Attorney General Phil Weiser sues to stop Trump administration’s illegal demands that states hand over sensitive personal data of SNAP recipients

July 28, 2025 (DENVER) – Attorney General Phil Weiser today joined a coalition of 20 states and the District of Columbia in filing a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s demand that states turn over personal and sensitive information about millions of people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP.

The USDA has suggested that it could withhold administrative funding for the program if states fail to comply—effectively forcing states to choose between protecting their residents’ privacy and providing critical food assistance to those in need.

Colorado expects to receive approximately $96 million this year to administer the program, and any delay in that funding could be catastrophic for the state and the residents who rely on SNAP to put food on the table. In the lawsuit, Attorney General Weiser and the coalition argue that this demand violates multiple federal privacy laws and the U.S. Constitution.

“SNAP is an essential program for millions of low-income Americans to purchase groceries and put food on the table. The program exists to fight hunger. It’s unthinkable that USDA would threaten the food security and privacy of millions of families. We’re suing because both federal and state law prohibit Colorado from disclosing personally identifying SNAP data unless strictly necessary for the administration of the program, or other limited circumstances that do not exist here,” said Attorney General Weiser.

For 60 years, the federal government and state agencies have worked together to build a robust process for ensuring that only eligible individuals receive benefits. In fact, the USDA itself has described SNAP as having “one of the most rigorous quality control systems in the federal government.” Those systems do not, and have never, required that states turn over sensitive, personally identifying information about millions of Americans without any meaningful restrictions on how that information is used or shared with other agencies.

Yet in May 2025, the USDA made an unprecedented demand that states turn over massive amounts of personal information on all SNAP applicants and recipients, including social security numbers and home addresses, dating back five years. Even a year’s worth of SNAP recipient data contains sensitive, personal identifying information on tens of millions of individuals — including nearly 615,000 Coloradans. Colorado officials requested that the USDA Food and Nutrition Service agree to data and security protocols in connection with this data collection and received no substantive response from the agency.

USDA’s demand is part of a coordinated effort by the federal government to collect personal information on Americans from every possible source, to be used to advance this president’s agenda. Public reports indicate that federal officials are amassing huge databases of personal information on Americans and using that data for undisclosed purposes, including immigration enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security has already obtained troves of personal information from both the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Health and Human Services Agency, including private medical information and other personal details on Medicaid recipients, which Colorado has already challenged in court. The USDA’s attempts to collect data from states about SNAP applicants and recipients appear to be the next step in this campaign.

In today’s lawsuit, Attorney General Weiser and the coalition argue that these demands violate multiple federal privacy laws, fail to meet the public comment requirements for this type of action, exceed USDA’s statutory authority, and violate the Spending Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The coalition asks that the court declare the Trump administration’s demands unlawful and block the administration from conditioning receipt of SNAP funding on states’ compliance with these demands.

Attorney General Weiser joins the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin, as well as the state of Kentucky, in filing the lawsuit.

Read a copy of the lawsuit filed today (PDF).

###

Media Contact:
Lawrence Pacheco
Chief Communications Officer
(720) 508-6553 office
lawrence.pacheco@coag.gov