States sue Trump administration over efforts to get food stamp data

By Benjamin Weiser and Zach Montague

A coalition of 21 states and Washington, D.C., sued the Trump administration Monday, seeking to block a Department of Agriculture demand that states surrender sensitive personal information about millions of food stamp recipients.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco, argues that the federal government’s demand violates federal privacy laws and the U.S. Constitution. It appears to be part of a coordinated effort to collect information that can be used to “advance the president’s agenda on fronts that are wholly unrelated to SNAP program administration,” including immigration enforcement, the lawsuit says.

“We will not allow this lifesaving program to be illegally used to hunt down immigrants and their families,” Attorney General Letitia James of New York said at a news conference Monday announcing the lawsuit, appearing with the attorneys general of California and Michigan. All three are Democrats.

“This administration cannot intimidate vulnerable families and prevent them from putting food on the table,” James added.

The Agriculture Department said in May that it planned to create a database of Americans who receive nutrition benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which serves about 42 million people. The federal government pays for the benefits and shares the administrative costs with the states.

But after a coalition of public interest groups and people receiving SNAP benefits sued in May in Washington to block the government from collecting the information on recipients, largely on privacy grounds, the Agriculture Department said it would pause the plan until it could “ensure that data received would be appropriately safeguarded” and would satisfy legal requirements. That lawsuit is still pending.

The lawsuit filed Monday asks the court to find the department’s demand for the data unlawful and to prevent the administration from conditioning receipt of SNAP funding on compliance by states.

It also asks the court to declare that the administration cannot disclose the requested SNAP data to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency or the Department of Homeland Security for any purpose other than administering the SNAP program.

The Agriculture Department declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The department has said the new policy is designed to help implement an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March, ostensibly focused on streamlining federal databases and minimizing barriers between agencies and between state and federal governments. It has argued in court that the requirement is necessary to administer the program more effectively, as states play a major role overseeing the day-to-day distribution of benefits.

Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said at the news conference Monday that the administration’s demand that states turn over personal sensitive data such as names, Social Security numbers and home addresses — even for people who applied years ago — was “a bait and switch of the worst kind.”

“This isn’t about oversight and transparency,” Bonta added. “This is about establishing widespread surveillance under the guise of fighting fraud. We can call it what it is: an illegal data grab designed to scare people away from public assistance programs.”

The lawsuit pending in Washington argues that the information the government has traditionally collected on SNAP recipients is for largely administrative purposes such as confirming eligibility, and that the new reporting requirements violate the spirit and purpose of the laws governing that data collection.

The new case filed Monday appeared to go further by pointing out the potential for abuse if newly collected data was shared outside the Agriculture Department or used for tracking and immigration enforcement.

Those concerns have been compounded by evidence that the Trump administration, with the assistance of Elon Musk and DOGE, have already taken steps to merge highly specialized databases at different agencies with the goal of hastening deportations.

This year, the Trump administration cemented an interagency agreement to provide taxpayer data housed at the IRS to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, resulting in the resignation of several senior IRS officials. According to reporting by ProPublica, the IRS is also building infrastructure to supply details within that data, such as home addresses, to Homeland Security officials on demand.

In June, the Supreme Court also allowed DOGE to proceed in reviewing personal data held by the Social Security Administration, with minimal restrictions on how that data might be used.

In addition to New York, California, Michigan and Washington, D.C., the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit announced Monday are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin.