Ag Secretary Celebrates Kicking 4.3 Million Off SNAP Because They're All Rich And Thriving Now

Brooke Rollins says millions cut from help are 'climbing the ladder of financial freedom.'

Baltimore Farmer’s Market, 2012. Photo: US Department of Agriculture, back when ‘feeding people’ was still a USDA priority. Public Domain.

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins wants everyone to know that Donald Trump’s America is such a wonderful, prosperous place that 4.3 million Americans no longer need food assistance, because they now have great jobs! That’s one way she’s spinning a preliminary USDA report that 4.3 million people have been kicked off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is exactly the same thing as all those people getting great jobs.

Rollins twote on Saturday that there are “4.3 million off SNAP and counting!” and “Under President Trump, Americans are getting back to work!”

The White House “rapid response” message retweeted by Rollins insisted the sharp decline meant that “work requirements for able-bodied Americans and stronger protections against illegals bilking the system do, in fact, work.” Of course, the number by itself doesn’t prove that more people are actually moving into good jobs, and it was already illegal for undocumented people to receive SNAP and most other federal benefits, but pointing that out means you have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Just be quiet and thank the Ministry of Plenty for increasing the chocolate ration from 30 grams to 20 grams.

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There Was Fraud Everywhere But Now It’s Gone And Everyone Has A Job Too

Last week, Rollins identified another very real reason that millions of people were kicked off SNAP: Those who hadn’t suddenly become well-off in Trump’s wonderful economy were doing fraud, as she elucidated on Fox Business:

Rollins explained that increases in SNAP during the Biden administration — the source of all America’s problems, as we all know — was just a ploy to “buy votes,” but that Donald Trump is returning “the power to the people to drain the swamp,” and that’s why millions of people lost their SNAP benefits. The American people did that! And how did We The People do that? Through the Big Ugly Bill that we passed last summer, that was all us!

“We now have moved 4.3 million Americans off of the food stamp program. A lot of that is fraud. A lot of that is people taking the program that shouldn't have been. And then a lot of it is just a better economy, we’ve had wage growth that outpaced inflation for the first time since early 2021, this is a really big day, so people don't need food stamps.”

Mind you, Rollins is lying about all of it. SNAP fraud is already rare, no matter how many people insist they saw a lady buy shopping cart full of lobster and wheel it out to a brand new Escalade. “Work requirements” don’t move people into real jobs, but the extra hoops do throw otherwise eligible people off programs while adding a costly layer of bureaucracy. And Rollins even lied about wage growth and inflation: while inflation spiked worldwide following the pandemic, wages have actually outpaced inflation every month since June 2023, although anything that happened before Trump’s second term began is fake and a lie.

The Associated Press did at least go to the trouble of doing a factcheck, which notes that “experts say new requirements mandated by a massive tax and spending cut bill Republicans pushed through Congress last summer are the primary reasons.” One of those crazy experts, Roger Figueroa of Cornell, even said “the trend in participation declines seems to be related to the program being harder to access,” without pointing out that educated people are the enemy of America.

The AP story also reiterated that fraud is very rare in SNAP, pointing out that disqualifications for fraud (a bit more than 41,000 in 2023) work out to just under one-tenth of one percent of the more than 42 million Americans who receive SNAP benefits. But what if all of them had 500 fake identities, huh? Math is fun.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: We went and took the AP report’s word for it, without doing the math, and we originally said fraud accounted for “about one percent” of SNAP recipients. But as Alert Wonkette Operative “Esseff Ennwhy” pointed out in email, one percent of 42 million would be 420,000, so we have corrected the AP’s error. Poor AP is like just three people now, two of them English majors, it’s sad.

Oh, yes, the AP also noted that the government’s own job numbers don’t show a surge of millions of people joining the workforce, but maybe that’s just because Deep State Biden holdovers are hiding how great the job market really is.

Welfare Cadillac, Meet The SNAP Ferrari

Asked by the AP for evidence that a crackdown on fraud contributed to the drop in people getting SNAP, the USDA pointed to a story in the New York Post with the headline “Ferrari drivers on food stamps — how states help scammers game welfare.” That story relied on a “study” by a rightwing lobbying group, the Foundation for Government Accountability, claiming that there’s vast fraud because of “broad based categorical eligibility,” a policy that allows some people getting different benefits to also get SNAP.

Of course, the “study” didn’t explain its methodology for claiming that SNAP enrollees in one unidentified state allegedly “owned more than 14,000 luxury vehicles.” Still, the study claimed its data showed that almost all the SNAP BMWs and Lexuses were “newer vehicles, manufactured in just the last handful of years—not an old Porsche from 1978.” Look, they wouldn’t just make that up, would they? Oh, and in a footnote, the study mentioned that several of its examples involved “possible cases of identity fraud that were under investigation.” No problem, everyone knows that people on SNAP are all cheats and criminals and no good people use the program except for millions of deserving Trumpers temporarily down on their luck until we deport all the immigrants.

Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Eat

This is at least Rollins’s second try at framing the millions of people who’ve lost SNAP as a sign of prosperity. In April, she published an op-ed in The Hill headlined “New SNAP data confirm millions of Americans have reclaimed their freedom,” because if your kids are going hungry, that means you’re free of government dependency. In that screed, Rollins also claimed that the sharp drop in SNAP enrollment — 3.3 million fewer than at the start of Trump’s term — “affirms that many Americans are moving from welfare to work,” although once again she didn’t offer any evidence that those folks all became wage earners instead of struggling even more to get by.

She did tout Trump’s sluggish job stats — 600,000 new private sector jobs since he took office — as proof of an economic miracle, but stopped short of claiming that the 3.3 million people who lost SNAP had somehow all gotten those jobs, perhaps sharing them among themselves.

Can’t Afford Beef? Blame ‘Biden Vegans’!

At a presser Monday, Rollins and Trump’s favorite economic liar Peter Navarro offered a unique take on why beef prices are increasing: It’s those nasty Biden vegans who didn’t allow cattle to overgraze public land, duh. Oh, also “nature” has given us a decade-long drought, but shhhh, that can’t possibly be climate change.

Navarro insisted that “drought has been a very big problem; there’s not much we up here can do about that.” Even worse, he said, “There are policies, for example, the withholding by the Biden vegans of literally millions, millions of acres of grazing land.”

That’s really the only possible reason, because Biden vegans hate beef, the real American food, and high prices are how they punish real Americans.

Rollins also cited a climate indicator, huge grassland fires in Nebraska, while explaining that the Biden administration had done “everything they could to eviscerate the cattle industry, whether that was through grazing allotments or or climate change hoax craziness,” although she didn’t mention vegans.

But don’t you go saying wildfires are connected to climate change, because for all we know, maybe Great Leader just needs to spill billions more gallons of water from dams in California to end the drought in Nebraska and put out the fires. Science is whatever he says it is, got it?

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[Common Dreams / AP / Guardian / Hill / Daily Kos]

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