The United States Department of Agriculture’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services division has apparently followed through on a threat to withhold a roughly $10.4 million payment to the state of Kansas for SNAP benefits.
According to a release from Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, over the weekend, the USDA carried out its threat and took the funds away from Kansas, after the Kelly administration refused to comply with a September 19 deadline to supply basic information about Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients in Kansas.
Earlier this month, Kobach sued Kansas Governor Laura Kelly and Department of Children and Families Secretary Laura Howard to force them to turn over data requested by the federal government.
Kelly and Howard have repeatedly refused to turn over enrollment data on the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” to the United States Department of Agriculture, citing “privacy concerns.”
The information the USDA is seeking is the qualifying information DCF must use to determine eligibility for SNAP — names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, home addresses, and “all data records used to determine eligibility,” including income information for those currently receiving food stamps. The Kansas SNAP program provides approximately $417 million in benefits annually and feeds about 188,000 people a month, including around 86,000 children.
The Kelly administration has refused to hand that data over, citing privacy concerns and a pending lawsuit against the Trump administration, to which Kansas is not a party.
According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, DCF Secretary Laura Howard said compiling the requested data would be a “significant burden,” and takes months and more than $100,000 to compile.
Why it would take so long — and cost so much — to compile data DCF presumably already has is unclear.
According to WIBW, Kelly’s Chief of Staff Will Lawrence has accused Kobach of having “a complicated relationship with the facts and the truth in an effort to score political points by misleading thousands of Kansans.”
Lawrence said the administration is appealing the decision.
“The filing of an appeal will automatically stay the disallowance of funds, meaning the SNAP program will continue to operate normally as the appeals process unfolds,” he said.
Presumably, however, if the state loses the appeal, USDA will “clawback” any funds originally disallowed.
“We warned that this would happen when we filed the lawsuit on behalf of all Kansans against the governor. She is required by Kansas law to provide this basic information to the USDA. Now low-income Kansas families won’t be able to put food on the table because of her political defiance,” Kobach said. “The Governor seems to be blinded by her political ideology. She is flagrantly violating Kansas law, and she is hurting needy Kansans in the process.”
According to Kobach, Kansas law requires that the state government “shall” provide “any” report required by the federal government.
“The complete transmission of the required SNAP enrollment data is imperative to ensure FNS and the state agency have full insight into the SNAP program integrity,” USDA Deputy Undersecretary of Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services Patrick Penn said in a Sept. 20 letter to Kelly. “In the absence of data, FNS and the Department of Children and Families lack key information necessary to ensure effective stewardship of taxpayer dollars. FNS has already discovered from states that are complying with this statutory data sharing requirement that fraud or duplication in state distribution of federal funds has gone unreported and needs remediation.”
Earlier this month, Republican U.S. Representatives Tracy Mann and Ron Estes sent a letter to Kelly expressing concern at the continuing failure to hand over the data to the federal agency that funds the program.
“We are writing to you today to express our deep concern with your administration’s refusal to protect the integrity of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Kansans deserve and expect their tax dollars to be managed properly, not wasted on fraudulent and incorrect payments,” the letter reads. “Your administration’s hostility towards working with federal partners to correct this error rate is unacceptable.”
Estes and Mann said the most recent USDA data showed Kansas had an error rate of nearly 10 percent in 2024.
“A subsequent investigation by the Kansas House Select Committee on Government Oversight found the error rate in spring 2025 to be almost twelve percent,’ the letter reads. “These numbers represent millions of dollars of Kansans’ hard-earned tax dollars being incorrectly sent to fraudsters or other ineligible people, including those who entered the country illegally. Every dollar wasted and stolen from SNAP is money taken from Kansans truly in need. Your administration should be eager to correct these long-standing issues in operating SNAP, but instead, you continue to double down on refusing to do so.”
