Tag: food

SNAP Benefits Go To 186,000 Dead People… And Stopping Them Might Be Difficult

President Donald Trump’s anti-fraud efforts have brought renewed focus on issues plaguing the welfare system, including the millions of dollars in food stamps that are being sent to dead recipients.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a report last month stating that 185,986 deceased people in 29 states were receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits as of July 1, 2025, at an annual cost of $419.6 million. It also reported an additional $3 billion in potential fraud, waste, and abuse.

On May 21, a federal jury convicted a man who stole the identity of Carlos Ramon Obregon, who was killed in a 1977 Los Angeles drive-by shooting. Decades after the 14-year-old’s death, the defendant used the dead teen’s identity to collect about $283,000 in government benefits, including SNAP benefits, Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income, and COVID-19 payments.

That’s just one example that the administration has outlined to highlight the issue. Here’s what to know about the problem of dead recipients, which has been lingering for decades.

Renewed Focus by Trump Admin

Trump directed federal agencies via executive order in March 2025 to ensure “unfettered access” to data from federally funded state programs such as SNAP, also known as food stamps.

In response, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service told state agencies on May 6, 2025, that all records associated with SNAP must be made available to the federal government.

“For years, this program has been on autopilot, with no USDA insight into real-time data,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins wrote in a letter to states.

Following the USDA’s demand for detailed information on food stamp recipients to review for fraud, a coalition of 21 states and the District of Columbia filed a federal lawsuit against the USDA, accusing the agency of unlawfully demanding massive amounts of sensitive SNAP recipient data.

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300 Studies Link This Neurotoxic Pesticide to Multi-Organ Damage, Chronic Disease

For decades, regulators viewed chlorpyrifos — a pesticide widely used in the U.S. and around the world — primarily as a neurotoxin that disrupts signaling in the brain and nervous system.

But as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reconsiders whether to continue to allow its use on foods like apples and soybeans, a new review indicates other insidious harms.

Published in April in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, the review synthesizes findings from nearly 300 studies worldwide published up to this year. These include laboratory experiments, animal studies, epidemiological research, regulatory documents and risk assessments.

Growing evidence suggests chlorpyrifos may damage the brain, hormones, liver, gut microbiome, muscles, reproductive organs and bones. Studies also link the pesticide to DNA damage and lasting changes in gene activity that may increase the risk of chronic disease.

Together, the findings portray chlorpyrifos as what the reviewers call a “multi-system toxicant” that poses a more significant threat to public health than previously understood.

It suggests the pesticide acts on the body in ways far beyond disrupted nerve signaling or obvious poisoning. Pregnancy and early childhood are especially sensitive periods for chemical exposure.

“What has genuinely evolved over time is our understanding that chlorpyrifos causes harm in ways that go beyond its effects on the nervous system including damage to DNA, changes in how genes are switched on or off, interference with hormones, and disruption of the healthy bacteria that live in the gut,” said Dana Boyd Barr, Ph.D., a professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and past president of the International Society of Exposure Science.

The authors warn that current regulatory systems may not fully capture the complexity of chlorpyrifos’ dangers to the body. Many occur at levels too low to be detected by current safety testing, which looks for the disruption of an enzyme involved in nerve cell communication.

The review links chlorpyrifos exposure to:

  • Biological changes associated with inflammation, chronic disease and cancer.
  • Brain and nervous system damage, including lower IQ and developmental harms in children, neurodegenerative disease, and disrupted cell growth, survival and communication.
  • DNA damage and altered gene regulation that hinders normal cell repair and changes how genes are switched on and off during development (epigenetics).
  • Hormone disruption involving thyroid, estrogen and testosterone pathways.
  • Liver injury, gut bacteria disruption and metabolic dysfunction are linked to obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
  • Reproductive, muscular and skeletal harm, including reduced sperm quality and bone loss.

Industry pushback despite reported harms

The review comes as the EPA reassesses whether the pesticide’s remaining uses meet the statutory standard of “no unreasonable adverse effects.” The action follows years of official stalling, prior bans, policy reversals and legal challenges.

Meanwhile, agrichemical companies are lobbying federal and state lawmakers to shield pesticide manufacturers, including Bayer and its subsidiary Monsanto, from some lawsuits involving Roundup weedkiller. The suits allege their products cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma, among other cancers.

In February 2020, Corteva Agriscience — then the world’s largest producer of chlorpyrifos — announced it would stop production, citing declining demand.

But existing stocks continued to be used. The chemical remains approved for several major crops in the U.S., including apples, strawberries, soybeans, citrus, wheat and peaches.

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Raw Milk: The Wrong Lesson

New York distillers poisoned thousands of infants with filthy milk, and the politicians paid to stop them took bribes instead. Then the government drew exactly the wrong lesson. Rather than remove the conditions that caused the disaster, it treated the symptom, protected the system, and taught generations of Americans that the cow was the problem.

She was not.

In the spring of 1858, a New York publisher named Frank Leslie received milk at his door that was blue, watery, and contaminated with pus. He ordered an analysis, disliked what he found, and sent reporters and illustrators to trace the milk to its source. What they uncovered was not a quality control failure. It was an industrial scandal that had become a business model.

The distilleries of Manhattan and Brooklyn produced enormous quantities of spent grain mash. Disposing of it cost money. Feeding it to cattle produced profit. Distillers built cow sheds against their whiskey operations and packed them with animals standing in filth, tethered over troughs and fed steaming waste from the stills. The diet destroyed the animals. Teeth loosened. Sores opened. Udders became diseased. Cows too weak to stand were suspended in slings and milked until they died.

That milk was sold to the public.

Because it was thin and blue, it was adulterated first. Chalk and plaster for color. Flour and starch for body. Molasses for appearance. Water for volume. Wagons labeled “Pure Country Milk” carried it through the city while families believed they were buying fresh milk from the country. Contemporary estimates attributed thousands of infant deaths a year to it.

The corruption that protected the trade should sound familiar.

When public outrage forced an investigation, inspectors warned the operators before arriving. The barns were cleaned. The conditions were staged. The committee toured the sanitized sheds, declared the danger exaggerated, and recommended better ventilation. One member, Charles Haswell, filed a dissent describing the fraud and warning that children were dying. He was ignored. Years of pressure passed before the state acted.

The story is usually told backward.

Nothing about the swill milk scandal shows that milk was inherently dangerous. The deaths came from confinement, diseased animals, contaminated feed, adulteration, and political corruption. The milk was dangerous because the system producing it was dangerous.

There were two ways to respond.

One was to fix the source. Take the cattle out of the distillery sheds. Clean up the conditions. Test the animals. Keep the herds healthy. Produce milk under conditions that do not cause disease.

The other was to leave the industrial system in place and try to neutralize the result after the fact.

The second path won.

Pasteurization was not the choice made in 1858. It did not yet exist as a practical milk intervention. Pasteur’s early work was on wine; milk pasteurization did not take hold in the United States until decades later. The officials who inspected the swill dairies were not choosing heat over reform. They were choosing corruption over reform.

That distinction matters.

Decades later, when the federal government did push pasteurization, it conceded that the method was not ideal, only practical under existing conditions. In plain terms, restructuring the production system was harder than heating the final product. The industry was already large, centralized, and politically connected. Heating the milk was easier than fixing the barn.

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Disaster Declared as 2nd Screwworm Case Found in Texas near Border, Canada Bans Texas Cattle

A second case of the flesh‑eating New World screwworm has been confirmed in Texas, only miles from the Mexican border, prompting Canada to shut its border to Texas livestock and Governor Greg Abbott to declare a state of disaster over what he warns is an “imminent threat.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced on Friday that a second infestation of screwworm larvae had been found in a calf in Zavala County, Texas. The second finding took place on the ranch near the Texas-Mexico border, about 5.6 miles from the case found earlier this week. The discovery of the second incident of the flesh-eating screwworm prompted Governor Abbott to issue a disaster declaration and apply additional state resources to combat the outbreak.

In a statement on Friday, Governor Abbott stated:

First, I authorize the use of all available resources of state government to respond to this disaster and reassign resources from across the state as needed to address NWS. Second, I am making all state personnel available to accelerate the movement of sterile flies into Texas and the construction of the new sterile screwworm production facility in Edinburg. We have eradicated this pest before, and we will do it again.

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Where’s the Beef? A Long-Gone Livestock-Eating Bug Is Back, and I have a Theory As to Why.

It turns out that a flesh-eating larva, the screwworm, not seen in the U.S. since 1966, has found its way back onto livestock ranches in southern Texas, and I smell a stink badger in the perfume aisle.

The infected calf (rumors have it that a second cow has been located, but I cannot yet verify this report) is on a ranch very close to the Mexican border. Authorities have set up a 12-mile quarantine zone around the ranch.

You may recall the feds arrested three Chinese scientists spies at the Detroit airport, one of whom was busted for sneaking in a fungus that could be used to wipe out our crops, and another was caught sneaking in roundworms, which are also devastating to mammals, including livestock.  

Here’s the fun part: Texas authorities arrested six camo-clad Chinese nationals with backpacks on a ranch in Texas on May 26, allegedly with the help of Mexican cartels. Less than a week later, the first case of screwworm was discovered. Somehow, that didn’t make the big Operation Mockingbird headlines. 

We do not yet know what the authorities found in those aforementioned backpacks.

The ranch where the Chinese were discovered is about 41 miles away from the ranch where the first infected calf was located, roughly a day-and-a-half walk. Both ranches are located very close to the Mexican border, in an area where few Chinese illegal border-rushers have been apprehended in the open-border years of the Biden administration.

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Texas AG Launches Investigation Into Glyphosate In Food

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has initiated an investigation into glyphosate contamination in food, with major manufacturers such as PepsiCo and Bayer being subjected to the probe.

Glyphosate is a commonly used herbicide applied to genetically engineered crops and is the main ingredient in Roundup weed killer, Paxton’s office said in a June 2 statement. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The organization also concluded that the herbicide showed “strong” evidence for genotoxicity, which refers to the ability to damage a cell’s genetic information.

“Since then, extensive human and animal research has shown that glyphosate contributes to endocrine disruption, infertility, kidney disease, and autoimmune diseases, in addition to its cancer-causing properties,” the attorney general’s statement read.

“More than 250 million pounds of glyphosate are sprayed in the United States each year. Research has found that over 70 percent of American adults have detectable traces of glyphosate in their bodies compared to a mere 12 percent in 1993. Scientists attribute much of this dramatic increase to the widespread use of glyphosate as a desiccant.”

Desiccation is the process of applying herbicides to crops prior to harvest to ensure they uniformly dry down, a practice responsible for more than 90 percent of glyphosate found in food.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deems glyphosate as an effective way to manage noxious and invasive weeds, the agency said in a May 5 update.

In agriculture, glyphosate is used in a wide range of crops, including corn, soybean, leafy vegetables, legumes, cereal grains, citrus, herbs and spices, nuts, oilseed crops, and sugarcane. The herbicide is also used for the conservation of pastures, forests, turf grass, rangeland, aquatic areas, parks, wildlife management areas, and paved areas.

The EPA said there are “no risks of concern to human health from current uses of glyphosate” and that there is “no indication that children are more sensitive to glyphosate.”

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Fighting for Food Freedom: A Georgia Farmer’s Stand Against Bureaucratic Overreach

“I never set out to battle county government. I simply wanted to sell the food I grow—healthy, local produce and value-added goods—to my neighbors,” Georgia farmer Stephanie Jones shared with The Gateway Pundit.

Recently, The Gateway Pundit spoke with Stephanie Jones, owner of Jones Creek Farm, a small family farm in Liberty County, Georgia.

In an era when Americans are increasingly demanding transparency and control over what ends up on their plates, the farm-to-table movement has emerged as a powerful counter to our industrialized food system.

By supporting small farmers and cottage food businesses, communities gain access to fresher, more nutritious food while strengthening local economies and preserving agricultural traditions.

These direct connections between growers and consumers are vital—not only for economic resilience, but for restoring personal agency over the food we eat.

This push for greater food sovereignty sits at the heart of the growing MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement, which seeks to reduce chronic disease by reforming agricultural policy, empowering small producers, and challenging the dominance of ultra-processed foods.

In this interview, this dedicated Georgia farmer shares her firsthand battle with local bureaucracy and her vision for a more resilient, community-centered food system.

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Food Stamp Fraud Pipeline Exposed: U.S. Taxpayer-Funded Groceries Shipped Overseas And Sold For Profit

Food stamps and food pantries are intended to keep struggling Americans fed.

What we found is that, in some communities, that food never reaches an American table. Instead, it gets shipped overseas and sold for profit.

The scheme works like this. Residents in cities like Lawrence, Massachusetts collect food through two channels: purchasing it at local markets using EBT cards, and picking it up for free from food banks and churches. That food is then packed into large blue barrels, dropped off at shipping companies, and sent by container ship to the Dominican Republic. Once it arrives, it is sold for profit in local stores. The people doing this see nothing wrong with it. In many cases, they do it openly.

According to a local that assisted us with this story, this fraud has been happening for over a decade.

Over the course of several weeks, Muckraker Foundation traced the full pipeline from food pantry lines in Lawrence, Massachusetts, through shipping warehouses in New York, to store shelves in Santo Domingo. This is what we found.

Lawrence, Massachusetts

Lawrence is a small city about 30 miles north of Boston. It has the highest concentration of Dominican immigrants of any city in Massachusetts, and the highest rate of SNAP enrollment in the state.

John has been delivering goods in Lawrence for over 11 years, six days a week, 35 stops a day. He knows the community intimately.

“I’ve been witnessing the Dominican residents going to food bank lines and collecting non-perishable goods,” he told us, “and then packing it in barrels and in boxes, and then they ship it back to the Dominican Republic.”

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Report: Zohran Mamdani’s Harlem Grocery Store Already Received $25M in Taxpayer Funds, Bringing Total to $55M

Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s chosen site for a $30 million, government-owned grocery store in East Harlem was approved for a $25 million taxpayer-funded facelift several years ago, setting up the total price tag at a whopping $55 million.

The proposed location is La Marqueta, a food-forward market located between East 111th and East 119th streets under the elevated Metro North tracks on Park Avenue. The purpose of the city-run store would be to offer super low prices because the store would not pay rent or taxes. 

“That same site, however, already won approval from the city’s Economic Development Corporation nearly a decade ago for a $25 million project to redevelop La Marqueta — bringing the total price tag of the market’s proposed makeover to a staggering $55 million, city officials confirmed,” New York Post first reported. 

Stephen Zagor, adjunct associate professor of food studies at Columbia Business School, told the outlet the $30 million price tag was already “an outrageous number,” and “you’d expect the doorknobs and cash registers to be solid gold.”

“And to think there is another $25 million allocated years ago for the rest of La Marqueta, which is well past its prime, I’d think they would have to revisit that,” Zagor added.

Anthony Pena, president of the National Supermarket Association, said city leaders have “not been transparent and open about anything they are doing” and noted that Mamdani never mentioned the location’s previous project in the report. 

Mamdani has allocated approximately $70 million for five government-run stores, one for each borough. Pena said the final cost raises questions about why the city would be spending so much on the East Harlem location specifically. 

“They are going to spend $10 million on a 20,000-square-foot store and $30 million on a 9,000-square-foot store,” Pena said. “There is a massive disconnect right now and there are more questions than answers.”

The Economic Development Corporation (EDC) confirmed to the Post that the $25 million deal and the $30 million store are two separate investment items. 

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Oregon petition to criminalize hunting, fishing reaches signature threshold

Supporters of an effort to criminalize the killing of animals for food in Oregon are one step closer in getting a measure on the November ballot.

Initiative Petition 28 would make it illegal to injure or kill animals and would effectively ban hunting, fishing and the breeding of animals.

Supporters have been collecting signatures for this since 2024 and this past week, they reached the number necessary to make it onto the November ballot.

But it’s not official yet. The Secretary of State’s Office still needs to verify the signatures.

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