Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins shared last month that she is taking steps to prevent the abuse of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Now, Rollins is threatening to cut federal funding from states that do not comply with her efforts to identify and eliminate fraud.

Last month, SNAP came to the forefront of the public’s attention after congressional Democrats shut down the federal government, which caused the roughly 42 million people enrolled in the program at the time to potentially face losing their benefits. With so much national attention centered on SNAP, Rollins announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) had launched an investigation into the program and discovered widespread fraud and abuse. The USDA had requested SNAP data from states, who are responsible for administering the funds, yet only 29 responded to the probe.

Even with data from only 29 states, the USDA found that over half a million people were receiving benefits twice (or more) under the same name, and nearly 200,000 dead people were receiving benefits. Rollins also noted that roughly 80% of those receiving SNAP benefits were eligible to work and simply chose not to. A report from the Center for Immigration Studies found that nearly half of noncitizen households — including illegal immigrants — relied on SNAP benefits. Subsequently, Rollins announced that everyone enrolled in SNAP would have to reapply, so that the USDA could root out fraud, prevent abuse, and “make sure that everyone who’s taking a taxpayer-funded benefit through SNAP or food stamps that they literally are vulnerable, and they can’t survive without it.”

“Here’s the really stunning thing: this is just data from those 29 mostly-red states,” Rollins pointed out. “Can you imagine when we get our hands on the blue-state data, what we’re going to find?”

In order to get that data, Rollins shared in a meeting with President Donald Trump and other Cabinet secretaries on Tuesday, the USDA will withhold federal funding from states that have not handed over their SNAP data yet. “In February of this year, we asked for all the states, for the first time, to turn over their data to the federal government to let the USDA partner with them to root out this fraud, to make sure that those who really need food stamps are getting them,” the Agriculture secretary said. “But also to ensure that the American taxpayer is protected. Twenty-nine states said yes — not surprisingly, the red states — and that’s where all of that data, that fraud comes from.” Twenty-one other states, including California, Minnesota, and New York, refused to comply. Starting next week, Rollins explained, the USDA will “stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply and … allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and to protect the American taxpayer.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Rachel Sheffield, a research fellow in Welfare and Family Policy at the Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing, suggested that Congress could play a role in eliminating fraud and abuse from the program. “There’s a significant amount of fraud in SNAP, and much of it goes undetected. While SNAP is administered by the states, it is nearly fully funded by the federal government. This means there is little financial incentive for states to detect and crack down on fraud,” she explained.

“Congress should reform SNAP to require states to pay for a portion of SNAP benefits. The amount states are required to pay could be gradually scaled up, to give states time to prepare for the change,” Sheffield recommended. “States need to be invested in ensuring that SNAP is going to those who need it most and that the program is not being defrauded. As it stands now, though, that’s not how SNAP is designed.”

In August, the 21 non-compliant states, along with the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit challenging a threat from Rollins to withhold federal funding unless SNAP data was turned over. Citing the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the coalition of states argued that the USDA’s demand for SNAP data was “contrary to law [and] without

observance of procedure required by law” and “arbitrary and capricious.” Judge Maxine Chesney of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California determined in October that the 21 states and D.C. “are likely to show the SNAP Act prohibits them from disclosing to USDA the information demanded in the formal warnings and, consequently, that they have shown a likelihood of success on their claim that USDA, in making such demand, acted in a manner contrary to law.” The judge issued a preliminary injunction barring the USDA from withholding SNAP funding from the non-compliant states.

The USDA has not yet filed an appeal but may be planning, in light of Rollins’s announcement Tuesday, to withhold federal funding from non-SNAP programs, since the injunction bars the withholding of SNAP funding.