America's Talking - 'No data, no money': USDA says states who don't hand over info will lose SNAP funding

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

(The Center Square) – States that refuse to turn over data on food stamp recipients will lose all SNAP funding, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced Tuesday. “If a state won’t share data on criminal use of SNAP benefits, it won’t get a dollar of federal SNAP administrative funding,” Rollins posted on X. “Let’s see which states stand for accountability and which are just protecting their bribery schemes.” USDA is combing through states’ SNAP recipient data to reduce ineligible enrollment, but 21 Democrat-governed states have so far refused to provide that information, citing citizen privacy concerns. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America's Talking, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McCaleb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. States that refuse to turn over to the federal government data on food stamp recipients will lose all SNAP funding, the Trump administration said this week. Joining me to discuss this is the Center Square's congressional reporter, Teres Boudreau. To Derez, the administration says the data is needed to help eliminate waste and fraud in the program, but many blue states argue that's a violation of individual privacy. Tell us more. Yeah, I mean, you put it pretty succinctly. Brooke Rowland's the secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

She's denounced on X, formerly known as Twitter, no data, no money. So, you know, there are right now, apparently she said that the USDA has received. The majority of states have sent their data on the SNAP recipients, but there are 21 now that haven't. blue states who have refused to send it. Like you said, there's concerns about the privacy of the recipients, their data. But that Brooke Rollins says, said that's unacceptable because this is all part of the Trump administration's attempt to rid the program and other federal programs from waste, fraud, and abuse. She has said, Rollins has said that there's data that shows that there's large, you know, scale amounts of fraud, that there's legal immigrants on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, she doesn't, she doesn't, she doesn't provide any of that. Uh, the only publicly available data that we do have, um, just shows error payment rates by state. Um, and those vary widely. I mean, the, the, the highest payment error rate is, uh, from Alaska.

they have an almost 25% payment rate. And on average, it's about 11% per state. And what do you mean by that is like 11% or in Alaska 20%, but on average, 11% of recipients shouldn't be getting food stamps. Is that what that means? Yes, I believe so. There are different Republicans put different provisions in their one big beautiful bill to hopefully combat that. But again, the Trump administration is taking all steps they can to

reduce the fraud and to make sure that ineligible enrollees are not on there. But again, there are states that are threatening to sue over this. It's, there's not, again, she said that there's a lot of data showing that this needs to be done because there's so much fraud, but she hasn't revealed any of that. So there's a lot of, a lot of conversation going on about this. And there have been examples, as I understand it, of recipients receiving food stamps in multiple states, not just necessarily in the home state where they live. Food stamps, of course, are meant for lower income families who have a harder time, buying such necessary things as nutritious of food. So what happens next? You said lawsuits or

threatened. This can end up in court like just many other things we're involving the Trump administration? Well, honestly, with so many other things going on this week, that's almost been on the side. Again, there's probably going to be more noise once other things in the budget reconciliation bill, the Wonder Beautiful bill, take effect. Because in that bill that passed July 4th, with just Republicans put in there that if you are a state and you have a payment error rate of over 6%, then you're going to have to start paying a percentage, small percentage, but a percentage of the benefits cost. Currently, the federal government just pays for 100% of the program benefits cost, and then states pay for a portion of the administrative cost. And then also other fraud-reducing measures they put in there were work requirements, or not fraud-reducing, rather waste-reducing.

They were saying that, you know, how Speaker Mike Johnson said, single guys, you know, without a job, just live, you know, on their couch in their parents' basement shouldn't be receiving SNAP benefits. So that's kind of the conversation that Republicans are having about it. so but in terms of of next steps i mean it looks like this is just going to keep going for now and again there are other things going on i think that democrats are just and everyone is just dealing with so many different things at once that it's it's hard to to really uh keep up tress you also wrote this week uh about the cato institute who who has weighed in on on this dispute it is of their opinion that in order to completely crack down on fraud in this

SNAP food stamp program. States should be responsible for the full, for 100% of the cost of it. Is that correct? Yes, that is a very interesting interview because, so again, the payment error rate provision, the highest that a state, you know, with a very high payment error rate, like Alaska, for instance, almost 25%, almost 25% of payments are made erroneously, the highest that they would have to pay would be 15%. So the Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank and they say that the only way to incentivize states to keep fraud under control to crack down on it is if they have to bear the brunt and in fact bear all of the cost of the program because right now it doesn't really matter to them if there's a lot of people who are ineligibly enrolled because that's the federal

government pays. I mean, they're not, they're not, they only have a portion of the administrative costs. So it's no difference to them. If there's, you know, and in fact, there are some laws and, and things to where they're incentivized to actually have as many people on there as possible. So what Kato Institute was saying is, hey, if this becomes a state run program, essentially, the federal government is barely involved at all. And states have to, to run it and to fund their SNAP programs, then they're going to want to actually crack down on things. Now, of course, there are concerns because while that would save the,

well, that would, you know, probably would, you know, to take care of a lot of the ineligible enrollment, which would reduce costs slightly. The cost of the program would simply shift from the federal government, you know, so being funded by federal taxpayer dollars to state. funded by state taxpayers. And so I was asking about that, too, like, hey, would this, would this just permanently raise taxes in a lot of states, you know, with high numbers of SNAP beneficiaries?

And they were saying that essentially states would probably right-size their programs to, in order to make sure that it works for their population. So it's an intriguing idea. And it is something I think would have the desired effect in terms of removing ineligible people from the rolls because you're making that incentive there. But again, the question is, okay, does this mean that some states are going to or most states are going to have their taxes just raised? So that's, again, another big question. So there's a lot of stuff going on about Snap right now. So we'll have to see where it goes.

Therese, thank you for joining us today. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecentersquare.com.