The state of Oregon issued full November SNAP benefits to all recipients Friday morning. The state was one of the first to provide funds.
The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked on Nov. 8 a lower court’s order that the Trump administration pay for a full month of food benefits, hours after some states began loading nutrition assistance funds on payment cards held by the 42 million Americans who use the program.
In a two-page filing, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accepted the government’s request to pause a Thursday order from Rhode Island Chief U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell while a lower appeals court hears the case.
His order Thursday compelled the U.S. Department of Agriculture to transfer funds from other programs to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, for November. The Trump administration had said the ongoing government shutdown meant it could not pay November SNAP benefits.
“The applicants assert that, without intervention from this Court, they will have to ‘transfer an estimated $4 billion by tonight’ to fund SNAP benefits through November,” Jackson, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, wrote.
A stay is needed to reach an “expeditious resolution,” she wrote.
Jackson’s order froze SNAP payments to states that the USDA had appeared to authorize earlier Friday before the administration appealed to the high court.
It was unclear Friday night what effect that might have on individual recipients’ electronic benefit transfer, or EBT, cards. A press release earlier Friday from California Gov. Gavin Newsom said some Californians had begun to see full benefits on their cards, following an order from a lower court.
16 million children on SNAP
McConnell on Thursday had ruled the department’s decision to withhold SNAP benefits arbitrary and capricious — the standard for judicial review of an executive branch action.
The $23 billion fund could spare the $4 billion needed to make November SNAP benefits whole and still maintain its intended purpose well beyond the month, so there was no need to maintain that fund at that level, he wrote.
Instead, the decision “predictably magnifies harm and undermines the very purpose of the program it administers,” McConnell wrote.
While federal agencies are due discretion from courts, such a “poor” use of decision-making power must be remedied, he said.
“Contrary to what the Defendants claim, 29 million children who participate in the Child Nutrition Program are not at risk of immediately going hungry in the event of a transfer,” he said. “Instead, SNAP recipients —16 million of whom are children — will go hungry if they do not receive their SNAP benefits this month.”
‘Starve Peter to feed Paul’
But U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer responded that was not McConnell’s call to make.
The trial judge’s ruling improperly assumed that Congress would eventually replenish the child nutrition program fund, but the USDA was within its right to take a more cautious approach toward protecting the child nutrition funding, said the solicitor general.
Allowing McConnell’s ruling to stand would invite a stampede to litigation, the government maintained.
“If allowed to stand, this decision will metastasize and sow further shutdown chaos,” Sauer said. “Every beneficiary of a federal program could run into court, point to an agency’s general discretion to prioritize funding, and claim that failing to prioritize their chosen program was arbitrary and capricious.”
Trump social media post
Sauer also said McConnell read too much into Trump’s social media post this week that threatened to withhold SNAP funding for the duration of the shutdowns.
McConnell cited in his order the post, in which Trump said SNAP benefits would “be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!” showed the true purpose of the USDA move was political leverage.
Sauer said that was improper.
“The court below had no basis to transfer of billions of dollars from school lunches to its preferred program based on its tendentious view of ‘the administration’s true motivations.’”
In a statement, Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, an advocacy group that is leading the litigation to force SNAP payments, said the group would continue to work to “secure benefits for the American people”
“The Trump-Vance administration continues to attempt — over and over — to take food out of the hands of families, seniors, workers, and children,” Perryman said. “And every time they tried, the courts told them what the law already makes clear: they cannot. American families should not be used as political props in a shutdown that this White House manufactured.”
By Jacob Fischler, Oregon Capital Chronicle