Ken Cook at EWG explains why they don't publish the names of food stamp recipients, as they do for farmers. Of course, times have changed since the court decision that forced FSA to give EWG the payment data with identities. Ken points out that adopting the $200K limit, as proposed by the administration, might reopen the argument that convinced the court.
(A personal note--I well remember Gerry Diebert being concerned about the prospect of losing the case. He was the liaison with our data processing people who had to figure out how to give EWG what they'd won. I also remember that I was, although not directly involved, rather aggravated. During my career I'd had some responsibility for implementing the Privacy Act of 1974. Effectively the court threw out a bunch of the work we'd done in the initial implementation--it was almost a catch-22 situation: farmers were covered by the Privacy Act until we'd done all the work; then they weren't covered by the Privacy act and FOIA required giving out the data. Make up your damn minds, policymakers.
In this context "policymakers" means those faceless bureaucrats in Congress and the courts who could tell us good guys what to do. :-) )
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