Trump threatens SNAP benefits again if Democratic-controlled states don’t comply

President Donald Trump’s administration is again threatening to freeze benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP and also still commonly referred to as food stamps.

Millions of people in Democratic-controlled states — including Hawai‘i — starting next week will have their benefits withheld again, for a second time this year, unless those states comply with an administration request to release information about people receiving the food assistance.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Tuesday during a meeting of Trump’s Cabinet, according to an Associated Press story, that the administration is being forced to take this action because the states refuse to give up data such as names and immigration status of SNAP recipients.

The department’s information request was initially made in February.

A federal judge in San Francisco barred the administration, at least for now, from collecting the information from those states after they sued the administration to block the request.

However, Trump’s administration in a letter sent last week informed the 22 Democratic-controlled states that it’s time to comply, giving them until Dec. 8 to respond to the information request.

Rollins claims the data will help root out fraud in the food stamps program.

The ag secretary says data provided by the other 28 states — including Republican-controlled states and North Carolina — shows 186,000 dead people are getting SNAP benefits and 500,000 are getting them more than once.

One in 8 people — about 42 million people total — throughout the nation rely on SNAP benefits to help buy food. There are more than 160,000 people in Hawai‘i alone who receive the food assistance.

“We asked for all the states for the first time to turn over their data to the federal government to let the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] partner with them to root out this fraud, to make sure that those who really need food stamps are getting them,” Rollins said in the Associated Press story, “but also to ensure that the American taxpayer is protected.”

Experts say, however, while there is almost assuredly fraud in the $100 billion-a-year program, it’s perpetrated by a bigger player — organized crime — and not its beneficiaries. Rollins’ office also has not released detailed data, including how much benefits received in error or by fraud are being used.

SNAP is not a federal program that usually spends much time highlighted by a political spotlight; however, under the Trump administration, it has this year.

The administration was not going to fund the program for November amid the longest federal government in U.S. history, volleying with courts about if it could. When the government reopened, benefits resumed before a final decision could be made.

That caused chaos and nearly a food crisis throughout the nation as millions of people who rely on the program’s benefits didn’t know what would happen if the shutdown continued — or even after the government reopened.

Trump’s big tax and policy bill U.S. Congress passed earlier this year also contained an expansion of work requirements for the program — which recently went into effect — that now includes people between the ages of 55 and 64 years old, homeless people and others.

U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, a Connecticut Democrat, said Rollins is attempting to change SNAP with no transparency and without a role for Congress.

The lawmaker added that the ag secretary is very much mischaracterizing the program.

“Individuals who are just trying to buy food, those aren’t the ones … gaming the system in the way that the administration is trying to portray,” Hayes said during an interview Tuesday with the Associated Press, before Rollins announced her intentions.