Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins detailed the Trump administration’s efforts to root out fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) during an appearance on “The Alex Marlow Show,” saying USDA has shifted personnel who previously worked on reducing the department’s workforce toward examining the food assistance program.
Asked by host Alex Marlow what USDA is doing to identify fraud, Rollins pointed to SNAP, commonly known as the food stamp program. “Well, we have the SNAP program, right? The food, the food stamp program, and you talk about fraud!” Rollins said, adding that other administration officials were also finding fraud in housing, Medicaid, and Medicare programs.
Rollins said one of the challenges with SNAP is that it is “a fully federally funded program,” but the federal government “just hand[s] that money over to the states, and there’s no accountability.”
“The spending on that program went up 40 percent under the last administration under Biden, which is crazy,” Rollins said. “More and more people got on food stamps.”
“There was no checking of whether, you know, they were working or trying to find a job,” she continued. “There was no checking on their means. There was no checking on whether they’re driving Lexuses or, you know, Range Rovers, which a lot of them are.”
Rollins said she contacted every governor after taking office. “The first day I walked in and sent a letter to every governor and said, ‘We’ve got to change this. This is not red or blue. We’ve got to work together and uncover,’” she said.
“You know, the American taxpayer just is owed better, as are the families that really need this program that is being stolen,” Rollins added.
Rollins said Republican-led states joined the effort and some Democratic governors also cooperated. “I had all the R, all the red states sign up, and actually a couple of the blue state governors have been great partners too,” she said.
Rollins said USDA found “250,000 people that are using dead people’s social security numbers in one state alone,” as well as “hundreds of fancy cars” associated with names receiving SNAP benefits. “But we have gotten, we have been able to root out so much already,” she said.
Rollins said she reassigned the team that had worked on reducing USDA’s workforce to the SNAP effort. “I took the Doge team, the Elon team that came into USDA to help us rightsize, and we did,” she said. “We shrunk USDA by 20,000 employees about a year and a half ago. Once that work finished, I pivoted them to this work, and what they have been able to find and uncover is remarkable.”
“We have now, Alex, moved almost 6 million people off of SNAP in just a year and a half,” Rollins said. “We’ve gone from 43, 44 million to right over 35, 36 million.”
“Welfare to work, no more illegal aliens, and no more fraud,” Rollins concluded. “I mean, this is what the president promised the people.”
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