As the Trump administration has sought to amass personally sensitive data on millions of individuals in America, it has run into one roadblock. The states, and not the federal government, hold many of the details Washington officials would now like to see.
The states administer many safety-net programs funded with federal dollars. They run elections and register voters. They track employers and individual workers. That means they hold a clearer, more recent portrait of where to find people, what needs they have and who lives with them.
The Trump administration is now expanding its data push to this trove, reaching into domains long controlled by the states — and further into their residents’ lives.
This week, 20 states with Democratic attorneys general, along with the District of Columbia and Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture over its demand for data on anyone who has applied for or received food stamps in the last five years. Democratic states are also suing the Department of Health and Human Services for taking data the states have shared to administer Medicaid and giving it to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement. The Department of Justice has also sought nonpublic voter files from states.
The federal government says it needs this information to ensure election integrity, to identify waste and fraud and to keep ineligible immigrants off benefit rolls. But critics fear that the personal data could be used to monitor immigrants and ideological opponents, or be misconstrued to portray widespread fraud.
“I can only conclude that they’re trying to amass a comprehensive, universal database to surveil the American people and to weaponize the data for their agenda,” said California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, whose office has helped coordinate the Medicaid and food stamp lawsuits.
The White House, pointing to waste in Medicaid and state errors in calculating one in 10 food stamp payments, said new federal scrutiny was necessary.
“Americans overwhelmingly support common-sense provisions to stop the waste of taxpayer dollars,” the White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. Doing so would “strengthen these benefits for families who need them.”
She also said the administration was ensuring the accuracy of voter rolls. But only the states have been authorized by Congress to maintain those lists.
“If you’re looking at this as a data puzzle,” Elizabeth Laird, with the Center for Democracy and Technology, said of the administration’s efforts to amass data, linking information held by the states “is the largest piece of that puzzle.”
Current addresses and family links
The White House signaled its data-centralizing effort in a March executive order calling for federal agencies to share information that has long been guarded in separate data sets. Notably, the order also sought “unfettered access to comprehensive data from all state programs that receive federal funding” — programs like Medicaid and food stamps.
The statutes creating those programs — combined with federal privacy laws — contain no such requirement, however.
“The president has no authority to instruct states to turn data over to federal agencies,” said Bridget Fahey, a law professor at the University of Chicago. Rather, states have agreements with the federal government to run specific cooperative programs, with rules for who has access to personal information and what it can be used for. These agreements often contain provisions for the federal government to audit state data.
“But audit provisions are different from ‘we just want to hold the data for ourselves, and use it for a bunch of purposes,’” Professor Fahey said.
The states suing the Department of Agriculture argue that the agency is proposing to do just that with food stamp data. The agency in June announced plans for a “National Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Information Database” — in effect, a central repository of every person using or applying for the program. In SNAP’s six decades, the federal government has never had such a thing.
“Why does the federal government need all the information on everybody who’s receiving SNAP?” said Robert Gordon, who ran the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and served in the Biden White House. “I don’t know the answer to that question. There might be a good answer — I don’t know what it is.”
The program already has a process for states to check the accuracy of a sample of benefits every year, and then for the federal government to check that work.
The full data, though, could be useful for immigration enforcement. The states typically have more up-to-date data to locate individuals — at home or work — than the federal government does. And they regularly come in contact with undocumented immigrants. Undocumented adults who are ineligible for SNAP can still legally apply for benefits for their U.S. citizen children (while describing their own incomes, addresses and household relationships). And undocumented immigrants who don’t qualify for Medicaid can still under federal law receive emergency hospital services funded by federal “emergency Medicaid.” Those immigrants are in state Medicaid data, too.
The federal government has been more explicit about how it plans to use Medicaid information. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (C.M.S.) and the Department of Homeland Security reached an agreement in July giving Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to Medicaid data to identify and locate immigrants.
ICE by itself frequently lacks sufficient address data to find immigrants, the agency said in a court declaration. When immigration officials sent Health and Human Services a spreadsheet of 7.6 million individuals it sought in June, the health agency found 1.1 million records that appeared to match those individuals in its Medicaid database, according to the declaration.
The states suing over the agreement say that by using health data to locate people, C.M.S. is reneging on the terms of its longstanding partnership with the states.
“For decades, the line that C.M.S. has given to the public — and that C.M.S. has instructed states to give to the public — is that Medicaid program data will be used and disclosed solely for the purpose of program administration,” said Julian Polaris, a partner with Manatt Health, which advises states and health care providers on Medicaid policy. That can include checking applicants’ citizenship status and auditing for ineligible recipients. But it’s unprecedented, he said, for Medicaid data to be used for generalized immigration enforcement.
“What is unprecedented,” an H.H.S. spokesperson said in a statement, “is the systemic neglect and policy failures under the Biden-Harris administration that opened the floodgates for illegal immigrants to exploit Medicaid — and forced hardworking Americans to foot the bill.”
Data and power
The push for state data is a more far-reaching version of actions during the first Trump administration. In 2017, a commission with the stated goal of election integrity and run by the Kansas secretary of state, Kris Kobach, made sweeping requests for state voter files. Nearly every state refused or offered only public data (Mississippi’s Republican secretary of state told the commission to go jump in the Gulf of Mexico).
The Trump administration tried again to obtain state data, including motor vehicle records, after the Supreme Court said that it could not add a citizenship question to the census. A 2019 executive order sought records that could construct “citizenship data for 100 percent of the population” to help evaluate immigration policy and to provide data states might need to apportion legislative districts based solely on citizen populations. The effort, the order said, had “nothing to do with enforcing immigration laws against particular individuals.”
Critics today note that the Trump administration across both terms has sought widespread personal data — but that the reasons for needing it have shifted, encompassing election integrity; legislative redistricting; waste, fraud and abuse; and now immigration enforcement. That suggests the administration sees value in having that data well beyond any single use of it.
“The ongoing pursuit of data and the ongoing pursuit of power are interlinked inextricably,” said Mr. Bonta, the California attorney general.
But while Republicans have balked historically at federal intrusions into personal privacy and state power, few are protesting now. That’s true even as the Trump administration has again sought voter files from Republican-controlled states.
“This is at its core a federalism issue,” said David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
He warned that if Republican states don’t also defend their roles in that system, a future Democratic administration might want all this data and power, too.