Attorney General Kwame Raoul won an important victory in the case to protect the privacy of millions of people throughout the country who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for food assistance.
In a lawsuit brought by Raoul and a coalition of 20 other attorneys general and the state of Kentucky, the District Court for the Northern District of California ordered a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from enforcing its demands that states turn over the personal information of all SNAP applicants and recipients.
“I join others in our coalition in applauding the court in this decision, which ensures SNAP recipients can receive the benefits they rely on without the concern of their private personal information being involuntarily shared outside the program,” Raoul said.
Both federal and state laws prohibit states from disclosing personally identifying SNAP data except under narrow circumstances. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers SNAP, has requested that states submit personally identifying information for all SNAP applicants and recipients since January 2020.
The USDA has threatened states with potential SNAP funding cuts if they refuse to comply. As a result of the USDA’s new demand, states have been put in the impossible position of either violating the law by complying or protecting their residents’ personal information while jeopardizing millions of dollars in funding used to administer the SNAP program.
For 60 years, Illinois and other states have administered SNAP, which serves as an essential safety net for millions of low-income Americans, including nearly 2 million Illinoisans, by providing benefits that can be used to purchase groceries for recipients and their families. Of those Illinois households receiving benefits, 33% contain children, 30% contain adults over 60 years of age, and 27% contain a person with a disability.
In those 60 years, the federal government and state agencies have worked together to build a robust process for ensuring that only eligible individuals receive benefits. Those systems do not, and have never, required states to 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.
