Trump Appeals To Supreme Ct to Block Order to Release Money For Food Stamps
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| The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP or food stamps, provides aid to about one in eight Americans.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times |
Reporting from Washington
New York Times
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson late Friday temporarily halted a court order that would have required the Trump administration to fund food stamps in full, in a move that fueled new uncertainty around the immediate fate of the nation’s largest anti-hunger program.
The justice did not rule on the legality of the White House’s actions. Instead, she imposed a pause meant to give an appeals court more time to weigh legal arguments in the case, as the government forged ahead in its bid to withhold funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during the federal shutdown.
The order, known as an administrative stay, came as a growing number of states, including New York, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Oregon, had started to release full benefits to their residents anyway. Many announced their plans on a day when even the Agriculture Department had suggested in guidance that it could soon make the money available for food stamps, after initially refusing to do so.
But it remained unclear late Friday how the new, temporary hold imposed by the Supreme Court might now affect some of those payments, or whether SNAP benefits might once again face delays, cuts or other restrictions.
Justice Jackson, a member of the court’s three-justice liberal bloc who has spoken forcefully against many of the Trump administration’s policies, issued a decision on the stay because she is responsible for emergency applications from that region of the country. She said in the order that she expected the appeals court to evaluate the matter and issue a more complete ruling swiftly.
Still, many Democrats around the country erupted in anger on Friday night, with some accusing President Trump of trying to turn nutrition assistance — a program on which one in eight Americans rely — into a bargaining chip while the government remains closed.
“Trump fought for this,” Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, said in a post on social media. “He doesn’t care if millions of Americans go hungry.”
The intervention of the Supreme Court capped a frenetic day for the roughly 42 million Americans who use monthly SNAP benefits to purchase groceries. Once again, these low-income Americans found themselves bearing the weight of a shutdown that has become the longest in U.S. history.
By its own admission, the Trump administration had tens of billions of dollars left over that it could have used to sustain food stamps into November. That included a roughly $5 billion emergency reserve that was created by Congress for SNAP, as well as a second pot of money at the Agriculture Department filled primarily with tariff revenue.
But the White House refused for weeks to use the money for SNAP, a program that Republicans long have sought to cut. Even though Mr. Trump has often claimed to possess vast powers over federal spending — and has frequently reprogrammed the budget to advance his agenda during the shutdown — he and his aides maintained that they could not help provision the anti-hunger aid.
A coalition of cities, religious groups and nonprofits sued over that refusal, telling the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island last week that the administration had a legal and moral obligation to supply the necessary funds. Twice, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. agreed, and on Thursday, he directed the White House to tap two accounts at the Agriculture Department that would fund SNAP benefits in their entirety.
The Justice Department quickly appealed, arguing on Friday that there was no “lawful basis” to force the president to find money in the “metaphorical couch cushions.” But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit declined to impose a temporary halt to the judge’s order, known as an administrative stay, prompting the administration to turn to the Supreme Court by Friday night.
“A single district court in Rhode Island should not be able to seize center stage in the shutdown, seek to upend political negotiations that could produce swift political solutions for SNAP and other programs, and dictate its own preferences for how scarce federal funds should be spent,” said Pam Bondi, the attorney general, in a series of posts on social media.
Even before the appeals court could rule, some states had resumed provisioning full benefits anyway. They did so by instructing the vendors that manage SNAP to load money onto E.B.T. cards, which is how participants in the program buy groceries.
In New York, Governor Hochul announced earlier on Friday that she had directed state agencies to ensure that food stamp recipients in her state received full benefits this month. She said those funds should start to reach families by Sunday.
The Agriculture Department had even issued guidance to states by Friday afternoon, saying that the federal government was preparing to release the funds necessary to restore low-income Americans’ aid, according to a copy viewed by The New York Times. The Agriculture Department declined to answer questions late Friday on how it would proceed. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Initially, Judge McConnell gave the government discretion on whether to make partial or full payments in November, and the funding source from which it would source that aid. His order had required the Trump administration to act quickly and make those payments by this week.
At the time, the Agriculture Department opted for partial funding for food stamps, and the way it devised those payments threatened to leave millions of families with no aid at all, or without benefits for weeks or months. Many states, which sued separately in a case awaiting a ruling in Massachusetts, described the conditions foisted onto the program as unnecessarily burdensome.
That prompted Judge McConnell on Thursday to require the government to tap additional funds to make payments in full. That, he said, would avert any cuts and delays, as he admonished the Trump administration for its actions.
“This should never happen in America,” the judge said during a tense but brief hearing
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