The United States government will partially fund food benefits for low-income Americans after two judges ruled the programme must continue amid a languishing government shutdown, US President Donald Trump’s administration has said.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – the country’s flagship food aid scheme, serving one in eight Americans each month – was set to freeze on November 1, after the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) said on October 10 that it would not be able to fund the programme if the shutdown continued.
On Friday, federal judges in the states of Massachusetts and Rhode Island doled out separate but similar rulings that told the federal government to cover the benefits by drawing from contingency funds.
SNAP, known colloquially as food stamps, costs more than $8bn to deploy monthly and covers about $190 or $356 in groceries per household. The benefits are typically loaded onto debit cards.
In a filing on Monday to the Rhode Island court, the USDA agreed to “fulfill its obligation to expend the full amount of SNAP contingency funds today”.
The administration will use up a fund totalling about $5bn, but not other funds that would allow it to fully fund SNAP, the filing said.
Because the process of loading the cards can take up to two weeks, it’s not yet clear when beneficiaries may begin to receive funds again – nor how much money will ultimately be included.
The judges had given the Trump administration until Monday to address how it could partially fund SNAP, with US District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston ruling a suspension of the programme was “unlawful” and “erroneous”.
“This court has now clarified that Defendants are required to use those Contingency Funds as necessary for the SNAP program,” she added.
In Rhode Island, US District Judge John McConnell reached a similar conclusion and asked the administration for an update on Monday, saying in a virtual hearing that “it is beyond argument that irreparable harm will begin to occur” if SNAP is paused.
The rulings came in response to separate challenges to the Trump administration’s suspension of benefits.
Trump had initially claimed on his Truth Social platform on Friday that the judges’ decisions were “conflicting”, and he used the potential loss of SNAP to take a shot at “Radical Democrats”.
Right-wing disinformation about food stamps has meanwhile surfaced online in recent days, with one viral chart claiming that “Afghan”, “Somali” and “Iraqi” people were the biggest beneficiaries of SNAP.
In fact, USDA data show that white people use SNAP the most, accounting for more than 35 percent of beneficiaries.
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