted Asylum, Deportation Withheld, and other groups that have the same eligibility as Refugees under statute,” the complaint reads.
In addition, two dozen or so states filed a separate lawsuit against the administration in October after the USDA said it couldn’t tap into emergency funds to distribute SNAP payments to states amid the government shutdown that ended in mid-November.
The shutdown came to an end when President Donald Trump signed a continuing resolution passed by Congress that funded the federal government until the end of January 2026.
Rollins has stated that SNAP is rife with fraud, saying her department had found that 500,000 people had received duplicate benefits and 5,000 dead individuals were on the program. In an interview with Fox News last month, Rollins also said that some illegal immigrants are currently receiving SNAP payments and that if those benefits are cut off, many would self-deport out of the United States.
SNAP is one of the “most corrupt, dysfunctional programs” in U.S. history, Rollins told Fox News on Nov. 21. Weeks before that, Rollins said in a post on X that in the Republican-leaning states that cooperated with her department, “massive fraud” was uncovered.
The federal food program is used by about 42 million people, roughly one in eight Americans, who receive an average of $190 monthly per person.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This article was originally published by The Epoch Times.
