Is U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins trying to starve people into submission? It seems so and she is dead wrong to threaten to cut off federal SNAP funding to states that refuse to comply with her unreasonable demands to turn over sensitive program data, including New York. Gov. Kathy Hochul is correct in telling Rollins to get lost in asking: “Why is the Trump administration so hellbent on people going hungry?”

USDA and Uncle Sam didn’t have the authority to deny Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits (what used to be called food stamps) during the shutdown and don’t have the authority to do so now.

As with many of the Trump administration’s other efforts to strong-arm local, state and federal officials, it’s couching this in the language of fraud, insinuating that the food benefits are being used by those who aren’t eligible, though neither Rollins nor anyone else seems to want to bother to present any evidence for this, because that’s sort of beyond the point.

The idea of “fraud“ has become the skeleton key for the Trump administration to push through all of its capricious preferences. If elections don’t seem to be going how they want, it’s due to rampant election fraud, never mind that investigation after investigation has failed to ever find significant numbers of such fraud in the United States.

If judges are handing down rulings that block or limit the administration’s priorities, these judges are acting improperly or in the pocket of special interests. If there is a public program that administration officials don’t like for ideological reasons, well, surely it must be rife with fraud. As for SNAP, only U.S. citizens and lawfully present noncitizens such as permanent residents are eligible for the food benefits.

Trump and his enablers simply treat it as a given that anything that goes against their preferences or objectives must not be happening legitimately, or at the very least that their followers will believe their evidence-free claims.

But there is no such fraud with SNAP. There never has been. If you go hunting, can you find isolated examples of people misusing benefits, or people who don’t quite qualify getting access? Sure, such is the case with anything.

When you have tens of millions of people participating in a program, it is simply inevitable that there will be some level of misuse. But there is no widespread and systematic fraud other than the fraud that Trump and his administration themselves are perpetrating on the American public, ignoring their oaths to defend the Constitution and safeguard the public interest and instead focusing on personal enrichment, the accumulation of power and the pursuit of unpopular ideological mandates.

The residents of the 29 states that have reportedly already complied with the USDA directive should demand that their local leaders explain why they are so freely sharing this information with a federal administration that has no basis to demand it, no respect for privacy or due process or reality itself and which has been very willing to misuse official information to pursue its political enemies. States like ours that have refused to comply are doing their duty to their residents and should hold fast.

We cannot be held hostage by the threat of federal funds being taken away every time that the White House wants to commandeer our local government. If the federal government intends to continue illegally withholding funds, they will ultimately lose in court.

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