Washington, DC — U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins revealed the shocking number of fraud cases uncovered and stamped out by her agency in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News.
During a sit-down chat Friday at her department’s headquarters, Rollins shared how the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) helped her tackle the massive black hole of unnecessary Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and unrelated grant spending left over from the Biden administration.
“I can’t give enough credit to Elon Musk, who I still am in contact with today, and to the DOGE team that came in,” the secretary said. “I know some of the other agencies weren’t as excited about it. I believed it was one of the greatest, most fortunate things that happened to us.”
If President Donald Trump had not been reelected after four years of former President Joe Biden, Rollins said, “I don’t know that we would have ever been able to stop and uncover — to the tune of billions of dollars.”
“I mean, there was a grant that went to someone in Iowa that was studying how racism had affected the pest industry — like it was crazy, crazy stuff,” she highlighted as an example.
Another grant uncovered by the DOGE team was being sent to Louisiana researchers “studying the menstrual cycles of transgender mice,” Rollins exclaimed.
“I mean, it was crazy. So they were tremendously helpful,” she added of the team. “Then as DOGE itself, the original concept, wound down at the end of the spring, we pivoted our DOGE team. They’re still here. We pivoted them to SNAP and helping us begin to understand how to even start to reconstruct that entire program.”
Within an hour of being sworn into office by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last year, Rollins said the first thing she did was sign a letter to all 50 governors “telling them that the days of fraud in SNAP and the food programs was over — but we needed their partnership.”
“It was not an adversarial, antagonistic letter at all,” she recalled. “It just said it doesn’t matter whether you’re blue or red, Democrat or Republican. It doesn’t matter, but we have to do better by the taxpayers.”
The agriculture secretary blasted the Biden administration for allowing SNAP to nearly double in its four years with “zero accountability.”
Up until Rollins’ letter to the governors, she said there had never been any data shared with the federal government from the states about whether SNAP money was being used effectively.
Republican states have complied with Rollins’ fraud-busting project, allowing the DOGE squad and other USDA employees to find around 500,000 people collecting two or more SNAP benefits, and almost 200,000 dead people still collecting benefits.
“So, people were using dead people’s social security numbers,” Rollins said, before revealing that the USDA’s investigations have led to around 1,500 arrests and 125 convictions so far.
When asked what the Democrat-run states sent back when she requested their help to stop the widescale fraud and abuse, Rollins revealed that they have resisted cooperating.
“The blue states said ‘No, thank you,’ and we’re in major litigation,” she explained, before noting that the Democrat governors of Kansas and North Carolina have begun warming up to the USDA’s fraud crackdown “in the last couple months.”
“But I can’t even begin to imagine what California, New York, or Minnesota look like,” the secretary continued.
Back in November, Rollins announced that nearly 700,000 individuals had been removed from SNAP and that about 118 alleged fraudsters had been arrested.
As of March, a whopping 3.3 million people have stopped receiving SNAP benefits since Rollins took office for reasons including fraudulently collecting benefits.
Another reason for the decrease in food stamps, Rollins explained, was Trump’s success in “opening up” more blue-collar wage opportunities.
“We’re actually proving that the dignity of work works, and that the American Dream is alive, and the American dream is not about getting SNAP benefits every month,” she said.
Directly before her Breitbart News interview, Rollins had a closed-door meeting with Vice President JD Vance and several cabinet members talking about further tackling fraud.
“When we finally get our hands on that blue state data, I think it is going to be more shocking than anyone could have even imagined,” she said.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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