The Trump administration on Friday asked a federal appeals court for an emergency pause on a federal judge's order to fully fund SNAP benefits this month.
U.S. District Judge John McConnell ordered the administration on Thursday afternoon to deliver payments in full to states by Friday, chastising it for delays that he said have likely caused SNAP recipients to go hungry.
But the Trump administration said in a court filing on Friday morning that because of the government shutdown, there is 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 ordinarily receive. But it has argued that it cannot draw from additional funds set aside for child nutrition programs, known as Section 32 funding, to fully fund SNAP because doing so would take away resources from other programs, like school lunches.
"This is a crisis, to be sure, but it is a crisis occasioned by congressional failure, and that can only be solved by congressional action," the administration wrote.
“This Court should allow USDA to continue with the partial payment and not compel the agency to transfer billions of dollars from another safety net program with no certainty of their replenishment,” it added.
The back-and-forth over SNAP funding has persisted for weeks. First, the Department of Agriculture said that SNAP funding would not be distributed in November as long as the federal government remained closed. 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 benefits as soon as possible.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the partial payments were disbursed to states on Monday. Since states oversee the process of loading payments onto electronic benefits cards, the Trump administration has argued that it has done its part by authorizing SNAP funding and giving states information to calculate partial benefits for households.
However, McConnell said Thursday that the administration's actions did not comply with his order to deliver the payments expeditiously and efficiently.
“People have gone without for too long. Not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable," McConnell said, adding: “This should never happen in America."
This is the first time SNAP benefits have lapsed because of a government shutdown in the program's 61-year history. Some families whose EBT cards were due to be reloaded already this week have reported skipping meals or subsisting on the meager foods remaining in their pantries, such as cereal or ramen.
