Speaking at a policy discussion hosted by Breitbart News on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins sharply criticized the current state of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), calling it a system overwhelmed by “fraud and abuse and corruption” that is in dire need of serious reform.
Rollins cited eye-opening numbers regarding federal spending on nutrition assistance. “Again, let me repeat that $400 million of our taxpayer money is spent every day across our nutrition programs, just at USDA,” she stated, referencing the total daily outlay across the department’s 16 different nutrition initiatives.
She tied the excessive spending to the president’s broader commitment to shrinking government and improving accountability. “So when the president ran and spoke to the American people about rightsizing government and realigning and making sure that every taxpayer dollar is spent to its best and highest and most effective use, that I’m not sure there is a program — there are others equally equal to it — but I’m not sure that there is a program that perhaps needs more reform than the SNAP program, which is the food stamp program.”
Emphasizing once more the staggering amount of $400 million in daily spending, Rollins said that kind of expenditure necessitates rigorous oversight and evaluation. She stressed that, in her view, “it’s ripe with fraud and abuse and corruption.”
According to Rollins, recent law enforcement operations have exposed widespread criminal activity linked to SNAP. She pointed to sting operations conducted by the Secret Service that resulted in arrests of individuals allegedly involved in defrauding the program. “Tens of millions of dollars” have been stolen, she said, adding that in some cases, benefits were improperly distributed to illegal immigrants.
“We’re working to change that, of course, across the whole government as well. There’s just a lot a lot of work that we need to do. That fact, that we’re just handing out all of this money without any sort of requirement of work for able-bodied, grown adults is sort of insane to me,” Rollins said.
She went on to emphasize that the United States should not be functioning like a socialist nation. “I mean, this is not, we are not a socialist country in America. If we’re going to use a taxpayer, we’re going to take $1 from you … then we need to make sure that dollar is spent effectively,” she continued.
Rollins explained that reforming SNAP is a major component of her department’s policy agenda. “And so that’s a big, important part of our work at USDA. We’ll be rolling out more on that the coming weeks. We’re rolling out a lot right now, a lot of policy agendas that we’re working on really hard, but that’s at the very top of the list, and obviously working with our partners in Congress is going to be really important, but also our partners out in the states,” she added.
{Matzav.com}