Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced nearly $6 billion in projected savings tied to enforcement efforts targeting abuse in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, saying in a Sept. 15 post to X that $5.8 billion in taxpayer losses have been prevented through initiatives implemented during President Trump’s second term.
Rollins said the savings were achieved through the shutdown of nearly 1,840 illegal SNAP devices that processed Electronic Benefit Transfer cards and the disqualification of 5,335 fraudulent retailers.
She said those who defraud SNAP are stealing from taxpayers and taking resources away from Americans who genuinely need assistance. She said the administration has zero tolerance for the abuse and will continue pursuing bad actors and protecting the integrity of the program.
The program and the fraud question
SNAP is the federal food assistance program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It serves tens of millions of low-income Americans and is one of the largest federal safety-net programs by expenditure. Abuse in the program takes several forms, including illegal skimming of EBT card data by retailers, the use of unauthorized devices to process transactions, and the enrollment of ineligible individuals.
The announcement comes roughly three months after the USDA released a report in early June finding that 185,986 deceased people in 29 states were receiving SNAP benefits, a finding the department said reflected both data and administrative failures in the enrollment verification process.
The $5.8 billion figure
The $5.8 billion figure represents a department projection of taxpayer losses prevented, not a confirmed recovery of funds. Anti-fraud measures that shut down illegal devices and disqualify retailers prevent future transactions from occurring through those channels. The savings estimate reflects the value of benefits that would have been processed absent the enforcement action.
The USDA did not provide a methodology for the projection in Rollins’s X post. The department has not publicly released an independent audit of the savings figure.
The SNAP context
SNAP benefits are issued on EBT cards that function like debit cards and can be used at authorized retailers. Violations involving EBT cards include card skimming, benefit trafficking and retailer-side manipulation of transactions. The disqualification of fraudulent retailers is one of the primary enforcement tools available to the USDA under SNAP regulations.
Whether the second-term enforcement effort represents a measurable increase in effectiveness over prior periods has not been independently assessed as of the Sept. 15 announcement.
