KOLUMN Magazine
Feeding
the State: Trump, SNAP and the Price of Personal Data
The White House wants five years of personal information on food-aid recipients. Democratic states are refusing. The fight is about more than privacy—it’s about who gets to eat.
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For tens of millions of Americans the politics of Washington typically feel distant. But the Trump administration’s latest showdown with Democratic governors over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is designed to be felt close to home.
A new kind of standoff
On December 2, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced at a Cabinet meeting that the administration would begin withholding federal money used to run SNAP in most Democratic-led states that refuse to turn over detailed information on the program’s recipients, including names and immigration status.
“We asked all the states for the first time to turn over their data to the federal government,” Rollins said, framing the demand as a way to “root out fraud” and “protect the American taxpayer.” Twenty-eight states—nearly all Republican-governed, plus North Carolina—have complied. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia, almost all led by Democrats, have refused and sued, calling the demand illegal and dangerous.
At stake is not the SNAP benefit money itself, at least not officially. After Rollins’s remarks sparked headlines warning that “SNAP could be cut off,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) rushed to clarify that it is targeting “administrative funds”—the federal dollars that pay for the staffing, call centers, enrollment systems and fraud checks that keep the program running—not the benefits that load onto EBT cards each month.
But for states and families, that distinction can feel like a technicality. Federal dollars cover all SNAP benefits and roughly half of states’ administrative costs—billions of dollars a year. Without those operating funds, caseworkers cannot process applications, eligibility systems break down, and people in grocery lines start seeing “Transaction Error” more often.
The scale—and the fragility—of SNAP
SNAP is the country’s largest anti-hunger program, providing food assistance to about 42 million low-income Americans, or roughly one in eight people. The average benefit is about $190 per person per month—just over $6 a day. Children, older adults and people with disabilities make up the majority of participants.
In normal times, the program rarely makes front-page news. But these are not normal times for SNAP. Earlier this fall, during a contentious government shutdown, the Trump administration refused to issue November SNAP benefits even though it had both the legal authority and reserve funds to do so. Courts ultimately ruled that USDA was required to send out the payments, but millions of families went weeks without the assistance they rely on to buy food. Food banks reported surging demand; families turned to high-interest credit cards, emergency loans from relatives, pawn shops.
Advocates say that crisis left a kind of psychic bruise. “The administration showed it was willing to use hunger as leverage,” Gina Plata-Nino, who leads SNAP work at the Food Research & Action Center, wrote in a recent analysis. She argued that the new data fight is unfolding “against a damaged landscape” of eroded trust and heightened fear.
Now, barely a month later, another threat is looming—this time aimed squarely at states that won’t hand over data.
What the administration wants
The USDA is not asking for a simple spreadsheet. According to guidance reviewed in ongoing lawsuits, the department is seeking five years’ worth of personally identifiable information on every SNAP applicant and participant: Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, immigration codes embedded in case files, application histories and participation records, including for people who applied but never received benefits.
Rollins has pointed to the states that have complied, saying their data reveal 186,000 deceased people receiving benefits and about 500,000 people “double-dipping” across state lines. So far, however, USDA has not released details showing how much money is actually at issue or how many cases represent fraud versus paperwork errors, lagging systems or identity theft.
For critics, the scope of the request raises a different question: Why does the federal government need this level of detail on individual grocery budgets?
A recent executive order signed by Trump in March sought to tear down “information silos” and allow federal agencies to pool state-held data across programs, a move framed as modernization but used in practice to bolster immigration enforcement. Civil liberties groups have documented instances in which agencies ranging from Medicaid to the Social Security Administration shared vulnerable families’ data with the Department of Homeland Security for purposes unrelated to benefits administration.
Now, USDA wants to build a national SNAP database atop that infrastructure. For mixed-status households—where some members are citizens and others are not—the prospect of having their addresses, immigration codes and benefit histories in a searchable federal system can be chilling.
“Does being hungry mean I lose my privacy?”
In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul put the dilemma bluntly in a local television interview: if 42 million Americans are using SNAP, she asked, “does that mean your privacy should be invaded now” as the price of putting food on the table?
Advocates describe a growing “chilling effect,” especially among immigrant families and communities of color. They worry that parents will quietly withdraw from SNAP rather than risk exposing relatives who lack legal status, or avoid applying in the first place even when their children are U.S. citizens fully eligible for help.
The fear is not hypothetical. In neighborhoods from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, legal aid lawyers report clients asking whether an EBT card could become a breadcrumb in an immigration case. Community organizers say they’ve watched families switch to food pantries and church giveaways—less reliable, but less traceable.
SNAP’s power has always rested not just on its budget line, but on a simple promise: that asking for help will not put you under surveillance.
The legal fight: benefits, bureaucracy and a line in the sand
States have drawn their own line. Beginning in May, when USDA first ordered them to transmit extensive household data and warned that noncompliance could trigger sanctions under federal SNAP law, coalitions of states, participants and nonprofit groups went to court.
In Palleck v. Rollins, SNAP participants argued that the directive violated the Privacy Act and other protections. In State of California et al. v. Rollins, 21 states and D.C. claimed USDA had short-circuited mandatory privacy procedures and overstepped its authority. A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction in October, blocking USDA from enforcing the July demand or moving ahead with noncompliance proceedings against those states.
The administration responded with a new round of letters in late November, addressed directly to governors and insisting that this was a “new” action not covered by the injunction. On December 2, Rollins escalated again at the Cabinet table, announcing that USDA would withhold SNAP benefits from states that still refused to comply—language that went beyond earlier threats to pull administrative funds.
Within 24 hours, USDA spokespeople began walking that statement back, emphasizing that any penalties would apply only to the money states use to manage SNAP, not to the monthly benefits themselves. Anti-hunger groups quickly noted that, under the statute Rollins is invoking, noncompliance procedures apply only to administrative funding in any case—not to benefit amounts.
“There’s never authority to withhold the SNAP benefits, and in this case there’s also no authority to withhold the administrative funding,” David Super, a Georgetown law professor who has studied SNAP for decades, told the Associated Press. Whether courts agree will determine how far the administration can go.
In the meantime, states are in limbo—receiving letters threatening to pull money, reassurances that benefits will continue, and court orders telling USDA to slow down.
On the ground: when policy becomes panic
Policy disputes in Washington often unfold in abstractions: charts of federal outlays, bullet-pointed lists of statutory citations, dueling press conferences. For SNAP participants, the experience is far less theoretical.
In Pennsylvania and New Jersey—two states that have refused to hand over data and are now under threat—state officials say their phones have lit up with calls from worried residents who saw headlines about “SNAP cuts” without the fine print about administrative funds. “They are playing chicken with people’s food,” New Jersey’s attorney general said recently, calling the administration’s stance “immoral.”
Parents of young children, already rattled by the shutdown’s missed payments in November, are asking if they should stockpile canned goods or stretch their current benefits by skipping meals. Older adults living on fixed incomes wonder whether they should choose a more expensive Medicare plan to cover potential health fallout, or keep their grocery budget intact as long as possible.
And for caseworkers in state welfare offices—many of whom lived through the chaotic rollout of pandemic-era emergency allotments, then their rollback—the prospect of losing federal operating funds feels existential. Without that money, offices can’t hire staff, upgrade aging computer systems or maintain call centers. Processing times lengthen. Errors multiply. People fall through the cracks.
Even if benefits are never formally cut off, advocates warn, the threat alone functions as a kind of policy: it sows fear, discourages participation and shifts more of the cost—and blame—onto states and local communities.
A partisan fight with human collateral
The data dispute has hardened into a decidedly partisan battle, as one AP analysis put it. All of the states that have refused to provide data are led by Democrats or have Democratic attorneys general; almost all of those that complied are Republican-governed.
For the Trump administration and its allies, the standoff is an opportunity to frame Democrats as soft on fraud and indifferent to “protecting taxpayers” from waste in a $100-billion-a-year program. Conservative media outlets have amplified Rollins’s claims about deceased recipients and double-dippers, often without noting that USDA has yet to quantify how much money is actually being lost—or to distinguish between beneficiary misconduct and sophisticated identity theft schemes that target government programs of all kinds.
For Democratic governors and anti-hunger advocates, the same data demand looks like something else: a surveillance tool wrapped in the language of integrity, designed to expand immigration enforcement and intimidate mixed-status families out of the program. They point to SNAP’s long-standing quality-control system, which federal officials themselves have praised as one of the strongest in government, and to USDA statistics showing that outright fraud by beneficiaries is relatively rare compared with retailer scams and organized crime rings.
Some Democrats also see the current fight as part of a broader reshaping of the program: Trump’s signature “One Big Beautiful Bill” expanded work requirements to older adults, homeless people and parents of teens, and starting in 2028, states will be forced to cover a portion of benefit costs if they make too many payment errors. To them, the data battle and the funding threats are less about integrity than about narrowing the program’s reach and shifting financial risk down the ladder.
The quiet power of a swipe
At the center of all this are families for whom SNAP is not a political talking point but a monthly arithmetic problem.
In Milwaukee, where Wisconsin’s Democratic governor is resisting the data demand even as the state’s divided government navigates its own budget fights, local reporters found confusion bordering on panic. Residents interviewed outside grocery stores spoke less about privacy than survival: Would cards stop working? Should they buy shelf-stable food instead of fresh produce this month, just in case?
For parents like Tasha in Louisville or retirees in Scranton, the answer to those questions is not in Federal Register notices or court dockets. It’s in the beep of a barcode scanner and the small “Approved” that appears—or doesn’t—on a glowing screen.
If SNAP continues to function smoothly, many may never know how close they came to being bargaining chips in a federal data war. If it doesn’t, the consequences will show up not in partisan scorecards but in emptier refrigerators, longer lines at food pantries and the quiet, grinding stress of figuring out how to feed a family when policy becomes punishment.
What this moment reveals is less about one administration’s appetite for confrontation than about the precariousness of the systems that guard against hunger. A program built on the promise of a simple, dignified swipe at the checkout counter now finds itself entangled in the politics of surveillance, states’ rights and immigration enforcement.
And somewhere between the Cabinet table and the supermarket aisle, the debate over “fraud” and “integrity” risks losing sight of the most basic question many SNAP participants are asking this week:
Will my card work when I need it?