Justice Department Sues Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota Over Refusal to Provide SNAP Data to USDA

The Department of Justice filed lawsuits against Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota, seeking injunctions requiring their state SNAP agencies to turn over the last five years of SNAP applicant data, per the DOJ's June 26 press release.

Per the release, the suits follow the four states' refusal to hand the data to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which says it needs the information to verify that states are properly administering eligibility determinations, including household benefit levels.

The filings' venues, the specific statutes invoked and the states' stated grounds for refusal were not carried in the material reviewed. What is on the record is the department's own account: four states sued, an injunction sought in each, and a five-year window of applicant data at issue.

Background

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is the largest US anti-hunger program, serving on the order of 40 million people. Its structure is the source of the dispute: the federal government, through USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, funds benefits and sets rules, while states run the program — taking applications, determining eligibility and holding the resulting records, which include names, addresses, Social Security numbers and household financial detail.

Federal demands for state-held SNAP applicant data began in 2025, when USDA moved to collect recipient records nationwide, framing the effort as program-integrity verification. The demand drew objections from privacy advocates and Democratic-led states, which argued that turning over years of applicant files exceeded what program rules require and risked uses beyond benefits administration; litigation followed. The June 26 suits invert the earlier posture — the federal government now suing holdout states to compel production, rather than states suing to block collection — and make the four named states the test of whether conditions attached to federal food-assistance funding can force the data's surrender.

What comes next

The suits seek injunctions, so the near-term procedural step is the states' responses and any preliminary-relief rulings in the four cases. Watch for whether the states contest the demand on statutory or privacy grounds, whether other refusing states are added as defendants, and whether USDA ties continued administrative funding to compliance while the litigation runs.