“This isn’t about oversight and transparency,” Bonta said. “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.”
A coalition of attorneys general from 21 states and the District of Columbia have filed a lawsuit challenging a U.S. Department of Agriculture rule requiring states to turn over any and all available information on food assistance applicants and other welfare recipients.
Late last month, near the end of July, the Agriculture Department informed states that they collect and share data on all applicants to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, collected over the past five years. This data includes full names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and home addresses.
The agency has since expanded the scope of its request to encompass immigration status and information related to applicants’ family members.
“SNAP recipients provided this information to get help feeding their families not to be entered into a government surveillance database or be used as targets in the president’s inhumane immigration agenda,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a Monday press conference announcing the lawsuit.
Bonta and his allies say that the Department of Agriculture’s sudden policy shift has much less to do with transparency and waste limitation than giving the government yet another way to obtain information on American citizens and residents.
“This isn’t about oversight and transparency,” Bonta said. “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.”
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, said that SNAP applicants have to share information such as their landlord contact information and monthly utility expenditures—information that they trusted the government to protect and to use in good faith for a specific purpose.
“Government at all levels has a responsibility to be good stewards over the private personal identifying information we request from our residents in order to effectuate these programs,” Nessel said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s updated notice, published last month, said that it plans to share any collected data with other federal agencies, including law enforcement and immigration enforcement agencies, if any violation is detected, even if the violation is not SNAP-specific.
The memo also appeared to indicate that, under limited circumstances, the U.S. government can even convey SNAP applicants’ personal data to foreign governments.
Nessel and her allies believe that the changes will likely dissuade vulnerable families from applying to SNAP and similar programs.
“Parents are too afraid to get food for them now,” Nessel said. “And that is so cruel on every level I can possibly imagine.”
Sources
States sue USDA over efforts to gather food stamp data on tens of millions of people
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