President Donald Trump’s administration is moving to suspend all Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits for roughly 42 million Americans amid the ongoing government shutdown—and he may not bring them back.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent a letter to states warning that a lapse in appropriations had resulted in “insufficient funds” to pay SNAP benefits through November. Over the weekend, states began to issue warnings to their most vulnerable residents that benefits would be suspended even sooner, Axios reported Monday.
In West Virginia, the Department of Human Services released a statement saying that the USDA had directed it to “delay the issuance of October 2025 SNAP benefits approved on or after October 16, 2025.”
The state had been notified that it was “very likely” that November benefits would also be delayed, if Congress failed to act “within the coming days,” the statement said.
In Pennsylvania, the Department of Human Services announced Friday that SNAP benefits would not be paid starting October 16 “until the federal government shutdown ends and funds are released to PA.”
“Because Republicans in Washington D.C., failed to pass a federal budget, causing the federal government shutdown, November 2025 SNAP benefits cannot be paid,” Pennsylvania’s statement said.
Texas, Minnesota, and Illinois also issued warnings about the pending halt to SNAP, Axios reported.
Amid his cost-cutting spree, Trump has moved to hold critical nutrition assistance hostage—and like every other federal program he’s threatened, SNAP is a hostage he’s more than happy to kill. Last week, Trump said that he planned to cut some “Democrat programs” and warned that they were “never going to come back in many cases.”
As with every other federal program Trump’s moved to permanently eliminate, he is not authorized to do so, because SNAP was created and funded by Congress. But that certainly hasn’t stopped him before.
The USDA is already rushing to implement new restrictions to SNAP benefits, as outlined in Trump’s “one big beautiful bill,” which was passed in July. Trump’s behemoth budget law slashed exemptions to the program’s work requirements by lowering the age of dependent children to 14, raising the age of the work requirement to 64, and ending the exemptions for veterans, homeless people, and young adults out of foster care. Earlier this month, USDA instructed states to implement new guidelines by November 1.
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