Judge Orders Trump Administration to Fully Fund SNAP Benefits This Month

The Justice Department later said it would appeal, leaving the program known as SNAP in limbo.

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Thursday to fund food stamps in full for roughly 42 million low-income Americans, after admonishing the government for delaying aid under the nation’s largest anti-hunger program during the shutdown.

But the Justice Department almost immediately told the court that it would appeal the ruling. The move renewed fears that the poorest Americans would not receive their full benefits to purchase groceries this month, leaving many at risk of imminent and severe financial hardship.

The order, issued by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, marked his second legal rebuke of the administration. Reading from the bench after a short but tense hearing, he sharply criticized federal officials for ignoring his original order last week to quickly restart payments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP.

Judge McConnell attributed the inappropriate delay, in part, to an attempt by President Trump and his aides to disrupt the program “for political reasons.” He also pointed to public comments by Mr. Trump, who said at one point that he would halt all food stamp payments until Democrats struck a deal to end the shutdown, now in its sixth week.

“This should never happen in America,” the judge said, warning that millions of poor families could go hungry in the absence of reliable federal aid.

His order, issued soon after in writing, gave the government until Friday to make the SNAP payments to the states, which manage the provision of food stamps. For now, the directive appeared set to take effect as scheduled, though the Justice Department has not indicated if it will seek to pause it, as the agency prepares to appeal the matter.

“Faced with a choice between advancing relief and entrenching delay, it chose the latter — an outcome that predictably magnifies harm and undermines the very purpose of the program it administers,” the judge wrote in a 27-page order lambasting the administration.

Representatives for the White House, Agriculture Department and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

During a hearing on Thursday, Tyler Becker, a Justice Department lawyer, insisted that the government had complied with the court’s requirements. Mr. Becker, at times taking a defiant or defensive tone, attributed the problem to “Congress not having appropriated funds.”

The ruling marked a temporary and perhaps fleeting victory for cities, religious groups and nonprofits, which had sued the Trump administration over its original refusal to continue funding food stamps during the federal shutdown. Absent a court order, roughly one in eight Americans stood to lose access to monthly federal nutrition aid starting this month, leaving many at risk of hunger.

By its own admission, the Agriculture Department had ample funds to continue SNAP without interruption in November and to make its payments in full. But the program is one that Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have long sought to cut. And it took the intervention of two federal courts, including an order by Judge McConnell, before the administration moved to restart nutrition assistance, which it only agreed to provision on a partial basis.

Even the Trump administration acknowledged that its approach would delay the delivery of benefits by weeks, or perhaps months. Many local officials later found that the Agriculture Department had exacerbated the problem, by saddling SNAP with a set of new and complex rules during the shutdown that would punish low-income Americans.

Some families even stood to receive nothing in November because of the way the agency had newly required states to calculate partial benefits. While the Agriculture Department admitted late Wednesday that it had made a mistake, and updated its policies, the change only further bogged down the food stamp program and threatened to inflict harm on its recipients.

Returning to court this week, local officials asked the judge to force the government to pay SNAP benefits in full and without delay. They pointed to the availability of a second reserve at the Agriculture Department, totaling tens of billions of dollars, that the Trump administration had tapped earlier in the shutdown to sustain another federal nutrition program.

Following his first hearing, Judge McConnell ordered the government to explore the use of that money to pay food stamps on time. Reconvening on Thursday, the judge explicitly required it, criticizing the administration for a “problem that could have, and should have, been avoided.”

Kristin Bateman, a lawyer representing cities and nonprofits that had sued, accused the administration earlier in the hearing Thursday of trying to “leverage people’s hunger to gain partisan political advantage.”

Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward, a legal group representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement that no one should “have to force the president to care for his citizens, but we will do whatever is necessary to protect people and communities.”

Roughly two dozen states have also sued the Trump administration in a bid to force the release of SNAP benefits. On Thursday, they told a federal court in Massachusetts that the government’s actions would “lead to unnecessary, and in some cases, substantial, delays” — and they asked a judge to require the Agriculture Department to fund benefits fully.

“A judge in Rhode Island just stopped the federal government from starving millions of Americans,” said Letitia James, the Democratic attorney general of New York and one of the participants in the lawsuit. “I am relieved that people will get the food they need. But it is outrageous that it took a lawsuit to make the federal government feed its own people.”

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