Lori Weber began receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance program about four years ago, after a medical emergency forced her to retire early from a 24-year career at the Brattleboro Retreat.
Weber, who lives on about $21,000 a year from Social Security, says the approximately $230 she gets in monthly SNAP benefits is a lifeline.
“I have nothing left at the end of the month,” the Westminster resident said. “I have literally no savings.”
When Weber found out earlier this week that the state of Vermont had shared the sensitive personal information of SNAP recipients with the Trump administration, she says she felt personally let down by Republican Gov. Phil Scott.
“Anger. And shock that Scott would do that. I mean, why?” Weber said. “I felt vulnerable, exposed.”
“If people don’t trust the federal government at all, then we’re in big trouble."Republican Gov. Phil Scott
Weber said she worries the Trump administration might use her own information against her in the future.
“Since I mistrust this administration so thoroughly, it causes me to fear what they might pull,” she said.
Scott on Thursday defended the release of the names, addresses, dates of birth and social security numbers of low-income Vermonters to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA last month notified states that they had until July 30 to provide the data, or face unspecified financial sanctions.
The federal food benefits program serves more than 64,000 residents in Vermont, though the data request goes back five years. The Agency of Human Services confirmed Thursday that it shared the personal information of approximately 140,000 SNAP recipients with the USDA.
Scott didn’t offer any reassurances about what the Trump administration will or will not do with their information.
“I don’t know what they will do with it,” the governor said during his weekly media briefing.
The president’s intent, Scott said, didn’t figure into his deliberations over whether to hand over the data. Instead, he said, he relied on his legal team’s assessment, which determined the USDA’s order was lawful.
“I just know that they are entitled to it. And I don’t know how we can resist when they have the information and they have the ability to get the information,” Scott said.
Scott’s political rivals are seizing on the decision, which they say flies in the face of the legal opinion of Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark. Clark, a Democrat, told Vermont Public earlier this week that she would have “absolutely” fought to protect Vermonters’ data had the Scott administration been on board.
Attorneys general in at least 20 states have joined a lawsuit challenging the USDA’s order.
Scott said guessing wrong in this instance would have unnecessarily jeopardized the $200 million annually in SNAP benefits that flow to Vermonters.
Many Democrats, however, say Scott’s actions have abetted the Trump administration’s efforts to illegally amass an unprecedented trove of Americans’ personal information.
“A lot of information about people, including our most sensitive information, has historically been collected at the state level and stayed at the state level."Elizabeth Laird, Center for Democracy and Technology
“The Governor's once-strong defense of Vermont and the Constitution has withered in the face of MAGA extremism,” Vermont Democratic Party Executive Director Meg Hanlon said in a press release this week.
Democratic State Treasurer Mike Pieciak, a potential Scott challenger in 2026, said ongoing litigation challenging the USDA order, and Clark’s willingness to join that fight, undermine the governor’s rationale for releasing the data.
“It appears pretty clear that it’s not a legal requirement … It’s really a choice,” Pieciak said in an interview Wednesday. “And I think in this case, the administration made the wrong choice.”
The Trump administration has said it intends to use the data to stamp out “waste, fraud and abuse” in the SNAP program. Pieciak said he’s dubious.
“This is not an administration that you want to have sensitive private information,” he said.
What exactly the Trump administration has in mind for Vermonters’ data is a growing concern for data privacy experts such as John Davisson, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
EPIC filed a separate lawsuit in May challenging the USDA’s plans to collect SNAP recipients’ data. Davisson said in an interview Wednesday that the order flouts at least three federal laws – the Privacy Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act – that are designed to prevent citizens’ personal information from being shared without their consent.
Those laws, according to Davisson, establish the guardrails that govern the sharing of data between government agencies. He said the Trump administration has failed to follow the strict procedural requirements that need to occur before information can be transferred legally. And since the USDA already has a robust fraud-detection system in place – a system that USDA itself recently described as being “one of the most rigorous quality control systems in the federal government – Davisson said the blanket request for all sensitive personal information appears “arbitrary and capricious.”
“It is ignoring the fact that collecting all of these personal data elements from every single SNAP beneficiary and applicant is not actually necessary for any sort of legitimate fraud prevention activity,” Davisson said. “And it is ignoring the limits that even the organic statute – the statute that governs SNAP – places limits on how SNAP beneficiary and applicant data can be disclosed.”
A Vermont Agency of Human spokesperson says the state has long shared SNAP recipients’ personal data with USDA, though at nothing close to the scale of the data set that was transferred last week. USDA conducts monthly “payment error rate” assessments with Vermont, during which the feds are able to access the personal information about about 60 SNAP recipients for that purpose. Vermont also provides sensitive personal information to the U.S. Department of Justice when it’s conducting targeted investigations.
Elizabeth Laird, director of equity in civic technology at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said that while the federal agencies often provide the funding for large government programs such as SNAP, the states, which function as program administrators, are generally keepers of residents’ most sensitive personal information.
“A lot of information about people, including our most sensitive information, has historically been collected at the state level and stayed at the state level,” Laird said.
While the federal government may issue social security numbers, Laird and Davisson said, that doesn’t mean agencies like the USDA can legally access them – or other personally identifying information – from the Social Security Administration.
Laird said USDA’s push for SNAP data is part of a larger pattern under the Trump administration of seizing information from states. Laird said the acquisition of this data has obvious implications for the undocumented immigrants that are the target of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. But she said the Trump administration could “weaponize” the information in ways that affect other groups as well, such as transgender Americans, people seeking reproductive care, or “people who just simply disagree with the administration.”
“Knowledge is power,” she said. “And the more that this administration has access to information about people, the more they’ll be able to use it to further their own goals, which include targeting certain groups of people.”
Scott on Thursday said, “I’ve never been a fan or a supporter of the president or his tactics.”
“But I do have respect for the position and the rule of law,” he said. “If people don’t trust the federal government at all, then we’re in big trouble. And if they’re counting on the little state of Vermont to protect them from everything the federal government does, I don’t believe they’re being realistic.”
