Comment: Using SNAP as leverage was bad idea first time around

By Erika D. Smith / Bloomberg Opinion

During this fall’s government shutdown, when food banks faced lines circling the block, President Donald Trump didn’t seem to understand that he’d become the face of his administration’s refusal to fund SNAP food benefits.

“I do NOT want Americans to go hungry,” he insisted on Truth Social in October, even as he waged a pitched legal battle to keep the nation’s largest anti-hunger program idled along with the rest of the federal government.

Polls show that strategy didn’t work out so well for Trump or for Republicans. Nevertheless, the administration, having failed to learn from that mistake, is doubling down and planning to try it again.

As soon as this week, millions of low-income and working-class Americans could have their SNAP food benefits withheld; part of what Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says is an attempt to root out “rampant fraud,” but Democrats say is a sneaky attempt to expand the White House’s mass deportation campaign.

At risk is anyone enrolled in the federal program who lives in California, Washington, New York, Minnesota or 17 other blue states where Democrats have refused to turn over the addresses and immigration statuses of SNAP recipients, worried that the personal information will be given to federal immigration agents.

“We have begun and will begin to stop moving federal funds into those states until they comply … to protect the American taxpayer,” Rollins said last week.

To be sure, finding and eliminating fraud, such as the public benefits scandal in Minnesota, is a good thing. But the way the Trump administration is choosing to go about it — threatening widespread hunger at a time when many Americans are already angry with the president because they can’t afford groceries — is not. There likely will be political consequences.

This latest showdown over SNAP has been brewing since May, when Rollins announced that states would have to provide “unfettered access” to the personal data of those receiving federal benefits.

Under Rollins, the Agriculture Department has insisted it has broad authority to share whatever data it collects on SNAP recipients with other government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, which handles immigration enforcement. That’s a change from past practice, when the federal government ensured undocumented immigrants weren’t enrolled by collecting data samples from states without holding onto anyone’s personal information.

By law, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for SNAP (though those with American children can sign up on their behalf). However, Rollins, Trump and others in the administration have continued to claim, without evidence, that many undocumented immigrants are using SNAP, and that Democratic-led states are choosing to “protect illegals, criminals and bad actors.” According to the Agriculture Department’s own website, more than 98 precent of people who get SNAP food assistance are eligible for it, and fraud is rare.

Most Republican-led states have nevertheless complied with Rollins’ order and turned over the personal data of their residents who receive SNAP. But a coalition of Democratic-led states led by California refused; and sued. In October, a federal judge in San Francisco sided with the blue states and issued a preliminary injunction, thwarting the administration. The Agriculture Department has until Dec. 15 to appeal, but in the meantime, it has demanded that states comply anyway, setting up this week’s deadline.

As California Attorney General Rob Bonta put it: “SNAP recipients provided this information to get help feeding their families, not to be entered into a government surveillance database or be used as targets in the president’s inhumane immigration agenda.”

Which is why there are likely to be political consequences for Trump.

Numerous polls show that not only is immigration enforcement increasingly unpopular with voters, but that Trump is spending too much time focusing on it rather than on lowering prices. Politico recently found that 46 percent of Americans believe that the current cost of living is the worst they’ve ever experienced, an opinion shared by 37 percent of Trump voters.

Surely among them are some of the roughly 42 million SNAP recipients in the U.S., many of them living in households with young children. During the shutdown, polls showed that most Americans — upwards of 70 percent — were aware of the impact on food assistance and were worried about it, arguing that Congress should ensure SNAP remained available until the government reopened. That, of course, didn’t happen.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to deprive people of food again, the president may be calculating that there won’t be such widespread disapproval since he is only targeting Democratic-led states. Or that voters may wrongly assume Minnesota-style fraud is rampant across the country.

But lines wrapped around food banks are hard to ignore, regardless of whether they are in red or blue states. And although it’s true that California has the highest number of residents enrolled in the program and New Mexico has the most per capita, plenty of Republican voters live in these and other blue states too. In Los Angeles County alone, nearly 1.2 million people cast ballots for Trump in the last presidential election, many of them Latino Americans who receive SNAP.

There are less partisan, and more effective and transparent ways to address fraud in the SNAP program, insofar as it’s actually a problem. For example, a bill recently introduced by U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., would require photo identification on all food stamp debit cards.

What the Trump administration is threatening to do — holding SNAP hostage to prop up its increasingly unpopular immigration policy — will only make life more unaffordable for millions of Americans. And that will only make the political landscape trickier for Republicans.

Erika D. Smith is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She is a former Los Angeles Times columnist and Sacramento Bee editorial board member.