The U.S. Department of Agriculture is telling states to begin turning over sensitive data on applicants to the food assistance program previously known as food stamps. The agency has recently expanded the scope of the data demand to include immigration status and information on household members.
In new guidance publicized Thursday, USDA told states to share information on applicants to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) over the last five years, including “all household group members names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, residential and mailing addresses used or provided, as well as all data records used to determine eligibility or ineligibility.”
A Privacy Impact Assessment the agency released Wednesday indicates the additional information USDA is seeking includes SNAP applicants’ immigration and citizenship status, as well as education, employment and marital status.
The broadened SNAP data request comes as the Trump administration is taking steps to share Internal Revenue Service and Medicaid records with immigration enforcement agents to locate people who may be subject to deportation.
While immigrants without legal status are ineligible for SNAP benefits, they can apply for any of their children who are U.S. citizens or could be part of a mixed status household.
The Agriculture Department has said the data will be used to check the integrity of the SNAP program and ensure SNAP enrollees are eligible. The agency has said the effort is connected to a Trump executive order aimed at “eliminating data silos” to combat waste, fraud and abuse, and that calls for “unfettered access” to data for state programs that receive federal funds.
There are already existing oversight programs in place for SNAP, and established ways for the federal government to audit and sample state data without collecting and centralizing applicants’ personal information.
“The new guidance from the USDA sheds some additional light on what types of sensitive data the agency is seeking on SNAP applicants and recipients, but the fact remains that we still don’t have good answers for why the range of data they’re requesting is needed or how it will be used,” said Nicole Schneidman, a technology policy strategist at the legal nonprofit Protect Democracy.
Schneidman is also one of the attorneys behind a legal challenge that argues USDA’s plan violates federal privacy laws.
“The agency says that it broadly wants to root out fraud, but it has neglected to explain what a person’s education status or roommate status has to do with that goal,” Schneidman said.
SNAP applicants must list household members they purchase and share food with, and their benefit amount is adjusted for household size. It is so far unclear if the USDA’s data demand is for all household members, including those ineligible to receive SNAP, or only for those who are considered eligible to share food purchased with SNAP funds.
A public comment period for the USDA’s SNAP data collection plan ended Wednesday, before additional details about the scope of the data the agency was requesting was made public. More than 400 comments were submitted.
USDA’s own analysis of comments received by Monday found the overwhelming majority were critical, according to a declaration by a senior USDA policy adviser in court filings. Nevertheless, the agency is moving forward with its data collection plan.
“The Department appreciates the range of comments received and has been reviewing them as they came in,” a USDA spokesperson who declined to provide their name wrote to NPR in an emailed statement. “USDA has begun gathering the requested data as scheduled.”
The plaintiffs suing over the USDA’s data collection asked a federal judge to issue an emergency ruling to postpone the data collection period, but the judge declined to intervene. The legal case continues.
States that do not comply with the data request could stand to lose federal funds. It is not yet clear if states will have the capacity to compile the massive volume of data the Agriculture Department wants by its July 30 deadline.
Texas Health and Human Services Commission submitted a public comment Monday asking USDA for more clarity on the process and said it would need approximately eight to ten weeks after receiving answers to submit its data.
USDA’s privacy impact assessment says states will submit the data through Box or MoveIt, which are commercially available file transfer tools. Federal officials blamed a vulnerability in MoveIt’s software for a 2023 Medicare data breach.
Earlier this week, 14 Democratic attorneys general, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, submitted a public comment arguing the data collection plan violates the Privacy Act. They objected to USDA’s assertion that it can share SNAP data broadly with other agencies and law enforcement if there is a potential violation of a law or regulation, even if it is unrelated to the SNAP program.
“USDA should rethink this flawed and unlawful proposal and instead work with the States to improve program efficiency and integrity through the robust processes already in place,” the attorneys general wrote in their comment.
An even larger group of Democratic-led states sued the Trump administration earlier this month for sharing Medicaid data with the Department of Homeland Security. It remains to be seen if states will also take legal action over this USDA data demand.
A group of Democratic senators also criticized USDA’s data collection plan last week, saying it would “turn a program that feeds millions of Americans into a tool of government mass surveillance.”
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Transcript:
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has told states they have one week to turn over the sensitive data on tens of millions of people who applied for federal food assistance. That includes names, Social Security numbers and addresses. And the agency also wants information about every person in those households. It appears to be part of a broader push by the Trump administration to collect and link government datasets containing personal information in new ways. NPR’s Jude Joffe-Block has been at the forefront of this story, Hi, Jude.
JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK, BYLINE: Hey, there.
SHAPIRO: Why does the USDA say it needs this data on food assistance recipients?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Well, USDA says it will use the data to check the integrity of the SNAP program, which used to be known as food stamps. And that includes applicants’ eligibility and immigration status. The agency cites one of President Trump’s executive orders that calls for, quote, “unfettered access to data from state programs that get federal funds.” And to be clear, there are already anti-fraud mechanisms in place for food aid and ways for the federal government to audit state data.
One piece of important context here is that the Trump administration is taking steps to share IRS and Medicaid data with immigration enforcement agents so they can locate people who could be subject to deportation. And just today, USDA made clear for the first time that, as part of this SNAP data collection, they want information on all household members, and that suggests one possibility is that mixed-status immigrant families’ data could be a target here.
SHAPIRO: Tell us about the reaction to this.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Well, the USDA put out a public notice describing their data collection plan, which is required by law, and the public could comment for 30 days. That period closed last night with hundreds of comments submitted. The USDA’s own analysis found that as of Monday, the comments were overwhelmingly critical. The department told NPR it reviewed those comments as they came in, but they’re forging ahead and have started gathering the data. A group of Democratic senators has slammed the data collection plan warning it would, quote, “turn a program that feeds millions of Americans into a tool of government mass surveillance.” And all that criticism was before the revelation that USDA announced today that it wants household members’ information, too, which has come as quite a surprise to many.
SHAPIRO: Yeah. Now, more than 40 million people in the U.S. get food assistance from SNAP. Have you spoken to any of them?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Well, I spoke to 20-year-old Namod Pallek. He’s a political science major at UC Berkeley. He said he couldn’t afford food and his schoolbooks without California’s SNAP program, known as CalFresh. He had to submit a lot of personal information when he applied, and now he’s having second thoughts about that because so much is unknown about the full range of data USDA will try to collect and how it could be used in the future.
NAMOD PALLEK: I got more worried about more people having access to my data and, like, causing mistakes and the possibility of, like, AI looking into my data and then having some kind of data leak.
JOFFE-BLOCK: And Pallek is actually a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging the data collection and argues the USDA’s plan violates federal privacy laws. The judge in that case declined last night to intervene and postpone the data collection period. That lawsuit continues.
SHAPIRO: SNAP is really run by the states, so how are they responding?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Well, in theory, funding could be withheld from states if they don’t comply, but that July 30 deadline next week may be hard even for some states that want to cooperate. Texas, for example, said in a public comment, they needed more clarity about how to submit the data and that once they get answers, they need several more weeks to get their data in. And Democratic attorneys general from 14 states joined together to write a public comment objecting to the data collection plan. So we’ll be watching to see what those states do next and if they wind up taking this issue to court.
SHAPIRO: That is NPR’s Jude Joffe-Block. Thank you.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Thanks.
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