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The Trump administration said Monday that it will release enough funds to pay for a half-month’s worth of food assistance benefits in November, days after two courts ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to release the money to avoid forcing almost 42 million Americans into food insecurity.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - known as SNAP or food stamps - lost funding after the Trump administration said it would not tap into a $5.5 billion contingency fund to pay for the benefit. On Friday, a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the administration to release backup funds moments after another federal judge in Massachusetts directed the government to decide by Monday whether it would use the contingency funds for food aid.
USDA said Monday that it will comply with the Rhode Island judge’s order. The department’s lawyers, in a Monday brief, wrote that the agency "will fulfill its obligation to expend the full amount of SNAP contingency funds today."
The White House deferred comment to the Office of Management and Budget, which along with USDA did not respond to a request for comment.
SNAP regularly costs the federal government about $9 billion a month.
But the federal shutdown, which has lasted more than a month, has affected the program because Congress has not appropriated new funds for it. The available money in the contingency funding will pay for only about half of November’s benefits.
In the Monday brief, Patrick Penn, the deputy undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services at USDA, said that the Food and Nutrition Service, which administers SNAP, will spend about $450 million of the contingency funds paying for states to administer the program this month. An additional $150 million will be used for food assistance programs in Puerto Rico and American Samoa, and the remaining $4.65 billion in the fund will be used to pay for SNAP benefits. That money, Penn said, will cover 50 percent of each eligible household’s current allotment.
"This means that no funds will remain for new SNAP applicants certified in November, disaster assistance, or as a cushion against the potential catastrophic consequences of shutting down SNAP entirely," Penn wrote in the brief.
The Trump administration had argued earlier that it would not tap the SNAP contingency fund because it did not want to spend money that could be used in an emergency such as a natural disaster.
USDA said it will generate a table required by states to calculate which benefits will be made available for each eligible household. States will be able to make the SNAP payments once the table is released to them, according to the brief.
In the brief, USDA said it would not tap a $23 billion fund for school lunch and child nutrition programs, known as Section 32 funding. Democrats in Congress and anti-hunger advocates have called for the Trump administration to tap those funds to fill in the SNAP shortfall and let lawmakers patch the hole in child nutrition funding later. In the brief, USDA said that program was separate from SNAP in terms of legal authority, appropriations accounts and operations.
"Section 32 Child Nutrition Program funds are not a contingency fund for SNAP," the agency’s lawyers wrote in the brief. "Using billions of dollars from Child Nutrition for SNAP would leave an unprecedented gap in Child Nutrition funding that Congress has never had to fill with annual appropriations, and USDA cannot predict what Congress will do under these circumstances."
While Democratic leaders and anti-hunger groups celebrated the agency’s decision Monday to release partial payments, many argued that the administration should still find ways to pay out full SNAP benefits.
In statements, Democratic Sens. Ben Ray Luján (New Mexico) and Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota) accused the Trump administration of continuing to withhold taxpayer dollars from "folks who need it most" while doing the "bare minimum" to get partial payments out. And Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) said that while states are awaiting clarity on when the Trump administration will make the partial SNAP payments available, the White House "should not stop there."
"President Trump should commit to fully funding SNAP benefits and make these full benefits available as soon as possible," she said.
Republicans, however, continued blaming Democrats for the funding impasse. Speaking on the Senate floor Monday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said SNAP is now "running on limited emergency funds." The program’s future, he said, is "uncertain."
"Millions more Americans … are now at risk of going hungry," Thune said. "Yet the Democrat shutdown marches on."
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) tried to pass a bill Monday night that would force the Trump administration to fully fund the SNAP program through November. All Senate Democrats except Sen. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) co-sponsored the measure.
"Children, seniors, the disabled, the veterans, our most vulnerable - they’re not bargaining chips," Merkley said on the Senate floor Monday.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) blocked it, arguing the measure is "meaningless" because Democrats have repeatedly voted to keep the government shut down.
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