In the Press

People with experience analyzing SNAP and other safety net programs say such statistics need more detail and context about how they were calculated to be evaluated.

“We have real questions about how they’ve arrived at these numbers,” said Nicole Schneidman, an attorney with the nonprofit, Protect Democracy. Schneidman represents SNAP recipients and hunger and privacy groups who sued over USDA’s data demand to states.

“One thing that’s really important for people to keep in mind is that 42 million people across the country receive SNAP on a monthly basis. And so these numbers that are being referenced are trivial in the grand scheme of the millions of people across the country who are receiving SNAP,” Schneidman said.

Conor Gaffney and Janine Lopez, attorneys at the nonprofit group Protect Democracy, wrote Thursday that “no doubt the boards of Paramount and Skydance are hoping this saga ends today—now that they’ve appeased the FCC and cleared merger review.”

“But as we’ve seen time and again, businesses that capitulate to the Trump administration find themselves captured rather than in the clear—with the president quick to change his mind and come back for more,” they wrote. “The costs of capitulation are higher than they might initially seem, and the business calculation that Paramount and many others have made may be wrong. The price of protection only goes up, and the mob keeps coming around.”

“The new guidance from the USDA sheds some additional light on what types of sensitive data the agency is seeking on SNAP applicants and recipients, but the fact remains that we still don’t have good answers for why the range of data they’re requesting is needed or how it will be used,” said Nicole Schneidman, a technology policy strategist at the legal nonprofit Protect Democracy.

Schneidman is also one of the attorneys behind a legal challenge that argues USDA’s plan violates federal privacy laws.

“The agency says that it broadly wants to root out fraud, but it has neglected to explain what a person’s education status or roommate status has to do with that goal,” Schneidman said.

The Privacy Act—passed in 1974 partly as a response to the infamous Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) COINTELPRO surveillance program—restricts the sharing of personal information between government agencies. However, “the options for challenging the changes the bill makes to Medicaid’s data sharing setup would be limited, especially in terms of litigation,” said Nicole Schneidman, technology policy strategist at the advocacy group Protect Democracy. It makes “any effort to push back on this quite aggressive collecting of information much, much more challenging.”

“Every week we’re seeing new examples of this administration demanding or sharing sensitive government data for unprecedented uses,” said Nicole Schneidman, who heads the technology and data governance team at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit legal center that describes its mission as “defeating the authoritarian threat.” Schneidman said Americans should understand “the data that they have entrusted to state governments right now is truly a target.”

“Once this kind of data is in the wrong hands and in particular is aggregated, it can be used for an incredibly broad ranging set of purposes,” Schneidman of Protect Democracy said. “It is critical for every American to understand there is no ‘undo’ button here.”

Orion Danjuma, counsel with Protect Democracy, said in a statement that the ruling was “disappointing but not final.”

“We remain confident in the strength of our claims and will continue to pursue every legal avenue to protect academic freedom and the rule of law,” Danjuma added.

Kenneth Parreno, a Protect Democracy attorney arguing for the plaintiffs in that case Monday, maintained the Administrative Procedure Act requires the NIH to make decisions on grants in a reasoned away, while the “record shows a slap-dash decision making process,” including a series of emails in which NIH leadership took “just minutes” to make a decision on grants affecting “hundreds of researchers and millions of lives.”

“The directives themselves are explicitly spelling out a process where HHS is directing and identifying these terminations, that NIH officials are, in turn, just rubber stamping them, not providing any review,” Parreno said. “What this is is a slap-dash, harried effort to rubber stamp an ideological purge.”

“We are really gratified that we have a judge who has taken a fair look at the record and come to the very clear conclusion that NIH and the defendants have acted unlawfully in terminating these grants based on ideological grounds and not based on science,” said Shalini Goel Agarwal, special counsel at Protect Democracy, an advocacy group representing the plaintiffs in one of the cases.

By terminating the grants, the Trump administration was effectively declaring that certain groups of Americans are not worthy of having their health studied, Agarwal said. It is part of “a pretty ugly history that the judge is rightly calling out as wrong and fundamentally unlawful.”