Judge considers demand to force the government to keep funding SNAP food aid despite the shutdown

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BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge in Boston on Thursday challenged the Trump administration's argument that SNAP benefits could be suspended for the first time in the food aid program's history because of the government shutdown.

During a hearing over a request by 25 Democratic-led states to keep the funding rolling, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani told lawyers that if the government can't afford to cover the program, there's a process to follow rather than simply suspending all benefits. “The steps involve finding an equitable way of reducing benefits," said Talwani, who was nominated to the court by former President Barack Obama.

She said she expects to issue a ruling later Thursday.

The hearing came two days before the U.S. Department of Agriculture planned to freeze payments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program because it said it can't continue funding it due to the shutdown.

The program serves about 1 in 8 Americans and is a major piece of the nation’s social safety net. Word in October that it would be a Nov. 1 casualty of the shutdown sent states, food banks and SNAP recipients scrambling to figure out how to secure food. Some states said they would spend their own funds to keep versions of the program going.

The program costs around $8 billion per month.

The administration said it wasn’t allowed to use a contingency fund with about $5 billion in it for the program, which reversed a USDA plan from before the shutdown that said that money would be tapped to keep SNAP running. The plaintiffs — Democratic state attorneys general or governors from 25 states, as well as the District of Columbia — argued that not only could that contingency money be used, it must be. They also said a separate fund with around $23 billion could be tapped.

While they requested the funding continue only in their jurisdictions, the judge indicated that any ruling would apply nationwide.

Much of the hearing revolved around what Congress intended to do when the agency runs out of money for the program. Talwani pushed back against the Trump administration's argument that suspending the benefits was the best option, saying using emergency funds for benefits, albeit reduced, seemed to make the most sense.

“It’s hard to me to understand that this is not an emergency, when there is no money and a lot of people are needing their SNAP benefits,” she said.

In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that failing to maintain the SNAP funding was illegal, arbitrary and capricious, and would irreparably harm them. They also said cutting off the benefits would “cause deterioration of public health and well-being” of recipients, and that those costs would be borne by the states.

“With the suspension of SNAP benefits, the nutritional needs of millions of school aged children in Plaintiff States will not be met,” plaintiffs wrote. “Hungry children have a harder time paying attention, behaving, and learning in school. States will have to devote additional state resources, including healthcare expenditures and additional educational resources, to address these challenges.”

Plaintiffs also argued that more than 100,000 merchants in their states that rely on SNAP recipients would be harmed, especially around Thanksgiving.

Lawyers for the federal government argued that the plaintiffs want the SNAP benefits to be dispersed in full, which would be “a blatant violation of the Antideficiency Act, a criminal statute that forbids the United States from making such an obligation without an appropriation.”

“Even assuming USDA had discretion to reallocate these funds, the question of how to allocate limited funds among multiple crucial safety-net programs, when there are insufficient funds, is one that the agency is empowered to make — not a federal court, and certainly not Plaintiffs,” the government wrote.

They also argued that there isn’t enough available funding to cover November funding and that the court could force the USDA to shift funding dedicated to SNAP from child nutrition programs, which would raise "calamitous concerns.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how quickly the debit cards that beneficiaries use to buy groceries could be reloaded after the ruling. That process often takes one to two weeks.

To qualify for SNAP in 2025, a family of four's net income can't exceed the federal poverty line, which is about $31,000 per year. Last year, SNAP provided assistance to 41 million people, nearly two-thirds of whom were families with children, according to the lawsuit.

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Mulvihill reported from Haddonfield, New Jersey.