Christine Tully, 78, worried that November would come but her food assistance from the federal government would not.
Maybe she could will a good outcome, she thought, by writing down her grocery list for the month as usual. Chicken. Apple juice. Carrots. And if she could find them on sale, she wrote, “a pack of three steaks.”
Millions of low-income Americans are in a similar position as the new month begins, wondering how long they will have to wait for a vital type of support.
“I’m just so confused,” Ms. Tully, a great-grandmother and retired diner cook in Miami, said on Friday, trying to figure out the status of the federal program that provides her with $285 in monthly help. “How did we get here?”
A judge in Rhode Island on Friday ordered the Trump administration to keep paying for food stamps during the shutdown, finding that it had acted unlawfully by refusing to tap emergency funds to sustain the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
Late on Friday, President Trump said that the administration would provide the funding for food stamps in November once a federal court could clarify “how we can legally” supply the money. But he indicated that a delay was inevitable.
“It is already delayed enough due to the Democrats keeping the Government closed through the monthly payment date,” he wrote on social media, “and, even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while states get the money out.”
Typically, the issuance of SNAP benefits involves state agencies, vendors who load the program’s debit-style cards, grocery stores, other retailers and the federal government.
Even if SNAP benefits are disbursed at some point this month, there remain broader concerns about how the most vulnerable Americans will weather the effects of the federal shutdown and other cuts to the country’s social safety net.
“It feels like we’re standing on the shore, and we see a tidal wave coming,” said Robyn Hyden, the director of Alabama Arise, an organization that advocates for policies to help low-income people. “But we don’t exactly know how it is going to hit, where it’s going to hit, because there’s still uncertainty over whether they’re going to be able to fix any of this.”
The disruption to SNAP is just one example of how federal programs have been imperiled — not just by the month-old shutdown, but also by the administration’s efforts to curtail spending on social programs as part of the domestic policy and tax cut law that President Trump signed in July.
Federal funding for several antipoverty programs will dry up this month because of the shutdown, affecting tens of millions of Americans who depend on subsidies for child care and utilities as well as food.
Some 6.7 million women and young children who participate in a grocery voucher program known as WIC may lose access to infant formula, food, breastfeeding support and health care screenings. As the weather turns colder, nearly six million households that receive help to pay for utility bills through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program may face higher heating costs or service cutoffs.
And for more than 65,000 children and families enrolled in Head Start early-education programs that depend on immediate federal funding, the shutdown means finding new child care options as early as next week.
The disruptions to government programs for the poor coincide with sweeping changes to two of the largest safety nets — Medicaid and SNAP — brought by the Republicans’ domestic policy law.
The law cut federal spending on Medicaid by roughly $1 trillion, and on SNAP by $186 billion. It also placed additional work requirements on recipients and reduced eligibility for both programs. The SNAP changes are set to take effect on Saturday. The changes are expected to reduce enrollment in both programs by millions of people over a decade.
This week, state and local governments, nonprofits and recipients of SNAP benefits were scrambling to find alternatives to fill the void. Until now, the benefits had continued without interruption since the Food Stamp Act of 1964 made the program permanent.
Officials and advocates for low-income people warned that any interruption of benefits would push the country into unfamiliar territory, heightening the risk of widespread hunger and threatening to overwhelm food banks already strained by rising food prices and recent cuts to federal programs.
In previous shutdowns, the fate of SNAP had caused less concern because of the relative brevity of those closures and a broadly shared assumption that the government would continue to fund such programs, said Christopher Bosso, a professor of food policy at Northeastern University and the author of a book on the history of federal food assistance.
“There’s always — always — some money,” he said. “Everybody understood that.”
But after the current shutdown began on Oct. 1, White House officials argued that safeguarding SNAP benefits was beyond their control, even as the administration went to unusual lengths to reorganize the budget to maintain other programs. Vice President JD Vance insisted this week that President Trump had “tried to do everything” in his power to make the shutdown as “painless as possible.”
Critics dismissed that assertion, saying that the benefits were endangered because the Trump administration was unwilling to draw upon reserves that had been set aside to fund SNAP during emergencies.
Legal challenges were brought by about two dozen states, charity organizations supporting the poor and the program’s beneficiaries, all of whom contended that there was a legal and moral imperative to preserve benefits and that the billions of dollars in reserves were there precisely for circumstances like these.
In one of the cases, Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts expressed skepticism of the Trump administration’s arguments that legal obstacles and technical hurdles stood in the way of its ability to deploy those funds. Siding with roughly two dozen states, she required the administration to explain by Monday how it would fund aid in November.
A separate ruling by the Rhode Island judge, Judge John J. McConnell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, said the Trump administration “must distribute the contingency money timely, or as soon as possible, for the Nov. 1 payments to be made.”
In Durham County, N.C., where some 32,000 residents rely on federal food assistance, the local social services office has been bombarded with calls and visits.
Maggie Clapp, the county’s social services director, recounted on Friday the questions people had been asking in recent days: “How am I going to feed my family? What am I going to do? Am I going to pay rent but not my grocery bills?”
“They’re firing off questions because they’re in crisis,” she said.
She has struggled to give them a firm answer.
Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C.
Linda Qiu is a Times reporter who specializes in fact-checking statements made by politicians and public figures. She has been reporting and fact-checking public figures for nearly a decade.
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
The post Uncertainty Persists for Americans Waiting for Monthly Food Stamps appeared first on New York Times.
