PROVIDENCE, R.I. — President Donald Trump’s administration said Monday that it will partially fund SNAP for November, after two judges issued rulings requiring the government to keep the nation’s largest food aid program running.
A filing in a Rhode Island U.S. District Court from Trump administration Deputy Undersecretary for Food Nutrition and Consumer Services Patrick Penn says, “Per orders issued by the United States District Courts for the Districts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, FNS intends to deplete SNAP contingency funds completely and provide reduced SNAP benefits for November 2025.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, had planned to freeze payments starting Nov. 1 because it said it could no longer keep funding it during the federal government shutdown.
The program serves about 1 in 8 Americans and is a major piece of the nation’s social safety net. It costs more than $8 billion per month nationally. The government says an emergency fund it will use has $4.65 billion — enough to cover about half the normal benefits.
Exhausting the fund potentially sets the stage for a similar situation in December if the shutdown isn’t resolved by then.
It’s not clear exactly how much beneficiaries will receive, nor how quickly they will see value show up on the debit cards they use to buy groceries. November payments have already been delayed for millions of people.
“The Trump Administration has the means to fund this program in full, and their decision not to will leave millions of Americans hungry and waiting even longer for relief as government takes the additional steps needed to partially fund this program,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, who led a coalition of Democratic state officials in one of the lawsuits that forced the funding, said in a statement.
Details on how payments still to come
The administration said it would provide details to states on Monday on calculating the per-household partial benefit. The process of loading the SNAP cards, which involves steps by state and federal government agencies and vendors, can take up to two weeks in some states.
The DOJ said in another filing it would soon produce a “table” for states to calculate the reduced benefits available for each household, and that it would begin disbursing the funds once that table is produced.
But the USDA warned in a court filing that it could take weeks or even months for states to make all the system changes to send out reduced benefits. The average monthly benefit is usually about $190 per person.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a news conference that it would take his state about a week to load benefit cards once the funding is made available.
“These are folks who are hungry, and every day matters,” Bonta said.
Gov. Maura Healey blasted the administration, saying the benefits never should have been suspended in the first place.
“The Trump Administration just admitted what we have known all along – this funding was available this entire time and the President could have been using it to prevent American families from going hungry. Families should never have been put through this, and it shouldn’t have taken a Court order to force President Trump to feed American families like every president before him,” Healey said.
Shutdown negotiations
Trump said in an interview aired on Sunday that he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats who are demanding negotiations to extend the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies. Echoing congressional Republicans, the president said on CBS’ “60 Minutes” he’ll negotiate only when the government is reopened.
Trump said Democrats “have lost their way” and predicted they’ll capitulate to Republicans.
“I think they have to,” Trump said. “And if they don’t vote, it’s their problem.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters Monday that he was “optimistic” that the Senate could vote to reopen the government by the end of the week.
The Senate has voted repeatedly on a continuing resolution to reopen the government, but the measure has failed without Democrats crossing the aisle to provide enough votes to overcome the filibuster.
Thune added, “If we don’t start seeing some progress or some evidence of that by at least the middle of this week, it’s hard to see how we would finish anything by the end of the week.”
Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday there’s a group of people talking about ”a path to fix the health care debacle” and a commitment from Republicans not to fire more federal workers. But it’s unclear if those talks could produce a meaningful compromise.
The current shutdown, which entered its second month on Nov.1, stands to become a record after Tuesday if the standoff continues.
A 35-day shutdown that lasted from December 2018 to January 2019 ended when Trump retreated from his demands over a border wall. That came amid intensifying delays at the nation’s airports and multiple missed paydays for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on ABC’s “This Week” that there have already been delays at several airports “and it’s only going to get worse.”
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