The Justice Department filed suit Friday against Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota for defying federal requests to turn over five years of SNAP applicant data, even after data from compliant states exposed roughly $3 billion in annual benefit fraud.
The four states have had nearly a year to comply. They have refused twice. On Friday, the Justice Department ran out of patience.
The lawsuits, filed June 27 and confirmed by an official DOJ press release, seek court injunctions forcing Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota to surrender five years of SNAP applicant records to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA first requested the data from all fifty states in June 2025 as part of a broader crackdown on waste and fraud in the $100-plus billion program. Twenty-eight other jurisdictions handed it over promptly. The four holdouts said no, and kept saying no even after the USDA came back with a second formal request in May 2026.
What the compliant states' data showed makes the defiance harder to defend. According to the DOJ press release, analysis of those 28 states' records uncovered approximately $3 billion in likely SNAP fraud annually, including benefits flowing to roughly 186,000 deceased individuals and 442,000 enrollees with fraudulent Social Security numbers. The USDA separately reported a 10.62 percent improper payment rate for fiscal year 2025, translating to more than $10 billion in overpayments across the program. Those are the numbers the four holdout states chose to protect themselves from scrutiny over.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche did not soften the government's view of what is happening. "The American people deserve a government that is transparent about how it spends their hard-earned tax dollars," Blanche said in a statement. "These four states are thwarting USDA's efforts to ensure that the billions of dollars in SNAP benefits they distribute every year are not lost to fraud. It's unacceptable, suspicious, and it will not stand under this Administration." USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins was equally direct: "For nearly 365 days, several States have shamelessly defied federal law and withheld data to which the U.S. Department of Agriculture is entitled."
Three of the four states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota, are governed by Democrats, and each has been among the most combative with the Trump administration on welfare and benefit policy. Minnesota under Governor Tim Walz, who ran as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2024, has sued the federal government repeatedly over benefit cuts. Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro and Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer have both publicly framed resistance to federal data requests as protecting residents' privacy.
Kentucky is the outlier. It has a Republican-leaning political profile and sent Republican senators to Washington, which makes its refusal the most notable detail in the lineup. The brief filed with the lawsuit does not indicate whether the four states coordinated their refusals, but the identical response to two separate federal requests across a twelve-month span suggests at minimum a shared legal strategy.
The privacy argument, whatever its merit, runs directly into the plain text of federal law. States that administer SNAP do so under federal authority and as a condition of receiving federal funds. The USDA's legal basis for the data request rests on its statutory oversight role, which courts have consistently upheld when states have tested it. Declining to share eligibility records with the agency that writes the checks is not a defensible posture for long.
The fraud figures from the 28 compliant states make the stakes concrete. Benefits paid to the deceased and to enrollees with fabricated Social Security numbers are not edge cases or accounting rounding errors. They are straight theft from a program that costs roughly $110 billion a year, funded almost entirely by federal taxpayers who have no say in how individual states administer it.
The lawsuits now move into federal district courts in each state. If the DOJ prevails, as the weight of precedent suggests it should, the four states will be ordered to produce the data and face potential contempt proceedings if they continue to stall. What USDA finds in those records, and how it compares to the $3 billion fraud rate in the states that already cooperated, will be the real story. The four holdouts appear to know that. Their resistance, stretched across two requests and twelve months, looks less like a principled privacy stand and more like a calculated effort to delay the moment of reckoning.
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