Kansas AG sues governor over refusal to share SNAP data with feds
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach on Monday made public he’s suing Gov. Laura Kelly. The suit is his attempt to force the governor to send the personal data of 730,000 applicants who applied to the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, between 2020 and 2025, to the federal government.
Kobach said he’s asking a court to compel the governor to turn over the data under state and federal law, claiming she and Laura Howard, secretary of the Department for Children and Families, repeatedly used taxpayer dollars to send erroneous SNAP payments to applicants deemed ineligible for the program.
“It’s ironic that the Governor would join a lawsuit to get a hypothetical amount of money for new grants for things like DEI and food justice, but she’s willing to sacrifice $10.4 million for Kansas’s most vulnerable citizens that the state will definitely lose immediately if she doesn’t supply information to the federal government,” Kobach said in statement about the lawsuit.
Kelly, a Democrat, called the lawsuit “low-rent political theater.”
“The Attorney General is known for not doing his homework or placing priority on protecting Kansans’ private data. I have always worked to protect Kansans, especially from federal overreach, and I will continue to do so,” Kelly said in a press release Monday.
According to the Center for Budget and Priorities, 187,000 people, or roughly 6% of the state’s population, received SNAP benefits in Kansas in 2024.
The suit comes roughly a month after Howard sent a letter to the Department of Agriculture denying the agency’s request for the state’s SNAP data, which included Social Security numbers, dates of birth and addresses, to be used as part of a federal database of SNAP participants. The request was prompted by President Donald Trump’s March 20 executive order aimed at reducing information silos between federal, state and local agencies.
In addition to privacy violations, Howard claimed the amount of time the USDA allotted the state agency to compile the data was unreasonable.
“Producing the amount of data being requested will require significant time, manpower, and expense. Requiring the production to occur no later than July 30, 2025, presents an unreasonable burden that simply cannot be met,” Howard wrote in her letter to the federal agency dated July 31.
Advocacy groups such as the Center for Democracy and Technology, Protect Democracy and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have urged financial providers that support SNAP to also reject recent data access demands from the Agriculture Department, arguing that doing so violates privacy protections.
