Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson has accused Democratic governors of "trying to protect the fraudsters" by refusing to hand over data on recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (SNAP) to the Trump administration. Speaking on Fox News's "America's Newsroom" on Thursday, Ferguson claimed that resistance from Democratic-led states is obstructing federal efforts to identify waste, fraud and abuse in benefit programmes funded by federal taxpayers. The remarks matter because they escalate a partisan dispute over data-sharing and the administration's wider anti-fraud drive.

Ferguson, who is helping lead the Trump administration's push to root out systemic fraud in government-funded programmes, said "red states are cooperating" while "blue states are not", and inferred from that refusal that "the Democrats are in on this". He noted that SNAP is administered by individual states but funded federally, and argued the government lacks clear insight into who receives the money, prompting requests for recipient-identifying data. The article, published by Fox News, also references related claims about tens of billions in prevented payments, hundreds of indictments, and warnings from a Labor Department official about H-1B visa fraud. No response from the accused governors is included in the excerpt.