RSSBehind the scenes of SNAP-gate, as told by a FOI request
Dec 01
We won’t comment too much on the whole SNAP data set drama, because a) we don’t want to legally jeopardize ourselves more than necessary, and b) we haven’t directly received any communications on the matter other than what we have already published. You know as much as we do, but we would like to point out the Boston Globe and Boston Phoenix and Yahoo! News, all of which provided some good, readable coverage.
We did receive one bit of new information, however, which we’re happy to share. Michael Ravnitzky provided us some documents that shed a little more light on the situation: 7 pages of e-mails between the Massachusetts’s Department of Transitional Assistance and the Federal Food & Nutrition Services, embedded with DocumentCloud here or you can download the pdf (the first DocumentCloud page is a little pixely for some reason). Nothing too surprising, except for:
- “We are consulting with General Counsel as to next steps, if any.” Gulp!
- The Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources was also, in the fed’s view, receiving SNAP data improperly.
At least it’s nice to know we weren’t the only scofflaws. A big thanks to Michael for sending us the information.
