(CNN) — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Friday temporarily paused a lower court order that required the Trump administration to cover full food stamp benefits for tens of millions of Americans in November, siding with the administration on a short-term basis in a legal fight that has quickly become a defining confrontation of the government shutdown.
The upshot is that the US Department of Agriculture will not have to immediately honor a lower court order that required it to transfer $4 billion to the key food assistance program by the end of the day. The decision, while temporary, could put at risk the full benefits for millions of Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to feed themselves and their families.
The order does not resolve the underlying legal questions raised by the case – and the Trump administration has already committed to using the program’s contingency fund to partially pay benefits. Rather, Jackson’s “administrative stay” freezes any additional action by the administration to give an appeals court additional time to review the case.
Jackson is the justice assigned to handle emergency appeals from the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals.
The legal fight over food stamps has emerged as a central pressure point between all three branches during the historically long government shutdown because it is one of the easiest to understand and most tangible impacts of that impasse so far. At stake is food assistance that nearly 42 million Americans rely on.
It’s unclear how the case will ultimately impact the billions of dollars spent in federal SNAP funding.
Complying with the lower court
The Trump administration’s emergency request to the justices came hours after the USDA told states that it was working to comply with the ruling to fully fund the program that was issued a day earlier by US District Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island.
This latest legal move has injected more uncertainty into whether food stamp recipients would see their full allotments anytime soon.
The administration had made a similar emergency appeal to a Boston-based federal appeals court Friday morning, but the court had not yet weighed in by the time the USDA sent the guidance, which also said the process to make full funding for November available should be completed later on Friday. The appeals court, in a brief order Friday night, declined to put the payments on hold temporarily while it reviewed the case “as quickly as possible.”
In its emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, the administration said, “Such a funding lapse is a crisis. But it is a crisis occasioned by congressional failure and one that can only be solved through congressional action.”
“The district court’s ruling,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court, “is untenable at every turn.”
The administration moved to appeal McConnell’s order after he ruled on Thursday that the government had to provide full SNAP benefits for November, instead of issuing only partial benefits as he had mandated days earlier.
Rushing to fund full benefits
Before the latest legal twist, several states had rushed to start issuing full SNAP payments to their residents. But that has caused problems, according to the administration’s filing to the Supreme Court.
Sauer told the court that Wisconsin immediately filed for 100% of its residents’ benefits to be placed on their electronic benefit transfer cards. But the USDA rejected the request because it had not yet had time to comply with McConnell’s order. That resulted in the state overdrawing its letter of credit by $20 million.
Similarly, Kansas issued full benefits worth nearly $32 million to approximately 86,000 households in the state, Sauer said.
These actions have hurt states that did not move quickly to issue benefits, he continued. They will be unable to receive funding to provide partial payments to their residents under McConnell’s prior order.
Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly reacted to the Supreme Court’s action in a statement Friday night, saying, “Today, in accordance with a court’s order and after receiving guidance from the USDA, Kansas sent full November SNAP benefits to all eligible Kansans. These Kansans, most of them children, seniors or people with disabilities, were struggling to put food on their plates.”
Other states have also promised beneficiaries would start receiving their full allotments as soon as Friday or over the weekend.
Pennsylvania residents who should have already received their SNAP benefits this month will start seeing their full payments hit their electronic benefit transfer cards on Friday, Gov. Josh Shapiro announced at a press conference earlier in the day.
“We are hoping that by this evening, by midnight or so, that all of those individuals who were owed money over the first week or so of this month, who hadn’t gotten it from the federal administration, are going to get their money,” Shapiro said.
Meanwhile, the governors of Maryland and New York said beneficiaries could expect to start seeing their benefits over the weekend.
The food stamp program has been in legal limbo since last month, when officials said recipients would not receive their payments for November due to the lapse in appropriations for the government.
The decision prompted two lawsuits, with two federal judges ruling last week that the agency must at least tap into contingency funds to provide partial benefits for this month or, at its discretion, use other revenue to fully fund November’s allotments.
The agency opted to fund partial benefits, but warned it could take weeks or months for some states to recalculate the allotments and distribute the assistance. The plaintiffs in the Rhode Island case raced back to McConnell earlier this week to argue that he should require the USDA to fully fund the benefits to get the money out the door quickly.
McConnell obliged. He ruled the administration had not worked fast enough to ensure at least partial benefits reached millions of the program’s recipients and that it had acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” when it decided against providing the full benefits this month.
“People have gone without for too long,” McConnell said during a hearing Thursday. “Not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable.”
Under McConnell’s ruling, the government was required to transfer additional unused tariff revenue used to support child nutrition programs in order to pay full SNAP benefits for November.
This story has been updated with more details.
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