Twenty-One Democratic Attorneys General Sued to Block a Rule Checking Whether Food-Stamp Recipients Are Even Alive. The USDA Says It Found 186,000 Who Weren’t.
Two lawsuits, one target. Since mid-2025, a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general — led first by California’s Rob Bonta and then, on November 26, by New York’s Letitia James and Oregon’s Dan Rayfield — has been fighting the U.S. Department of Agriculture in federal court over two connected moves: a demand that states hand over food-stamp recipients’ personal data for fraud verification, and a rule narrowing which noncitizens can collect Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits at all.
Trump administration USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins says the data those states are refusing to share would confirm what her department already found in states that complied: roughly 186,000 dead people still drawing SNAP benefits, and another 500,000 people collecting checks in more than one state at once. She has not released the underlying data publicly, and neither figure has been independently verified. But a finished, published Inspector General audit out of Puerto Rico — not in dispute — already found $150,000,000 in food-assistance money paid to 38,618 dead people on that island alone.
This is civil litigation, not a criminal case — no one has been charged, and the states argue USDA broke administrative law, not that anyone committed fraud. But the practical effect is the same either way: while the cases are litigated, the states declining to share data are not being checked against the dead.
- $10,100,000,000 in improper SNAP payments nationwide in fiscal year 2025 — a 10.62% error rate, nearly double Congress's 6% threshold — USDA, FY2025 State Payment Error Rates
- 186,000 deceased people USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins says her department found still drawing SNAP benefits, across 29 cooperating states — USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins
- 500,000 people Rollins says her department found collecting SNAP benefits in more than one state at the same time — USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins
- 21 states + D.C. sued to block USDA's noncitizen-eligibility rule and data-verification demands — U.S. District Court, District of Oregon
The first fight started in mid-2025, when USDA demanded that every state turn over five years of SNAP applicant and recipient data — Social Security numbers, birthdates, home addresses — so the department could check the rolls against death records and duplicate enrollment. Attorney General Rob Bonta (D-CA) led a coalition that sued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, calling the demand “an attempt to weaponize” sensitive personal data that could feed federal immigration enforcement. The court granted a preliminary injunction blocking the transfer.
The second fight is newer and broader. On October 31, 2025, USDA issued guidance implementing Section 10108 of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, narrowing SNAP eligibility to lawful permanent residents, Cuban and Haitian entrants, and residents lawfully present from Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau — cutting off refugees, asylees, and humanitarian parolees even after they later obtain green cards, according to the complaint. On November 26, 2025 — the day before Thanksgiving — Attorney General Letitia James (D-NY) and Attorney General Dan Rayfield (D-OR) co-led 20 more states and the District of Columbia into the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon to block it. “It’s wild that we’re here the day before Thanksgiving,” Rayfield said. “The law is clear, and this is not how you treat people.”
Rollins first put a number on it during a Fox News interview with Laura Ingraham on November 12, 2025, saying her department’s review of 29 states that shared their data had turned up “5,000 dead people” and “half a million people getting benefits two times under the same name.” The next day, on Newsmax, she revised the dead-recipient figure sharply upward: “That 5,000 dead people, that was just one month. The number is closer to 186,000.” By June 2026 she was citing nearly 700,000 total fraud cases found. USDA has not made the underlying data public, and Snopes reported the agency would not provide it for independent review when asked.
The nationwide figures remain contested. But one comparable case is not: a March 2026 audit by Puerto Rico Comptroller Carmen Vega Fournier, publicly released and unrelated to Rollins’ disputed 29-state review, found that 38,618 participants in the island’s Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP’s Puerto Rico equivalent — were already dead when $150,000,000in benefits was paid out to them between 2017 and 2024. USDA Inspector General John Walk called it proof that “proper authorities can work to ensure that federal food assistance goes to eligible recipients and not spent by those exploiting the dead.”
Sec. Brooke Rollins uncovers STUNNING fraud inside America’s welfare system. "5,000 DEAD PEOPLE getting SNAP. And 500,000 PEOPLE getting SNAP twice under the same name." "This light has now been shined on one of the most CORRUPT, DYSFUNCTIONAL programs in American history."
A federal Government Accountability Office report found SNAP’s national payment-error rate hit 10.62% in fiscal year 2025 — $10,100,000,000 nationwide, nearly double Congress’s 6% threshold — but GAO and independent reporting both draw a line Rollins’ public statements tend to blur: an administrative error, like a missed recertification, is not the same as proven criminal fraud, which GAO has separately estimated at closer to $1,000,000,000 a year nationally.
Twenty-nine mostly Republican-led states handed over their SNAP data when USDA asked. The 21 states and D.C. now in court did not — and their attorneys general say that is exactly the point. Attorney General Rob Bonta (D-CA) has called the data demand “cruel, unnecessary, and illegal,” arguing USDA is “exploiting a program designed to ensure children do not go hungry… in order to fuel its mass surveillance effort.” Attorney General Anthony Brown (D-MD) framed the eligibility guidance the same way: “The Trump Administration is doing everything possible to target immigrants — even taking food from Marylanders’ tables.”
Attorney General Letitia James (D-NY) — co-lead, eligibility-guidance lawsuit, U.S. District Court, District of Oregon.
Attorney General Dan Rayfield (D-OR) — co-lead, same case.
Attorney General Rob Bonta (D-CA) — lead, data-demand lawsuit, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.
Attorney General Anthony Brown (D-MD) — joined both actions.
A federal judge in Oregon issued an order on December 15, 2025, temporarily blocking USDA from financially penalizing states over delayed compliance while the case proceeds, giving states until April 9, 2026 to fall in line if they eventually lose. The underlying question — whether USDA’s guidance correctly reads the law on refugees and asylees who later become permanent residents — remains unresolved as of this writing. The Justice Department did not wait on the data fight: in June 2026 it sued four states that continued refusing to share SNAP records — Minnesota, Kentucky, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — seeking a court order compelling them to comply.
The House Oversight Committee’s DOGE Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), held a hearing titled “Combating Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in SNAP” on June 25, 2026. USDA Inspector General John Walk testified that fraud proceeds from the program have reached “transnational criminal organizations” and other bad actors exploiting weak identity verification — testimony, not a court finding, but consistent with the Puerto Rico case his own office had already closed out.
Vice President JD Vance has made the dead-recipient figure a stump-speech line, telling an Iowa rally crowd in May 2026 that USDA found “186,000 dead people getting SNAP benefits” and “355,000 people on SNAP benefits receiving double benefits,” adding that cutting off deceased recipients struck him as “a reasonable thing.” The figures track Rollins’ disputed numbers rather than an independently audited count — a distinction Vance did not draw onstage.
JD VANCE | 186,000 dead people still receiving Food Stamps.
“These payment error rates are further proof that state accountability is severely lacking in SNAP. USDA has taken historic action to help interested states curb SNAP waste, and I hope other states, regardless of political leadership, prioritize needy families and the American taxpayer over politics.”
Brooke Rollins · U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, June 24, 2026
Rollins’ headline numbers — 186,000 dead, 500,000 double-enrolled — are administration claims USDA has not opened to independent review, and this site treats them as contested until it does. But the one comparable claim that has been fully audited and published, Puerto Rico’s $150,000,000 paid to 38,618 dead recipients, shows the failure mode Rollins describes is not hypothetical. Twenty-one Democratic-led states and D.C. are suing not over that finding, but over whether USDA can lawfully demand the data and narrow the eligibility rules that would let regulators check for more of it nationwide. Until the litigation resolves, the states declining to share their rolls are also the states not being checked.
