Trump Secretary Rollins threatens SNAP funding cuts to blue states
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins meets with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., at the U.S. Capitol on Friday, Oct. 31, 2025. He held a press conference regarding the government shutdown.
Tom Williams | Cq-roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Tuesday threatened to cut federal funding to Democratic-leaning states over their refusal to share SNAP program data with the Trump administration.
“The administration will begin to pause the movement of federal funds to these states until they get them to those states starting next week,” Rollins told President Donald Trump at a Cabinet meeting at the White House.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul responds to Rollins in a post Xhe wrote: “The real question: Why is the Trump Administration so determined to let people go hungry?”
Rollins said his department needs state-by-state data on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as food stamps, “to root out this fraud and protect American taxpayers.”
The secretary said the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked all 50 states in February to “turn over their data to the federal government for the first time.”
He said 29 “red states” complied, but 21 “blue states continued to say no.”
Noncompliant states include California, New York and Minnesota, Rollins said. The governorships of each of these three states did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment.
“28 States and Guam have joined us in this fight, but states like California, New York, and Minnesota, among the other 19 blue States, continue to fight us,” a USDA spokesperson later told CNBC.
The spokesperson said the department is “establishing a SNAP integrity team” to analyze state data and “end indiscriminate welfare fraud.”
“We have sent another data request to Democratic States, and if they do not comply they will be given a formal warning that USDA will withdraw their administrative funds.”
Massachusetts has not received any notification from the Trump administration regarding the withholding of federal funds, Gov. Maura Healy’s office told CNBC.
But Healey still called Rollins’ threat “truly appalling and cruel.”
“The Trump Administration is once again playing politics to keep working parents with children, the elderly, and the disabled from buying food,” the governor said in a statement. “President Trump needs to instruct Secretary Rollins to immediately release SNAP funding and prevent more Americans from going hungry.”
Marissa Saldivar, a spokeswoman for California Governor Gavin Newsom, told CNBC: “We are no longer taking the Trump Administration’s words at face value; we’ll see what they actually do.”
Saldívar added: “Cutting programs that feed American children is morally repugnant.”
critics They have long accused the Trump administration of trying to weaken food stamp programs.
The Republican-backed “Big, Beautiful Bill” that Trump signed into law in July includes: cuts to SNAP.
The administration later argued that it could not pay full SNAP benefits in November during the government shutdown because it lacked congressionally appropriated funds to do so. Many courts rejected the administration’s efforts to halt these payments.
Almost 42 million people According to USDA’s official website, most SNAP recipients each month in fiscal year 2024 are children, elderly or disabled.
At the Cabinet meeting, Rollins said SNAP suffers from “rampant fraud.” But one information note “Most SNAP benefits are being used as intended,” he says, citing fiscal year 2023 data from the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service. Of the approximately 262,000 authorized SNAP retailers, 1,980 were disqualified and 561 were fined during that period, according to the fact sheet.
— CNBC’s Mary Catherine Wellons contributed to this report.
