In a pair of rulings on Friday, two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to tap contingency funds to keep SNAP benefits flowing, with the program set to run out of money on Saturday due to the ongoing shutdown in yet another example of how imperial the Judicial Branch has become.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re now a full month into the Schumer Shutdown, and SNAP benefits \u2014 better known as food stamps \u2014 have become the latest political football for Democrats.<\/p>\n
The solution couldn\u2019t be simpler: Democrats could stop playing games with \u201cleverage\u201d and just vote to reopen the government. But instead, they did what they always do \u2014 ran to the courts. On Tuesday, 25 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit in (where else?) Massachusetts, claiming \u201con information and belief\u201d that the U.S. Department of Agriculture supposedly has enough funds to cover all or most of November\u2019s SNAP payments. The suit demands that the court order the USDA to pay out benefits from its contingency reserve, despite the lack of congressional appropriations.<\/p>\n
And wouldn\u2019t you know it \u2014 the case was \u201crandomly\u201d assigned to Judge Indira Talwani, the same Obama appointee best known for ruling that Congress couldn\u2019t defund Planned Parenthood. A hearing on the states\u2019 request for a temporary restraining order (TRO) was scheduled for Thursday morning.<\/p>\n
At Thursday\u2019s hearing, both sides presented their arguments before Judge Indira Talwani, who took the matter under advisement.<\/p>\n
The USDA\u2019s position was laid out clearly in its memorandum opposing the plaintiffs\u2019 request for a temporary restraining order. The introduction alone spans roughly two and a half pages \u2014 a detailed defense of why the agency cannot lawfully issue SNAP benefits without congressional appropriations. It\u2019s worth reading in full, but here\u2019s the key takeaway:<\/p>\n
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (\u201cSNAP\u201d) is a critical program that, through regular allotments and extraordinary disaster disbursements (the \u201cD-SNAP program\u201d), helps to improve food security for millions of Americans. At its regular level, SNAP requires approximately $8.5 to 9 billion dollars each month. Unfortunately, the ongoing lapse in appropriations has left SNAP with no appropriated funds in its annual allotments account. As a consequence of this never-before-seen circumstance, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (\u201cUSDA\u201d) was forced to suspend upcoming November benefits.<\/p>\n
In their proposed order, Plaintiffs appear to ask the Court to order USDA to unsuspend allotments and let the system run with full benefits amounts (i.e., deposit full amounts on beneficiaries\u2019 SNAP cards) no matter the absence of funds for such benefits. But that is no option at all. That would be a blatant violation of the Antideficiency Act, a criminal statute that forbids the United States from making such an obligation without an appropriation.<\/p>\n
In their brief, Plaintiffs argue that the Court should force USDA to deplete its long-term emergency fund, currently containing around $5.25 billion, to provide SNAP benefits for November. But Congress has not appropriated any SNAP funding for fiscal year 2026. And depletion of the long-term emergency fund would eliminate money for the D-SNAP program over the coming years, a program that provides critical support in the event of natural disasters and other uncontrollable catastrophes. Even assuming USDA had discretion to reallocate these funds, the question of how to allocate limited funds among multiple crucial safety-net programs, when there are insufficient funds, is one that the agency is empowered to make\u2014not a federal court, and certainly not Plaintiffs. \u2026<\/p>\n
All told, Defendants understand that the lack of SNAP funds has created a difficult situation for millions of Americans. But as a matter of both law and practical consequence, it is not a problem that this Court can solve through the remedy that Plaintiffs here seek.<\/p>\n
On Friday, Judge Talwani issued a memorandum and order keeping the plaintiffs\u2019 motion for a temporary restraining order under advisement \u2014 but still managed to saddle the Trump administration with a new set of bureaucratic hoops to jump through:<\/p>\n
No later than Monday, November 3, 2025, Defendants shall advise the court whether they will authorize at least reduced SNAP benefits for November and, if so, their timeline for determining whether to authorize only reduced SNAP benefits using the Contingency Funds or to authorize full SNAP benefits using both the Contingency Funds and additional available funds.<\/p>\n
According to Talwani\u2019s interpretation of things, the fact that Congress, in the 2024 Consolidated Appropriations Act, separately appropriated $6 billion to the SNAP program \u201cto remain available through September 30, 2026\u201d and \u201cbe placed in reserve for use only in such amounts and at such times as may become necessary to carry out program operations,\u201d the government is obligated to use this contingent reserve.<\/p>\n
In her view, \u201cthe statutory scheme does not contemplate an outright suspension of the program while some funds are available.\u201d<\/p>\n
But as Agriculture Secretary Brooke Robbins explained on Friday a) the \u2018contingency fund,\u2019 by law, can only be used if the program is already fully funded (it isn\u2019t, thanks to Democrats shutting down the government); and b) it would take at least $9.2 billion in funding to refill SNAP cards.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, over in Rhode Island, District Court Judge John McConnell Jr., an Obama appointee (notice a pattern?) issued his own ruling Friday afternoon in a nearly identical case brought by a coalition of cities and nonprofits:<\/p>\n
In Providence, Rhode Island, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell ruled from the bench in a case filed by cities and nonprofits that the program must be funded using at least the contingency funds, and he asked for an update on progress by Monday.<\/p>\n
Along with ordering the federal government to use emergency reserves to backfill SNAP benefits, McConnell ruled that all previous work requirement waivers must continue to be honored. The USDA during the shutdown has terminated existing waivers that exempted work requirements for older adults, veterans and others.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has yet to file an appeal in either case, but you can bet it\u2019s coming. And to think, just a week or so ago, Democrats were complaining that President Trump was a \u201cking.\u201d Now they want him to act like one despite the fact that, constitutionally speaking, only Congress can appropriate funds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a pair of rulings on Friday, two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to tap contingency funds to keep SNAP benefits flowing, with the program set to run out … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21017,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21020,"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21019\/revisions\/21020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cndailynews.store\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}