Attention

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent our advertisers

Saturday, December 03, 2016

USDA Can No Longer Hide How Much Money Stores Make From Food Stamps

All across America, families use benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP — formerly, and colloquially, known as the Food

Stamp program) to buy food, but participation in SNAP varies from store to store, and the federal regulator that oversees the program has denied requests to turn over data on retailer-specific use of SNAP benefits. However, yesterday a federal court ruled that the government can no longer shield this information from public view.

The ruling [PDF] comes out of a long-running legal dispute between South Dakota’s Argus Leader newspaper and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In 2011, Argus staff filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the USDA, seeking — among other SNAP-related information — data on how much revenue certain retailers had made from SNAP benefits. The USDA denied that request, citing a number of FOIA exemptions that prevent certain information from being disclosed to the public.

More

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The only thing this information shows is proof that the SNAP program needs to be defunded by 75%.

Anonymous said...

And cash back.

Anonymous said...

Secret government

Anonymous said...

Next will come the long list of administrator abuses. They should show the faces of each/every one of those cheats to the system.