Two federal judges ruled nearly simultaneously on Friday that President Donald Trump’s administration must to continue to fund SNAP, the nation’s biggest food aid program, using contingency funds during the government shutdown.
The rulings came a day before the U.S. Department of Agriculture planned to freeze payments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program because it said it could no longer keep funding it due to the shutdown.
The program serves about 1 in 8 Americans and is a major piece of the nation’s social safety net. Word in October that it would be a Nov. 1 casualty of the shutdown sent states, food banks and SNAP recipients scrambling to figure out how to secure food. Some states said they would spend their own funds to keep versions of the program going.
The program costs around $8 billion per month nationally.
Ashleigh Shaw, with the Bread and Roses food pantry in Lawrence, said she was cautiously optimistic after the rulings.
“We know it’s still going to be a hard weekend for a lot of families, people that were expecting to get that funding on Monday, or Saturday and Sunday,” she said. “But hopefully by Monday that can kind of be resolved and at least the emergency funds can be used up.”
It wasn’t immediately clear how quickly the debit cards that beneficiaries use to buy groceries could be reloaded after the ruling. That process often takes one to two weeks.
Shaw told GBH News that she was still looking for a long-term resolution.
“We’re still making contingency plans just because we know that the funding that is being released from the emergency funding, it won’t help in the long term. It’s only covered about half the month,” she said.
At Project Bread, CEO Erin McAleer also said the timing of any restored funding is an unknown.
“Those pantries and emergency supports that have been set up, I think, will be necessary to get through the next few days,” she said. “Hopefully, early next week we’ll have more of an understanding of exactly when people are going to continue to get SNAP and in what capacity.”
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell was among 25 Democratic state attorneys general or governors, as well as the District of Columbia, challenging the plan to pause the program, contending that the administration has a legal obligation to keep it running in their jurisdictions.
The administration said it wasn’t allowed to use a contingency fund with about $5 billion in it for the program, which reversed a USDA plan from before the shutdown that said money would be tapped to keep SNAP running. The Democratic officials argued that not only could that money be used, it must be.
A federal judge in Rhode Island ruled from a bench that the program must be funded using at least the contingency funds — and asked for an update on progress by Monday.
A Boston-based judge also gave the administration until Monday to say whether it would partially pay for the benefits for November with contingency money or fund them fully with additional funds.
Shortly after the rulings, Campbell said she and the courts would be watching the federal government on its next steps.
“The court has made it clear that they must fund the program, at least partially, and should do so as quickly as possible,” the attorney general said at a press conference Friday afternoon. “If they choose not to fully fund this program, or don’t act quick enough, the health and well-being of millions of Americans who will go hungry will be on their hands, not because they couldn’t help them, but because they chose not to.”
Gov. Maura Healey issued a statement also accusing the Trump administration of choosing not to continue paying SNAP benefits.
“I’m grateful to Attorney General Campbell and her colleagues for taking the President to court,” the statement said. “I continue to urge [President Trump] to immediately restore full benefits as soon as possible.”
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Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, New Jersey; and Kruesi from Providence, Rhode Island. Associated Press reporter Lisa Mascaro in Washington, D.C., contributed.
