Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says her department has found 14,000 food stamp recipients in a single state who drive Ferraris, Bentleys, and Lamborghinis, and she wants the loophole that made it possible shut down for good.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is ramping up a nationwide crackdown on fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the country’s largest federal anti-hunger effort. Rollins posted on X this week that a policy known as Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility has allowed wealthy individuals to qualify for government benefits they were never meant to receive. She told Fox Business the department is “getting very, very close to being able to fix that.”
The numbers behind the push are hard to ignore. Speaking on “The Ingraham Angle” Thursday night, Rollins laid out what USDA investigators have found so far, and the picture she painted is one of a system riddled with waste, duplication, and outright theft.
Rollins told Fox News that her team’s data review, drawn from states that agreed to share their records, has turned up staggering irregularities. As Fox News Digital reported, the secretary said on air:
“We’ve found 500,000 people getting more than one benefit illegally. We found 244,000 dead people. This is just the red states.”
That last line is the kicker. The USDA has only been able to examine data from cooperative states, mostly Republican-led. Blue states, by Rollins’ account, have not yet handed over their records.
The arrest figures have climbed steadily. Rollins said 895 people had been arrested in the past year for illegally using the food stamp system. A later accounting from Breitbart’s exclusive interview with Rollins put the total at around 1,500 arrests and 125 convictions, with investigators aided by the Department of Government Efficiency. Rollins described a pattern of Social Security numbers belonging to dead people being used to collect benefits across multiple states.
“So, people were using dead people’s social security numbers,” Rollins said.
At the center of the controversy is a policy that was supposed to streamline access for the truly needy. Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility allows states to waive traditional asset tests when determining who qualifies for SNAP. In practice, it means a household’s bank accounts, property, and vehicles are not checked, only income, and sometimes loosely.
The result: a Minnesota man named Rob Undersander, who is a millionaire, was able to qualify for food stamps. Fox News Digital reported in March on Undersander’s case. He has since testified on the issue in Minnesota and before Congress, making the point that the system’s guardrails are functionally nonexistent.
When someone who owns a seven-figure portfolio can walk into a benefits office and walk out with a taxpayer-funded EBT card, the program has lost its way. That 14,000 luxury-vehicle owners in one state are collecting SNAP benefits is not a glitch. It is the predictable outcome of a policy designed to skip the most basic eligibility check.
Matt Schmid, the Health and Harvest Campaign Director at the America First Policy Institute, put it plainly in March:
“Reintroducing basic guardrails like an asset test is a commonsense step to restore integrity, ensure benefits go to those who truly need them and protect the long-term viability of the program. This isn’t about taking help away. It’s about making sure SNAP works the way it was intended to.”
The fraud is not confined to a few bad actors gaming the system from their driveways. Jenny Rae Le Roux, a Republican congressional candidate in Orange County and CAL DOGE Director, told Fox News Digital that the scale in her state alone is enormous.
“Food stamp waste and fraud is out of control. California alone loses nearly $14 million every day from SNAP to EBT skimming, out-of-state and country beneficiaries and eligibility lapses at a time when technology exists to close every gap, quickly.”
Fourteen million dollars a day. That is roughly $5.1 billion a year from a single state, money that was supposed to feed families who cannot afford groceries, instead siphoned off through skimming, cross-border fraud, and eligibility failures that nobody bothered to fix.
Stories of vulnerable individuals failed by broken systems are not limited to food stamps. Across the Atlantic, authorities recently discovered a nine-year-old boy locked in his father’s van in France, malnourished and unable to walk, a grim reminder that when institutions stop checking on the people they are supposed to protect, the consequences fall hardest on the defenseless.
Beyond the fraud crackdown, the USDA issued a press release Thursday outlining a broader reorganization of its nutrition programs. The plan calls for moving food nutrition resources and staff out of Washington, D.C. to four cities: Indianapolis, Dallas, Denver, and Kansas City.
A USDA spokesperson told Fox News Digital on Friday that the move “aligns with the Food and Nutrition Administration’s mission, to nourish those in need through financially sound programs that promote health and work, as well as champion the productivity of American agriculture.” The spokesperson added that Indianapolis, in particular, “has a lower cost of living, one of the top airports in the country, and has excelled at innovative program delivery.”
The department stressed that all 16 federal nutrition programs will continue without disruption during the transition.
Rollins has signaled that the administration’s plans go well beyond closing one loophole. The New York Post reported that Rollins wants every SNAP recipient in the country to reapply for benefits as part of the overhaul.
“It’s going to give us a platform and a trajectory to fundamentally rebuild this program, have everyone reapply for their benefit.”
A USDA spokesperson told the Post: “Secretary Rollins wants to ensure the fraud, waste, and incessant abuse of SNAP ends.” The Post noted that SNAP already has regular recertification requirements, but the administration argues that stronger reviews and data analysis are needed to root out the scale of abuse investigators have uncovered.
The earlier Newsmax interview with Rollins placed the number of deceased people still receiving benefits at 186,000, drawn from USDA data covering 29 states. She also described finding one Social Security number tied to EBT cards in six different states, a detail that points to organized exploitation rather than scattered clerical errors.
USDA data shows 4.2 million fewer food stamp recipients during President Trump’s first year in office, a figure the administration points to as evidence that tighter oversight is already having an effect.
Perhaps the most telling detail in the entire crackdown is what investigators have not yet been able to see. Rollins has been clear that the findings so far come only from states, mostly red, that agreed to share their data. The blue states have largely held back.
“When we finally get our hands on that blue state data, I think it is going to be more shocking than anyone could have even imagined,” Rollins said.
That is not a small caveat. If half a million duplicate benefits and nearly 200,000 dead recipients turned up in cooperative states alone, the national total could be far larger. The states most resistant to transparency may be the ones with the most to hide.
In a March Fox News op-ed, Rollins and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. framed the stakes directly: “Since its inception, SNAP has helped our most vulnerable citizens afford the essential and nutritious food they need. At least, that is what the program is supposed to do.” They added: “Over time, however, SNAP has been taken advantage of, allowing many to game the system and leaving millions of vulnerable Americans without healthy, nutrient-dense food options.”
The USDA has not identified which state Rollins was referring to when she cited 14,000 luxury-vehicle owners on SNAP. The charges and jurisdictions behind the 895-plus arrests have not been detailed publicly. And the methodology behind the figures, 500,000 duplicate benefits, 244,000 dead recipients, has not been laid out in full.
Those are fair questions, and Congress should press for answers. But the core problem is not in dispute. A federal benefits program meant to feed the hungry has been operating for years without basic checks on who is collecting the money. Millionaires qualified. Dead people stayed on the rolls. And the states with the biggest caseloads refused to open their books.
A program that cannot tell the difference between a family that needs help and a Ferrari owner who does not is not a safety net. It is an open register.
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