Millions of low-income families around the country confronted new delays and disruptions to their food stamp benefits Saturday, after a late-night Supreme Court order allowed the Trump administration to continue withholding some funding for the nation’s largest anti-hunger program.
Only one day earlier, states including Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and Oregon had started sending full benefits to the roughly 1 in 8 Americans who receive aid each month, seeking to put an end to weeks of uncertainty and spare the poorest Americans from severe financial hardship.
But the process appeared to grind to a halt Friday night. The Supreme Court granted an emergency request by the Trump administration to pause an order issued by a federal judge, who had required the White House to fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
The decision once again upended food stamps, which are funded by the federal government and administered by states. It marked the latest turn in a weekslong legal battle waged by local leaders and nonprofits, which have filed multiple lawsuits to ensure that about 42 million low-income Americans would not lose their ability to buy groceries during the federal shutdown.
Throughout the closure, now the longest in history, the White House has refused to tap an ample store of leftover money that would prevent severe interruptions to the nutrition program. While the Supreme Court order was only temporary, it still appeared to freeze some of the work to restart food stamps, particularly in states that had not yet made full payments to all of their residents.
In effect, that meant some of the families that had already gone days without aid faced the prospect of an even longer wait.
In Ohio, state leaders initially told local families on SNAP that they could receive full food stamps by this coming week, only to have to announce that benefits had been “delayed” shortly after the Supreme Court order.
Others, like Michigan and North Carolina, had intended to make payments swiftly but had to abandon their effort by the weekend. In Massachusetts, officials said they had managed to send full aid to residents who were owed a payment by Friday. But state leaders said they remained unsure when benefits would reach low-income families that were scheduled to receive their food stamps this coming week.
In New Jersey, officials expressed fear that the federal government could target the firm that manages the cards used by SNAP recipients to purchase groceries, and potentially prevent the vendor from drawing down federal funds, upending the entire program. In many other states, including Louisiana and Texas, there was no updated information at all.
Even among food stamp recipients who had received their monthly allowances, there emerged early signs of disruption. That included in New York, which announced Friday — hours before the Supreme Court intervened — that it would furnish long-awaited grocery aid to residents. By Saturday, the state continued to forge ahead, in the hopes of releasing the food stamp money by the end of the weekend.
At the Empire Grocery &Deli in Manhattan, Duwanna Alford swiped her EBT card that morning, hoping she could use the $298 in her account to buy a breakfast sandwich for her 9-year-old grandson. But when she looked down at the payment screen, Alford, 58, saw her card had been declined.
A frequent visitor to that deli for more than a decade, she immediately pulled out her phone and called the hotline for SNAP, which administers the EBT cards. Alford said she got a busy signal.
On the other side of the counter, the cashier, Sanad Ali, 34, shook his head. He said he had seen many failed EBT transactions recently at his store, a lifeline for low-income families in the Chelsea neighborhood, where very few delis accept food stamps. The disruption, he added, had squeezed his business, too.
“You see how it’s quiet? You see how it’s dead?” he said.
The Agriculture Department did not respond to a request for comment.
By its own admission, the Trump administration can access tens of billions in leftover funds to finance SNAP benefits this month, sparing the program from any interruption. But President Donald Trump has declined to use that money, and his aides have claimed they cannot help, despite the fact that they have reworked other parts of the federal budget to sustain their priorities during the shutdown — including to pay officers conducting mass deportations.
Many Democrats have expressed public outrage over what they view as a double standard that ultimately reduced the nation’s work to combat hunger to a bargaining chip during the shutdown.
“President Trump needs to stop trying to force Americans to go hungry and pay full SNAP benefits for everyone,” said Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, a Democrat, who added in a statement that her state was assessing the implications of the court’s actions.
The legal wrangling over SNAP began Thursday, after a federal court in Rhode Island ordered the White House to tap two accounts at the Agriculture Department to fund SNAP benefits in full. Absent that order, which was the second issued by that judge, the government would have provided only partial benefits — with some families receiving nothing this month, and others waiting many weeks for assistance.
The Justice Department immediately challenged that ruling, but the appeals court declined Friday to block the judge’s order from taking immediate effect. The Trump administration then turned to the Supreme Court, where Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson granted a temporary pause, known as an administrative stay.
The justice, who handles emergency applications from courts in that part of the country, essentially left it to the appeals court to decide what to do. That means the panel of judges must determine whether to halt or preserve the original order requiring the White House to fund SNAP benefits in full this month. A decision is expected quickly.
But the result, in the meantime, was legal whiplash for the families who rely on the food stamp program, even in states that had recently announced that they would begin funding benefits in full. Those include California, Michigan, New Jersey and Wisconsin, where it remained unclear Saturday how the Supreme Court decision might immediately affect their low-income residents.
Many of those states had sued the Trump administration over SNAP funding in a case still being heard in a court in Massachusetts. On Saturday, they asked a judge there to issue an order prohibiting the Agriculture Department from punishing them for their handling of benefits during the shutdown.
“It is downright cruel that the Trump administration is still trying to cut off food benefits from millions of Americans,” Matthew J. Platkin, the attorney general of New Jersey, a Democrat, said in a statement.
He added that it was “unconscionable” that the Agriculture Department had issued conflicting guidance about payments, while promising that New Jersey would “not stop fighting to ensure that full SNAP benefits remain available to our residents.”
In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said in a statement Saturday that his state had been “working to process” benefits when the Supreme Court ruling came down, and he promised to “work quickly” once a final decision in the case was reached.
Gavin Lesnick, a spokesperson for Arkansas’ Department of Human Services, said that SNAP funds there remained on hold while officials awaited guidance from the Agriculture Department. Only then, Lesnick added, could Arkansas “finalize benefit amounts or an issuance date.”
In a handful of other states that had opted to fund SNAP using their own funds, there were no signs of trouble. In Connecticut, an official said the state planned to provide full benefits to residents by the end of Saturday, while in Vermont, a local lawmaker confirmed that the state had tapped its own money to front aid for the next two weeks.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Source: The Garden Island