Twenty-one state attorneys general just sued the federal government over food stamps. Not to feed more hungry American citizens. To keep benefits flowing to noncitizens and to stop Washington from checking whether the people collecting them are alive, unique, or even eligible in the first place.
I have spent three decades in investment management, much of it as an expert witness reconstructing where money actually went when someone claims it went somewhere else. That training teaches you one thing fast: when an institution fights harder to keep records sealed than to fix the underlying problem, the records are the problem.
On Oct. 31, the USDA issued guidance implementing the SNAP reforms in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, narrowing eligibility for certain noncitizen categories consistent with the law Congress passed. New York Attorney General Letitia James, leading a coalition of twenty other Democratic AGs, filed suit in federal court in Oregon, calling the guidance “arbitrary and capricious” and demanding a judge vacate it. A separate but related fight, led by California, challenges USDA’s demand that states hand over recipient data, including names, birthdates, and Social Security numbers, so the agency can check the rolls against reality.
Here is the reality Sacramento and Albany would rather you not check. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says a review of data from twenty-nine states found roughly 186,000 deceased people still drawing SNAP benefits and another 500,000 people collecting in more than one jurisdiction at the same time. USDA has not released the full underlying dataset, and I will not pretend those numbers are audited fact rather than administration claim. But dead men do not need groceries, and nobody legitimately qualifies for two benefit checks under two names. If the numbers are even half right, that is not a rounding error. That is a program running on the honor system in a country that stopped extending Democratic attorneys general the benefit of the doubt somewhere around the 2020 lockdowns.
To be fair, USDA’s own paperwork has not exactly inspired confidence. A Dec. 9 follow-up memo clarified that refugees, asylees, and other humanitarian entrants remain exempt from the standard five-year waiting period once they secure a green card, which is precisely what the state lawsuit argued the October guidance got wrong. Sloppy drafting deserves criticism regardless of which administration authors it. I have reviewed enough contracts and regulatory filings in expert witness work to know that “we meant something different” is a weak defense once the memo is already governing fifty state agencies. Fix the guidance. Don’t use the fumble as cover to block the data audit that has nothing to do with it.
Because that is the real game here, and it is not subtle. One lawsuit argues over who qualifies for benefits under a law Congress already wrote. The other lawsuit argues that the federal government funding the program, to the tune of roughly $100 billion a year, has no right to verify who is collecting it. California Attorney General Rob Bonta calls the data request a surveillance scheme. I call it an audit, the same kind any pension fund, endowment, or family office undergoes every year without howling about privacy. Taxpayers who fund SNAP are the beneficiaries of a trust relationship, and beneficiaries get to see the books.
SNAP WASN’T CUT. IT WAS CAUGHT
Every dollar paid to a deceased recipient or a double-dipper is a dollar not available for a legitimate family working two jobs and still short at the register. That is not a talking point. That is arithmetic, and arithmetic does not care about your politics.
States that genuinely wanted a well-run safety net would welcome the audit and spend their legal budgets fixing their own recertification systems instead of litigating to keep Washington blind. Instead, twenty-one attorneys general chose to sue over the fix while resisting the receipts. Reagan warned that the closest thing to eternal life on earth is a government program. He never got to see one filing a lawsuit to make sure it stays that way.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.