Washington — A federal judge on Friday said the Trump administration is required by law to use contingency funds to pay at least partial benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during the government shutdown, and gave the government until Monday to tell the court whether it plans to do so.
In a 15-page order, Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts stopped short of ordering the administration to send SNAP payments on Saturday. But she rejected the government’s argument that a $5 billion contingency fund cannot be used to fund SNAP benefits during the lapse in appropriations.
“At core, Defendants’ conclusion that USDA is statutorily prohibited from funding SNAP because Congress has not enacted new appropriations for the current fiscal year is erroneous,” Talwani wrote. “To the contrary, Defendants are statutorily mandated to use the previously appropriated SNAP contingency reserve when necessary and also have discretion to use other previously appropriated funds.”
Talwani wrote that “the court will allow Defendants to consider whether they will authorize at least reduced SNAP benefits for November, and report back to the court no later than” Nov. 3.
Roughly 42 million Americans rely on SNAP to help buy food, with recipients receiving an average of $187 a month on a prepaid card. Many families rely on those benefits as their main source of money for food. The Trump administration said money for the program was due to expire on Saturday because of the ongoing government shutdown, now on its 31st day.
Talwani’s order arose from a suit filed by two dozen states and the District of Columbia earlier this week. They asked the court to require the administration to tap into emergency funding to keep SNAP money flowing to states, which use the funds to administer their food stamp programs.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, said in a memo last week that “the well has run dry” and that November benefits would not be paid without an end to the shutdown. Administration officials and Republicans in Congress have said that roughly $5 billion in a contingency fund could not legally be used to cover the shortfall, an assertion that the states and Democrats disputed.
“By law, the contingency fund can only flow when the underlying fund is flowing,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said at the Capitol on Friday. “Even if it could flow, it doesn’t even cover half of the month of November. So here we are again, in two weeks, having the exact same conversation.”
Talwani, the judge, rejected that argument in her ruling: “[U]nder Defendants’ statutory construction, the use of the separately appropriated contingent reserve to fund SNAP benefits is somehow predicated on Congress’s annual appropriation of funds to the SNAP program. Congress placed no such restrictions in the 2024 Consolidated Appropriations Act.”
The states argued that the administration’s decision to cut off food stamp payments was unlawful and threatened to deprive millions of Americans of essential food benefits that help protect against food insecurity and hunger.
“Shutting off SNAP benefits will cause deterioration of public health and well-being,” state officials wrote in their lawsuit. “Ultimately, the States will bear costs associated with many of these harms. The loss of SNAP benefits leads to food insecurity, hunger, and malnutrition, which are associated with numerous negative health outcomes in children, such as poor concentration, decreased cognitive function, fatigue, depression, and behavioral problems.”