The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps 42 million Americans obtain enough food each month, is currently not issuing benefits. Each day, more and more low-income families pass the one-month mark since they last received assistance and risk running out of food. This appalling state of affairs in one of the world’s richest countries is made all the worse because it is completely unnecessary.
Congress has given the Trump administration all the funds it needs to provide full SNAP benefits, and on Thursday, a judge ordered the administration to fully fund this month’s benefits. But the administration continues to drag its feet.
SNAP is the nation’s largest food assistance program. As I wrote last week, two-fifths of SNAP households include at least one employed member, and almost all the remaining households are either elderly, disabled or relying on SNAP during brief periods while looking for work.
Though states operate the program, the Department of Agriculture, or the USDA, funds its benefits. And although the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008 requires the USDA to provide food assistance to all eligible families that apply, Congress traditionally has included specific funding for SNAP in its annual appropriations bills. October benefits were funded by last fiscal year’s appropriations act, but when that expired at the end of September and the government shutdown began, the question arose what would happen to SNAP.
The answer seemed clear: Congress set aside a $6 billion contingency reserve to pay SNAP benefits in just this type of situation, and also gave the USDA authority to transfer funds from one food assistance program to another as needed to prevent interruptions in benefits. In October, the Trump administration exercised this same transfer authority to move money from child nutrition programs to keep WIC running.
The administration, however, refused to tap either source of funds to continue SNAP in November. The USDA even took down a plan it had posted a few weeks earlier promising to pay benefits from the contingency fund. Instead, the department’s website has added a deeply partisan post blaming congressional Democrats for shutting down SNAP. This sequence, without a coherent rationale for refraining from spending the funds, suggests that the administration’s decision was motivated not by legal or operational concerns, but rather by a desire to further pressure congressional Democrats in the current shutdown fight.
The USDA promptly faced several lawsuits, one from a group of states, one from a group of cities and nonprofits worried about how they could feed millions of people whose food aid suddenly stopped and one from SNAP recipients themselves. Two judges separately found the USDA’s withholding benefit unlawful, with a federal judge in Rhode Island ordering the department to allow states to provide at least partial SNAP benefits right away.
Rather than promptly complying, the USDA began foot-dragging. It told the court it had already spent some of the contingency fund on other things but would devote what was left to paying SNAP benefits. It then told states to recalculate every household’s SNAP benefits under a formula that would cut far more than was needed to fit within even what the USDA said was left in the contingency fund. After plaintiffs pointed out that it was not complying with the court’s order, the USDA told states to start over and recalculate everyone’s benefits under a new, modestly less parsimonious formula.
This formula would still cut every family by more than one-third and would leave millions with no food assistance at all. And the repeated changes in direction slowed down getting SNAP to people even more.
On Thursday, Judge John McConnell expressed frustration with the USDA’s continued delays and found no legal reason why the department could not transfer excess child nutrition funds, as it already had to fund WIC. He therefore ordered the USDA to allow states to deliver full SNAP benefits by Friday.
The USDA has sent states a vague statement that it is “working towards implementing” the court’s order while the administration filed an emergency appeal with the court of appeals. The department did not, however, explicitly rescind its previous guidance telling states to recalculate and cut households’ benefits. Some states have read the memo as authorizing them to issue full benefits, but other states are seeking further clarification, further extending the waits of their low-income families. SNAP may be entering a period of chaos, with a supposedly “uniform national” program staying open or shutting down based on the empathy and risk tolerance of individual state governors.
And despite the USDA’s statement, the administration has not withdrawn its appeal. It claims that it is refusing to transfer the needed funds to SNAP out of concern that Congress might, for the first time in almost 80 years, decide to defund the child nutrition programs — something nobody in either party is proposing to do. Instead, it asked both the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court to delay Judge McConnell’s order.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson postponed that order’s effective date long enough for the Court of Appeals to evaluate the Government’s appeal.
One can only conclude from all this foot-dragging without any legal justification that the Trump administration is seeking to maximize the suffering of low-income Americans to gain political leverage on Democratic lawmakers. The USDA’s warning last week that stores cannot offer discounts to households that have lost their SNAP benefits seems to support that conclusion.
Last weekend, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that it would be his “honor” to provide SNAP benefits if a court told the administration where to find the money. Judge McConnell has done just that. This shameful episode must end.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
