Senator Ted Cruz amplified dubious claims about food stamp fraud. Tom Williams/Getty Images
The US Department of Agriculture has spent the past week notifying people that the country is (allegedly) overrun by individuals who are fraudulently claiming SNAP benefits, while (allegedly) driving luxury vehicles.
“In just ONE state, 14,000 individuals receiving SNAP benefits were driving LUXURY VEHICLES!” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins posted on X last week. The official USDA account made similar claims, which were then amplified by figures like Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Rand Paul.
The numbers that Rollins used come from the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative think tank out of Florida that has been working to demolish the social safety net—programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and Social Security—since launching in 2011. The USDA, which administers the SNAP program, confirmed in an email to Mother Jones that FGA (and a New York Post article written by an FGA staffer) were the sole sources used for their data, but would not comment further on the record.
Those numbers are questionable at best. For one thing, the report they come from doesn’t name the state where thousands of people are allegedly buying Ferraris while using government money to buy food. For another, that report doesn’t include any explanation of its methodology.
FGA has spent the past several years pushing for restrictions on SNAP benefits. Though SNAP fraud exists, it is far less prevalent than the foundation makes it out to be: SNAP trafficking rates—the illegal sale of benefits for dollars—have decreased countrywide from about 4 percent in the 1990s to around 1.5 percent today. When SNAP overpayments do occur, per the US Department of Agriculture, they’re more often than not the result of administrative error rather than intentional fraud.
Much of the Foundation for Government Accountability’s rhetoric hearkens back to the Reagan-era myth of the “welfare queen”—a racialized stereotype alleging that Black women exploit SNAP benefits to gain wealth, and that SNAP benefits encourage people not to get jobs. (Notably, the single largest racial group receiving SNAP benefits is white.) FGA, according to its website, advocates for dramatically cutting back SNAP benefits in order to “better serve the truly needy.”
In July of 2025, FGA notched a major victory: in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, work requirements for SNAP benefits were expanded. In a rule that took effect at the start of February, all adults ages 18 to 64 without dependents under 14 are now required to work a minimum of 20 hours per week. Previously, this rule only applied to adults aged 18 to 54 without dependents under age 18. Beyond that, some groups that were previously exempted from the work rule — such as some veterans and people experiencing homelessness — must now find employment or risk losing their benefits. (Studies have shown such regulations are unlikely to address the root issue of underemployment, which is a lack of readily available jobs.)
SNAP currently helps provide food to more than 38 million Americans each month—more than two–thirds of whom are elderly, disabled, or under 18. To qualify for SNAP, households must be at or below 130 percent of the poverty line—which, as of 2026, is $15,960 for a single person, $27,320 for a three-person household, and $38,680 for a five-person household.
But over the past year, more than four million Americans have dropped off the food aid rolls—which Rollins attributes to a crackdown on alleged fraudsters, like the luxury-vehicle-driving SNAP recipients she described in her posts. In this, she is once again echoing FGA’s language: on an American Family Radio broadcast in early January, FGA’s Hayden Dublois asserted that Trump is “cracking down” on “illegal aliens receiving food stamps.” Undocumented immigrants were never eligible for SNAP benefits in the first place. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, says that this precipitous change in food stamp enrollment can be blamed in part on new work requirements, new restrictions tied to immigration status, and cost-shifting onto states from the federal government.
“A lot of that is fraud, and a lot of it is just a better economy,” Rollins said last week of the 8 percent drop in food stamp enrollment. That better economy, she added, means that “People don’t need food stamps.” The unemployment rate has remained around 4% since July of 2025, according to BLS records, making it unlikely that economic growth is causing people to stop using the program.
And while politicians argue over who’s receiving SNAP and shouldn’t be, the bigger issue is overlooked: every year, thousands of people who are eligible for food aid end up going hungry instead, as evidenced by the USDA’s own data.
