Office of the
Illinois Attorney General
Kwame Raoul

Chicago – Attorney General Kwame Raoul, as part of a coalition of 22 states and attorneys general, filed a lawsuit on Monday challenging the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) demand that states turn over personal and sensitive information about millions of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients.

SNAP is a federally funded, state-administered program providing billions of dollars in food assistance to tens of millions of low-income families across the country. SNAP applicants provide their private information on the understanding, backed by long-standing state and federal laws, that their information will not be used for unrelated purposes. The USDA has suggested that it could withhold administrative funding for the program if states fail to comply, effectively forcing states to choose between protecting their residents’ privacy and providing critical nutrition assistance to those in need. Illinois receives roughly $177 million a year to administer SNAP, and any delay in that funding could be catastrophic for the state and the residents who rely on the program to put food on the table.

“Nearly 2 million Illinois families, seniors and students rely on SNAP to access food. Those individuals provided private personal information to allow them to receive critical SNAP benefits, and the Trump administration’s demand for that data is a gross violation of recipients’ privacy and trust,” Raoul said. “I will continue to stand with my fellow attorneys general to stop the administration from launching a vague fishing expedition using unfettered access to millions of SNAP recipients’ private information.”

In their lawsuit, Raoul and the coalition argue that the USDA demand is an unprecedented overreach of the department’s oversight powers that violates multiple federal privacy laws and the U.S. Constitution. This attempt to collect Illinois’ data is part of a coordinated effort by the federal government to collect Americans’ personal information from multiple highly protected federal databases to be used to advance the president’s agenda. 

Yet in May, the USDA made an unprecedented demand that states turn over massive amounts of personal information on all SNAP applicants and recipients, including Social Security numbers and home addresses, dating back five years. Even a year of SNAP recipient data contains sensitive, personal identifying information on tens of millions of individuals – including more than 1.9 million in Illinois.   

Since President Trump reentered the White House in January, public reports indicate that federal officials are amassing huge databases of Americans’ personal information and using that data for undisclosed purposes, including immigration enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security has already obtained troves of personal information from both the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including private medical information and other personal details on Medicaid recipients, an action which Illinois has already challenged in court. The USDA’s attempts to collect data from states about SNAP applicants and recipients appear to be an additional step in this campaign.  

For 60 years, Illinois and other states have administered SNAP, which serves as an essential safety net for millions of low-income Americans by providing credits that can be used to purchase groceries for themselves and their family members. The USDA itself has described SNAP as having “one of the most rigorous quality control systems in the federal government.”  

The USDA’s actions are unprecedented, threaten the privacy of millions of families, and ignore long-standing restrictions on the use and redisclosure of SNAP data. Both federal and state law prohibit Illinois from disclosing personally identifying SNAP data unless strictly necessary for the administration of the program, or other limited circumstances exist. Those circumstances do not exist here. 

In their lawsuit, Raoul and the coalition argue that these demands violate multiple federal privacy laws; fail to meet the public comment requirements for this type of action; exceed the USDA’s statutory authority; and violate the Spending Clause. The coalition asks that the district court declare the Trump administration’s demands unlawful and block the administration from conditioning receipt of SNAP funding on states’ compliance with these demands.

Joining Raoul in filing the lawsuit are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the state of Kentucky.