The Trump administration’s attack on the 87-year-old food aid program that supports tens of millions of low-income Americans escalated last week as the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, claimed that 14,000 Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (Snap) recipients included owners of luxury vehicles such as Ferraris, Bentleys and Teslas.

Critics charge that the broadside is part of a disinformation campaign aimed at undermining a benefit relied on by some of the most vulnerable people in the US.

Rollins did not cite the unnamed state or where this data and its claims came from, but it went viral among conservatives on social media with Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Rand Paul, Congressman Tim Burchett, and actor James Woods quoting the post. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the $57bn program, would not comment on the record and would not verify Rollins’s claims, which stem from an analysis by the Foundation for Government Accountability, an organization that has long advocated for cutting and reducing Snap and other federal government benefits.

The report says its conclusions stem from 2023 data obtained by an unnamed contractor from an anonymous state. It does not provide any information on the alleged Snap recipients or how their identities were matched to car registrations.

The Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) would not provide its data or methodology and did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Congresswoman Jahana Hayes, ranking member of the nutrition and foreign agriculture subcommittee, said she was highly skeptical of the data.

“First of all, if it were true, it would have been cited with the state and what happened,” said Hayes. “I just don’t buy the secretary saying that they have all this information as a gotcha moment, while not also simultaneously saying we plan to hold these people accountable for defrauding the system and taking food away from the people who really need it.”

Hayes said claims of fraud and abuse have often been made without evidence and that cases of provable fraud should be prosecuted, not be used to cut and attack Snap at the expense of people who need and rely on it.

“I never thought it was about abuse. I never thought it was about fraud. It’s about taking food away from hungry people,” Hayes added. “If there are people who are misusing this program, then we deal with those individuals as individuals. But it doesn’t mean that we distract our attention from the millions of families and children and veterans and seniors who rely so heavily on this program to put food on the table and make it through the end of the month.”

Researchers who spoke with the Guardian also criticized the report.

“There is no methodology, nor is there any data, and so it’s very reasonable to assume that the data could be made up and then it could be thrown out there to us,” said Eric Pachman, founder of the data analysis non-profit Data 4 the People. “She [Rollins] can’t hide behind the statement that she’s trying to protect vulnerable people because the analysis out there shows that we have no interest, and we are failing more often than we are succeeding on a county level, in actually even covering all the vulnerable people.”

Pachman noted 67% of counties in the US were not providing Snap to all residents living under the federal poverty level in 2024. He noted, according to the USDA, in most cases an individual or family must meet income thresholds of below 130% of the federal poverty level to be eligible for Snap, which is $32,150 a year for a family of four in 2025.

In 2023, about 36.8 million Americans were living below the federal poverty line, while the monthly average of Snap recipients in the US in 2023 was 42.1 million Americans, 73% of whom lived at or below the federal poverty level. The 27% of Snap recipients living above the poverty level received a much smaller proportion of total Snap benefits, 14%.

According to the latest USDA household food insecurity report, 13.7% of US households were food insecure in 2024, the highest level in a decade as the Trump administration ended the household food security report.

“They’re not sharing what this is or where it comes from exactly, or what their methodology is so I would take it with a grain of salt for that reason,” said Stephen Nuñez, director of stratification economics at the Roosevelt Institute.

Rollins said 4.3 million Americans have been removed from Snap benefits in the wake of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”, Trump’s agenda-setting 2025 statute that expanded work requirements and shifted administrative costs to states. Rollins claimed many of those removed were committing fraud.

“It’s possible they believe that all these people are fraud, but I think they just really want to dismantle these programs, and I think they’re using fraud as an excuse, to be quite honest,” said Nuñez. “This is a program that somewhere, depending on the year, between 16% to 19% of all households in the United States rely on in some way. And they’re basically claiming that it’s rife with fraud and corruption and so forth and there’s just really no evidence to suggest that.”

According to the USDA, Snap recipient fraud “occurs relatively infrequently”.

FGA has faced previous accusations of using questionable research as it has lobbied aggressively for cuts to Snap.

In a 2019 interview with Public Integrity, Peter Germanis, a conservative welfare reform expert who worked for the Reagan and George HW Bush administrations, called the Foundation for Government Accountability’s work “dangerous”.

Germanis declined to comment on the recent claims from the group as he currently works for the federal government under the Trump administration.

“Nobody who’s serious about public policy really takes them seriously,” Germanis told Public Integrity in a phone interview in 2019. “But politicians seem to love them because [the FGA] tells them what they want to hear.”

A spokesperson for the USDA cited the report by the Foundation for Government Accountability, but did not respond to questions on the veracity of the research, its data and methodology, or its conclusions.

They also did not comment on data showing the lack of Snap coverage for eligible Americans living under the poverty line throughout the US.

The spokesperson cited a proposed rule by the Trump administration to limit categorical eligibility for Snap from welfare benefits (TANF), claiming the broad-based categorical eligibility, meant to lower administrative costs and burdens, had bloated Snap rolls.