State officials wrestle with federal data demands

State officials are weighing their options in response to increased demands by the federal government for access to administrative data.

State agencies collect and store many datasets for many reasons, said Maine State Auditor Matthew Dunlap during a webinar this week hosted by the Center for Democracy and Technology, The Leadership Conference’s Center for Civil Rights and Technology and Protect Democracy. Often, he said, they share the information with federal agencies to ensure eligibility or to meet federal funding requirements.

But on March 20, President Donald Trump issued an executive order aimed at “removing unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing.” It requires agencies to ensure that the federal government has “unfettered access” to data from all state programs that get federal funding.

That, at times, conflicts with state statutes and federal laws, the panelists said.

 “There are some legal [privacy] protections that are rooted in both federal statutes, in state laws and in constitutional principles,” said Frank Torres, a civil rights technology fellow at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights’ Center for Civil Rights and Technology. “In other words, federal access to this data is not unlimited. There are some safeguards that were put in place, and for good reason.”

Torres pointed to the Privacy Act, which restricts “the collection of information to only the information relevant to the purpose, to ensure the information remains accurate, to collect information directly from the subject whenever possible, and to tell the subject the purpose for which the information is being collected and the authority under which it is being collected.”

The E-Government Act of 2022 calls for Privacy Impact Assessments that look at how “how information in identifiable form is collected, stored, protected, shared, and managed.”

At the state level, “if the statute says [data] cannot be made public or shared, then it’s protected,” Dunlap said.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has emerged as a lightning rod for this issue. This week, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach announced a lawsuit against Gov. Laura Kelly for refusing to share the personal data — Social Security numbers, names and other information — of about 730,000 SNAP recipients with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. By contrast, Vermont’s Agency of Human Services, which oversees benefits programs such as SNAP, gave USDA the personal information of about 140,000 SNAP.

“One of the most astonishing aspects of this to me was that in subsequent press conferences, our governor, Phil Scott said, ‘I don’t know what they want it for,’” said Angela Arsenault, a Vermont state representative, during the webinar. She said she sees the potential for two main impacts from sharing the data. The primary one is preventing people in need from accessing food and medical care.

“These are very fundamental needs that our government has chosen to try to meet and is now putting people in a position where…folks who have reached out for help when they needed it are now more vulnerable than they were to begin with,” Arsenault said.

The secondary impact is a fostering of mistrust between Vermonters and the state government, Arsenault warned. Nationwide, public trust in government overall is already low, according to an August report from the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service.

How states respond to the new federal requests for data might lie with the courts. Several lawsuits are already underway to determine the legality of some of the requests.

Nicole Schneidman, head of the technology and data governance team at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit group, said the organization filed a lawsuit in May challenging whether USDA complied with privacy protections in asking for the personal data of anyone who applied for or received SNAP benefits since 2020. 

“They need to put forward a system of record notice, putting all of us on alert that they are going to be doing this and for what purpose they will be using the data,” Schneidman said, adding that USDA “did not do what they needed to do.”

California is leading a multi-state lawsuit against USDA to push back on demands for the information and another against requests by the Department of Health and Human Services for information related to Medicaid programs.

“When you have vast troves of data about every single individual in the system, how you use it is really a policy decision,” Dunlap said.