Attorney General Neronha, coalition challenge Trump Administration’s illegal demands to release sensitive personal data of SNAP recipients
Published on Tuesday, July 29, 2025
Attorney General Peter F. Neronha joined a coalition of 21 attorneys general and one governor in filing a lawsuit that challenges the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) demand that states turn over personal and sensitive information about millions of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients.
SNAP is a federally-funded, state-administered program providing billions of dollars in food assistance to tens of millions of low-income families across the country. SNAP applicants provide their private information on the understanding, backed by long-standing state and federal laws, that their information will not be used for unrelated purposes. USDA has suggested that it could withhold administrative funding for the program if states fail to comply—effectively forcing states to choose between protecting their residents’ privacy and providing critical nutrition assistance to those in need.
Rhode Island receives roughly $27 million a year to administer the program, and any delay in that funding could be catastrophic for the state and the residents who rely on SNAP.
“Once again this Administration is attempting to unlawfully collect sensitive personal information – this time by threatening Americans’ ability to feed their families,” said Attorney General Neronha. “More than 10% of Rhode Islanders receive SNAP benefits to help put food on the table. These are our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends. They have children who may go hungry without the program. They may need temporary assistance due to job loss or they may need sustained assistance if they don’t make enough money to make ends meet. But they don’t need their privacy violated by the federal government, especially since the program itself is widely recognized as having rigorous checks to weed out fraud and waste. We must protect our most vulnerable, and this lawsuit will do just that.”
For 60 years, SNAP has served as an essential safety net for millions of low-income Americans by providing credits that can be used to purchase groceries for themselves and their family members. In those 60 years, the federal government and state agencies worked together to build a robust process for ensuring that only eligible individuals receive benefits. In fact, the USDA itself has described SNAP as having “one of the most rigorous quality control systems in the federal government.” Those systems do not, and have never, required that states turn over sensitive, personally identifying information about millions of Americans without any meaningful restrictions on how that information is used or shared with other agencies.
Yet in May 2025, USDA made an unprecedented demand that states turn over massive amounts of personal information on all SNAP applicants and recipients, including social security numbers and home addresses, dating back five years. Even a year’s worth of SNAP recipient data contains sensitive, personal identifying information on tens of millions of individuals including, for example, the 144,200 Rhode Island residents that received benefits in 2024. The federal government’s stated justifications for its unprecedented data demands, to “prevent fraud and abuse,” are directly contradicted by their own findings.
USDA’s demand is part of a coordinated effort by the federal government to collect personal information on Americans from every possible source, to be used to advance this President’s agenda. Since President Trump re-entered the White House in January, public reports indicate that federal officials are amassing huge databases of personal information on Americans and using that data for undisclosed purposes, including immigration enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security has already obtained troves of personal information from both the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Health and Human Services Agency, including private medical information and other personal details on Medicaid recipients, which Rhode Island has already challenged in court. USDA’s attempts to collect data from states about SNAP applicants and recipients appear to be the next step in this campaign.
USDA’s actions are unprecedented, threaten the privacy of millions of families, and ignore long-standing restrictions on the use and redisclosure of SNAP data. Both federal and state law prohibit Rhode Island from disclosing personally identifying SNAP data unless strictly necessary for the administration of the program, or other limited circumstances exist. Those circumstances do not exist here.
In the lawsuit, Attorney General Neronha and the coalition argue that these demands violate multiple federal privacy laws; fail to meet the public comment requirements for this type of action; exceed USDA’s statutory authority; and violate the Spending Clause. The coalition asks that the District Court declare the Trump Administration’s demands unlawful and block the Trump Administration from conditioning receipt of SNAP funding on states’ compliance with these demands.
Attorneys General Neronha joins the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin, as well as the governor of Kentucky, in filing the lawsuit.
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