States Fight Federal Effort To Collect Personal Data Of Food Stamp Users

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Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Deepa Shivaram.

I cover the White House.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

I'm Jude Jaffe-Block.

I'm on the Power and Influence team.

And today on the show, we're talking about Americans' personal data and the federal government's efforts to collect it from the states.

Jude, you have been covering one of the recent efforts on this by the U.S.

Department of Agriculture, or USDA.

Explain to us what has been going on.

Yeah, well, USDA told states they had until July 30th to turn over a lot of data about everyone who has received or even applied for food assistance.

The program SNAP, it used to be known as Food Stamps.

And so this data, they're requesting social security numbers, names, birthdays.

addresses, how much they've received in SNAP benefits.

And this goes back to January of 2020.

So five years worth of data here.

And they brought up this data request in May, but then just last week, the USDA broadened the request to include even more information like immigration status and information on household members as well.

And then yesterday, on Monday, a coalition of more than 20 states led by California and New York sued over this data request, saying it's an unlawful request.

And it's actually the second lawsuit we've seen so far challenging this data collection plan.

With this data, though, from USDA, I mean, can you tell us how many people receive the SNAP benefits?

What do those demographics really look like?

Yeah, I mean this is a huge population.

More than 40 million people get SNAP benefits every month.

These are people who are at or below 130% of the federal poverty level.

To apply, they have to give a lot of personal data and information to find out if they're eligible.

And they give that information to the states that administer the program.

And,

you know, only certain categories of non-citizens can get SNAP.

People in the country without legal status definitely cannot get SNAP benefits, but they can sign up their U.S.

citizen children if they're eligible.

Okay, so why does the government say that it needs this data at all?

Their line is that they want to check the integrity of the program.

They want to ensure the people who are enrolled are really eligible.

They've cited an executive order that Trump signed in March that is about eliminating data silos.

It calls for, quote, unfettered access to data from state programs that receive federal funds.

And the attorneys general from states that are challenging this, you know, they push back and they say that this is really a pretext, that, you know, checking for fraud isn't the real goal here.

There are already anti-fraud measures in place.

There are ways for the federal government to audit data without collecting this volume of personal information of people.

And I will say, I feel like even the states that are pushing back on this, they're not saying necessarily that there is no fraud at all in the SNAP program or that improper payments never go out.

I think what they're saying basically is it's not clear from the USDA why they need this data to be able to check or what they're going to be doing with it.

And there's never been.

evidence of the kind of massive fraud.

We see this in a lot of different sectors, this idea that there is this fraud, waste, and abuse without there being any sort of widespread evidence of it.

Aaron Powell, Miles, what other data sets has the federal government collected or tried to collect from the state so far?

I mean, there is just a plethora of different things that the federal government over the last few months has been asking for.

I don't not think it's hyperbolic to say this is, we're kind of seeing a data consolidation or a data gathering revolution within the federal government right now.

I mean, reports over the last couple of weeks have noted that the federal government is looking for Medicaid data, for instance, data from the IRS.

Jude and I reported a story just a couple weeks ago about the Department of Homeland Security consolidating a number of data sources to basically create a system that allows the local election officials to put in somebody's name and be able to say, are you a citizen or are you not a citizen, for the purpose of cleaning up the voter rolls?

But there are a lot of concerns, obviously, about creating such a system and what else something like that could be used for.

Yeah, I think that's the big question, Mark, right?

Is the government saying, hey, we want more information from the states?

The states are saying, eh, we're like not feeling super great about some of this, at least almost half based on what you said.

I'm curious if you could speak a little bit more about how states are reacting.

and do they have besides this lawsuit like are there any tools in their toolbox to essentially say like no to the federal government and wanting to collect this information

well the threat here is that if states don't turn over the data that they could be considered not in compliance and that the federal government could have grounds to try to withhold funding from the states.

And so this lawsuit that the states filed yesterday, some of the relief they're asking for is to say to a judge, we want you to say that this is unlawful and that they also can't take away funds if we don't turn over this data.

And so that's one of the big kind of questions at the heart of this lawsuit is kind of like how this is going to shake out.

And just in terms of the bigger picture here, I think the states that are concerned about the SNAP data are really looking at the precedent here with the IRS and the Medicaid data, because these are examples where the federal government is taking steps to be able to share address information from IRS, from Medicaid data, with the Department of Homeland Security, in the case of Medicaid, with ICE specifically,

really to be able to locate people who might be subject to deportation.

And so that is the bigger picture that they have on their minds with this SNAP data.

We heard from Rob Bonta, Attorney General of California, one of the states behind the lawsuit challenging this data collection.

talked about this bigger pattern during a press conference Monday announcing the lawsuit.

Now they're coming for SNAP data.

Tomorrow, it could be housing, education, or emergency relief.

It's all part of a dangerous strategy.

Weaponize personal information to create fear and suppress access to essential services.

The bigger context here is that the SNAP program and the Medicaid program have both seen really dramatic cuts in funding as well.

And so this debate over the data from these programs is also playing out at a time when people who were used to relying on these programs, states that used to rely on federal funds for these programs, are seeing dramatic decreases there as well.

Miles, what has the reaction been so far?

I mean, from folks who are receiving these SNAP benefits, these food stamp benefits,

what has the criticism been of the government?

I mean, right.

There's the criticism of the data privacy stuff, which is kind of abstract.

But I think in the practical level, you have to remember that these are benefits that allow poor people to get food, right?

And so I think there is a really big fear that there are going to be people, the parents are non-citizens, but the children are U.S.

citizens and are eligible for these benefits, that those are going to be the type of people who may need this food and may not apply moving forward because the parents may be so scared of getting kind of caught up in an immigration raid.

There is a lot of fear that there's going to be a chilling effect here.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back in a moment.

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Okay, here's the show.

And we're back.

And we should mention here that there's a law that's relevant in all of this.

Jude, can you explain, walk me through how the Privacy Act of 1974 plays into what we're talking about?

Yeah, well, the Privacy Act was created in the aftermath of the Watergate era.

I mean, it was also at a time when there had been some proposals about federal databases that would consolidate a lot of data on Americans, and there was pushback to that.

So the idea here was a law that would protect against Americans' personal data being collected by the government for one reason and then being used for another purpose

and to kind of guard against this like mass consolidation and the creation of kind of a master database of everybody's information.

And so the lawsuit that's challenging this SNAP program data collection is raising concerns about violations of Privacy Act.

You know, they're pointing out that the USDA in its own public notice about how it's going to use the data has indicated that it plans to share the data with other agencies and law enforcement sort of with kind of gives itself a broad way to do that.

And they point out that the, you know, under the Privacy Act, really, this data should only be used for SNAP administration and quite narrowly used and not shared widely.

And so that's one of the points here.

The Privacy Act also ensures that there's a public comment period and that the public can give feedback to the government when their data is going to be collected and used.

And the USDA did put out a public notice and receive public comments, like more than 450 comments, many of them negative and critical about this data collection, raising concerns.

But the very next day after the comment period closed, USDA started their data collection program as planned without sort of making any changes.

So that's another part that's been pointed out by these states that they didn't really honor the spirit of that public comment and feedback period.

Yeah, I feel like the narrowness, as you mentioned, Jude, is like the thing that sticks out to me when I think about all of these different debates with all these different sets of data that the federal government's interested in getting right now is it just makes it so clear that you can't like get a bunch of data and be like that seems useful we'll figure out what we're going to do with that after we combine it right it's like you have to have a very specific purpose to combine that data before you do it uh as opposed to the other way around well also like politically speaking i mean you mentioned this privacy act was in the aftermath of watergate right where like political tension was very fraught at the time there was a lot of lack of transparency lack of trust in the government and to come to this point where now it's you know our conservative administration that's arguing here that they should be collecting more data when traditionally this is a party that has been opposed to that.

I mean, the politics of this has kind of flipped around too.

Yeah, totally.

And it's very unclear, I think, at this point how the public feels about all of this data consolidation.

I think part of it because it's very in the weeds.

You just hit the check mark whenever you hit it.

Exactly right.

That whole thing, right?

But there has been a little bit of polling.

I know the New York Times did a poll a few months ago that found like two-thirds of Americans were concerned about how Doge was accessing sensitive information.

So I think it's clear that there's some level of concern, but I do think that there's a lot of people are basically like, everyone else has my data.

You know,

many people are kind of surprised, I think, that the federal government doesn't already have access to this data.

But the bottom line is these laws have been in place for decades.

And so, yes, it might make logical sense to a lot of people, might make logical sense to some members of Congress.

If that's the case, then Congress needs to change the law in a lot of cases, right?

And so at this point, there are laws and there are ways that this is supposed to be done.

And it's just not clear that that's how it's being done in many of these cases.

Which is, I guess, guess where these lawsuits are coming from.

We're going to leave it there for today.

I'm Deepa Shivaram.

I cover the White House.

I'm Miles Parks.

I cover voting.

I'm Jude Jaffe Block.

I'm on the Power and Influence team.

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