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Tuesday, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins told President Donald
Trump they’re preparing to withhold federal taxpayer funds from
states that don’t cooperate by handing over information.
“As of next week, we have begun and will begin to stop moving
federal funds into those states until they comply and they tell
us and allow us to partner with them to root out this fraud and
protect the American taxpayer,” Rollins said.
Wednesday, Pritzker said the Trump administration is trying to
weaponize food.
“I reject the idea that the federal government is doing
something that’s good for the country by gathering these
databases because we know that is not what this is all about,”
Pritzker told reporters at an unrelated event in Chicago.
Pritzker said they’re just trying to feed people.
“People should deserve privacy, right, and whether they are a
SNAP recipient or not, it should not be information that gets
gathered by and then disseminated by the federal government,”
Pritzker said.
Rollins said rooting out fraud ensures those who are supposed to
get the subsidies receive the benefit and not those who are
ineligible, and they are finding fraud all throughout the
system.
“We found 186,000 dead people, with dead people’s Social
Security numbers being used, 500,000 people receiving benefits
more than twice,” Rollins said. “We had a couple of people
receiving benefits in six states.”
For all of federal fiscal year 2024, Illinois received more than
$4.4 billion to facilitate payments for more than 1.9 million
SNAP recipients.
Illinois’ error rate was 11.56%, most of which is overpayments.
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