Federal judge orders Trump administration to fully fund SNAP benefits in November

A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration Thursday to fully fund November’s SNAP benefits, a decision the administration immediately appealed.

U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. gave the administration until Friday to make complete payments through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The ruling comes after the administration had proposed covering only 65% of the maximum benefit, which would have left some recipients with nothing for the month.

“The defendants failed to consider the practical consequences associated with this decision to only partially fund SNAP,” McConnell stated during his bench ruling. “They knew that there would be a long delay in paying partial SNAP payments and failed to consider the harms individuals who rely on those benefits would suffer.”

The judge delivered a sharp rebuke to the administration, noting the human cost of withholding food assistance. “Without SNAP funding for the month of November, 16 million children are immediately at risk of going hungry,” McConnell said. “This should never happen in America. In fact, it’s likely that SNAP recipients are hungry as we sit here.”

This ruling builds on a previous decision last week when judges in Rhode Island and Massachusetts ordered the administration to use emergency reserve funds rather than skip November’s benefits entirely due to the federal government shutdown. The program serves approximately 42 million Americans—about one in eight people nationwide—most of whom live in poverty.

After those initial rulings, the administration announced it would only fund 65% of maximum benefits, claiming it was Congress’s responsibility to appropriate full funding and that remaining reserve funds were needed for other child hunger programs. This partial funding approach would have created a complex situation where benefit reductions would be unevenly distributed, with some families receiving nothing and some smaller households getting as little as $16.

Vice President JD Vance criticized the court’s intervention, calling the ruling “absurd” and placing blame on congressional Democrats. “What we’d like to do is for the Democrats to open up the government of course, then we can fund SNAP,” Vance told reporters. “But in the midst of a shutdown, we can’t have a federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation.”

The legal challenge was brought by a coalition of cities and nonprofit organizations, who argued the administration’s approach was politically motivated. Attorney Kristin Bateman told the court, “What defendants are really trying to do is to leverage people’s hunger to gain partisan political advantage in the shutdown fight.”

For SNAP recipients like Carmel Scaife, a 56-year-old former day care owner in Milwaukee who relies on $130 monthly in SNAP benefits after suffering severe injuries in a car accident, any reduction in benefits creates immediate hardship. “That’ll take away from the bills that I pay,” she explained. “But that’s the only way I can survive.”

The case took several turns this week. Initially, the administration claimed in a court filing that implementing full benefits could take “weeks or even months” due to required calculations and system changes. Trump then appeared to threaten withholding benefits entirely unless Democrats agreed to reopen the government, though his press secretary later clarified that only future months’ payments were at risk if the shutdown continues.

Democracy Forward, an organization whose lawyers filed the challenge, indicated it would continue fighting if necessary. “We shouldn’t have to force the President to care for his citizens,” said President and CEO Skye Perryman, “but we will do whatever is necessary to protect people and communities.”

While the administration has filed a motion to appeal both Thursday’s ruling and the earlier decisions, this type of order typically isn’t subject to appeal, though the Trump administration has previously challenged similar rulings. Even with the court order, it remains unclear how quickly benefits will reach recipients, as it often takes a week or more for SNAP benefits to be loaded onto recipients’ debit cards once states initiate the process.

The monthly cost of fully funding SNAP ranges between $8.5 billion and $9 billion, with the emergency reserve fund containing more than $4.6 billion that judges had previously ordered to be used for November’s benefits.