WASHINGTON ― The Trump administration is planning major changes to federal food benefits, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, though the exact nature of those changes is unclear even to members of Trump’s party on Capitol Hill.
Rollins has said all 22 million households enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will have to reapply for benefits as part of a forthcoming purge of fraudulent recipients ― a step enrollees are already required to take. A Republican source on Capitol Hill said lawmakers have no idea what Rollins is talking about.
“We’re making a lot of structural changes in SNAP,” Rollins said Wednesday on Newsnation. “We’ll have a big announcement about that the week after Thanksgiving exactly what that’s going to look like.”
Last week, Rollins said the USDA would “fundamentally rebuild this program, have everybody reapply for their benefit, make sure that everybody’s taking a taxpayer benefit through SNAP or food stamps that they literally are vulnerable and can’t survive without it.”
Speaking to Newsmax, Rollins said the USDA had uncovered evidence that thousands of SNAP recipients were actually dead, and their benefits were being paid fraudulently. The USDA hasn’t made the data public.
