Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says the federal government has removed nearly six million people from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over the past 18 months, cutting total SNAP enrollment from roughly 43 to 44 million down to 35 to 36 million. Rollins attributed the decline to a mix of fraud crackdowns, work requirements, and the removal of illegal immigrants from the program.
Rollins also said the Trump administration has suspended or disqualified nearly 6,000 retailers and disabled or blocked more than 2,000 illegal point-of-sale devices tied to benefit fraud. She described the effort as a broad push to protect both vulnerable families who depend on food assistance and the taxpayers who fund it.
Deceased Social Security Numbers, Luxury Vehicles Among Fraud Cases
Speaking to Breitbart’s Alex Marlow, Rollins said investigators found that 250,000 individuals in a single state were using deceased persons’ Social Security numbers to collect benefits. She also noted that “hundreds of luxury vehicles” were registered to SNAP recipients, pointing to what she called widespread exploitation of the program.
“The message is simple: if you steal from American taxpayers or exploit a program meant to feed vulnerable families, we are coming after the fraud,” Rollins stated on X. She added in a separate post, “This is about protecting two groups of people: families who rely on SNAP to put food on the table, and the hardworking taxpayers who fund it.” According to SNAP fraud enforcement and USDA removals, Rollins made several of these remarks during a Monday interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson.
Rollins Credits Years of Preparation After First Trump Term
Rollins told Johnson that the second Trump administration had used the intervening years between the two terms to plan an aggressive rollback of federal programs. She said the team had “four years to prepare, and were able to come back and just start deconstructing the administrative state.”
She said she was proud that a “pretty good chunk” of the nation’s 40-plus million SNAP enrollees were no longer receiving benefits. The administration has framed the reductions as a success of its “welfare to work” policy alongside tighter eligibility enforcement.
What Comes Next for SNAP Oversight
The USDA has not detailed a specific endpoint for its fraud enforcement campaign, suggesting the review of SNAP eligibility is ongoing. With enrollment now sitting well below 40 million, further reductions could follow as the administration continues auditing retailer participation and recipient eligibility. The scale of the cuts is already among the largest in the program’s recent history, and the policy is likely to face continued scrutiny from anti-hunger advocates who argue that some eligible recipients may have been wrongly removed.
