The Trump administration will require millions of food aid recipients to recertify their information to receive their benefits, part of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ effort to overhaul the program, she told Newsmax on Thursday.
On “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” Rollins said she plans to “have everyone reapply for their benefits, make sure that everyone that’s taking a taxpayer-funded benefit through … food stamps, that they literally are vulnerable and they can’t survive without it.”
Rollins was discussing fraud in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and said after receiving data on recipients from 29 red states that “186,000 deceased men and women and children in this country are receiving a check.”
“Can you imagine when we get our hands on the blue state data what we’re going to find?” she added.
“It’s going to give us a platform and a trajectory to fundamentally rebuild this program, have everyone reapply for their benefit, make sure that everyone that’s taking a taxpayer-funded benefit through SNAP or food stamps, that they literally are vulnerable, and they can’t survive without it,” she added.
Rollins said her department found one man receiving the same benefit in six states.
“So, these are the things that we’re uncovering that for years, no one has really ever dug into because the feds didn’t have the system in place to do it,” she said.
“But we do now. The president has made this a priority. We will fix this program.”
The Trump administration has arrested about 120 Americans “committing fraud on the system,” she said.
“We are actively with the DOJ [Department of Justice], with a lot of the other investigation units around the country, already arresting; there’s a lot of people already sitting in jail, but I think we’re just at the very tip of the iceberg and what we’re going to find,” she added.
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