Trump administration asks for emergency pause on judge’s order to fully fund SNAP
The Trump administration asked a federal appeals court Friday for an emergency pause on a federal judge’s order to fully fund SNAP benefits this month.
U.S. District Judge John McConnell on Thursday afternoon ordered the administration to make full payments to states by Friday, chastising it for delays that he said likely caused SNAP recipients to starve.
But the Trump administration said in a court filing Friday morning that because of the government shutdown, there was only enough money to pay partial benefits in November.
The administration agreed earlier this week to use $4.65 billion in contingency funds to cover about 65% of the benefits that eligible households would normally receive. But he argued that he couldn’t draw on additional money set aside for child nutrition programs, known as Section 32 funding, to fully fund SNAP because it would take resources away from other programs, like school meals.
“This is indeed a crisis, but it is a crisis caused by Congressional failure, and it can only be resolved through Congressional action,” the administration wrote.
“This Court should allow USDA to continue the partial payment and not force the agency to transfer billions of dollars from another safety net program without certainty of their replenishment,” he adds.
Discussions about SNAP funding have persisted for weeks. First, the Department of Agriculture said SNAP funding would not be distributed in November as long as the federal government remained shut down. However, the progressive legal advocacy group Democracy Forward challenged that plan in a lawsuit, prompting McConnell last week to order the Trump administration to distribute the benefits as soon as possible.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said partial payments were made to states on Monday. Because states oversee the process of loading payments onto electronic benefit cards, the Trump administration argued that it did its part by authorizing SNAP funding and providing states with information to calculate partial benefits for households.
However, McConnell said Thursday that the administration’s actions were not consistent with his order to make payments quickly and efficiently.
“People have gone without payment for too long. Not paying them even one more day is simply unacceptable,” McConnell said, adding, “This should never happen in America.”
This is the first time SNAP benefits have expired due to a government shutdown in the program’s 61-year history. Some families whose EBT cards were due to be reloaded as early as this week reported skipping meals or subsisting on the meager foods remaining in their pantries, like cereal or ramen.
