The Justice Department filed lawsuits on Friday against four states that have spent the better part of a year stonewalling federal requests for SNAP program data, a move the Trump administration says is necessary to root out what could be billions of dollars in fraud.
Minnesota, Kentucky, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are the targets of the legal action, as first reported by USA Journal. The DOJ's Civil Division and Fraud Division jointly filed the suits after the USDA was repeatedly rebuffed in its attempts to obtain SNAP eligibility records from these states.
The backstory makes the refusals all the more glaring. When the USDA initially requested the data last year, 28 other jurisdictions handed it over without a fuss. The information from those cooperating states revealed a staggering pattern: billions of dollars annually flowing to overpayments and outright fraud. Armed with that evidence, the USDA went back to the four holdout states in May and asked again. They were turned down. Again.
Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche did not mince words. "These four states are thwarting USDA's efforts to ensure that the billions of dollars in SNAP benefits they distribute every year are not lost to fraud," Blanche said. "It's unacceptable, suspicious, and it will not stand under this Administration."
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was the one who formally requested the DOJ take legal action. She pointed out that these states have "shamelessly defied federal law" for close to a full year, withholding data that her agency is legally entitled to receive. Her message was blunt: if a state decides to stand between federal investigators and the information they need to protect taxpayer dollars, it will end up in court.
The federal government funds the vast majority of SNAP benefits distributed by states. In exchange, states are required to provide eligibility data when asked. There is no legal gray area here. The states receiving federal money to run the program have no standing to refuse transparency about how that money is being spent.
Leah Foley, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, offered some troubling context during a Friday evening appearance on Fox News. She explained that SNAP cards are being used as a gateway to additional government benefits. Once someone has a card, it functions almost like a "magic key" that unlocks access to government healthcare and housing programs, creating a cascade of fraudulent payouts.
Perhaps the most infuriating detail Foley shared was what happens when federal officials ask these states the most basic question imaginable: how do you verify who is on your rolls? The states simply refuse to answer.
"Literally, we have asked the state to provide us with the names of the people who are on the rolls now," Foley said. She explained that the USDA wants names and identifying information so it can confirm whether recipients are real people and whether they are also collecting benefits in other states. The holdout states will not cooperate on even that fundamental level.
The data from the 28 states that did comply paints an ugly picture. If billions in fraud and overpayments exist in those jurisdictions alone, the numbers hiding behind the four resistant states could be substantial. The DOJ's press release noted that the ongoing refusal "creates the likelihood of ongoing, material waste, fraud, and abuse going undetected."
Governors in these states, including Minnesota's Tim Walz and Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro, have offered no compelling legal justification for their refusal. The federal law requiring cooperation is not ambiguous, and the funding relationship between Washington and the states makes the obligation even clearer.
The lawsuits aim to force compliance through the courts. Whether these states will continue to resist once a federal judge weighs in remains to be seen. But the administration has made its position clear: the stalling is over, and the legal machinery is now in motion to compel the transparency that taxpayers deserve.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
