United States Supreme Court, October 9, 2024 (Photo: Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday evening temporarily blocked a lower court’s ruling that the Trump administration would pay for a full month of food benefits, hours after some states began loading food assistance funds on payment cards held by 42 million Americans who exploit the program.
In a two-page document titled Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson granted the government’s request to stay Thursday’s order by Rhode Island Chief U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell until a lower appeals court considers the case.
His Thursday order forced the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reallocate funds from other programs to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) through November. The Trump administration said the ongoing government shutdown means it will not be able to pay November SNAP benefits.
“Plaintiffs argue that without the Court’s intervention, they will have to ‘contribute an estimated $4 billion’ by this evening to fund SNAP benefits through November,” wrote Jackson, an appointee of President Joe Biden.
To achieve a “quick resolution,” a pause is necessary, she wrote.
Jackson’s order froze SNAP payments to states that the USDA had seemed to authorize earlier Friday, before the administration filed an appeal to the Supreme Court.
It was unclear Friday evening what impact this might have on individual recipients’ electronic benefits transfer, or EBT, cards. In a press release issued earlier Friday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said some Californians began seeing full benefits on their cards after the lower court’s order.
Supreme Court Challenge
In a Friday evening briefing to the Supreme Court that followed a day of mixed messages from the administration, U.S. Attorney General D. John Sauer said the high court should step in to protect executive branch power from what he called McConnell’s unprecedented overreach.
By demanding that the USDA transfer money from a $23 billion fund for child feeding programs to cover November SNAP benefits, McConnell substituted his ruling for the agency, violating the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, Sauer argued.
Sauer said the department’s decision to pay partial November benefits from the roughly $5 billion remaining in the emergency fund rather than paying out about $9 billion for a full month of benefits was a decision made by the department and not subject to judicial review.
“USDA wisely determined that the best solution would be to combine partial SNAP payments with stable funding for child nutrition programs, rather than putting the latter at risk in order to guarantee full payments under the former,” Sauer wrote. “The district court would have done otherwise. But it had no legal basis to “replace the agency’s ruling with its own policy ruling.”
Confusion in the states
The lower court’s order — as well as a letter from the USDA at noon Friday to state SNAP administrators — also led to confusion among states, which began demanding SNAP funds in a way that Sauer likened to a bank run.
Several states have announced that full funding will be available and have started sending money to beneficiaries.
Immediately after McConnell’s executive order was published, Wisconsin required “100% SNAP benefits,” Sauer wrote. Even though the USDA system denied the application, the private sector payment processor “has made progress, and as a result, Wisconsin is now $20 million over its L/C balance,” he said.
Kansas decided to take a similar step. Sauer reports that some California SNAP users have received their full benefits.
16 million children on SNAP
On Thursday, McConnell ruled that the department’s decision to withhold SNAP benefits was arbitrary and capricious, the standard for judicial review of executive branch actions.
A $23 billion fund could save the $4 billion needed to fully utilize November SNAP benefits and maintain its intended goal well beyond the full month, so there was no need to keep the fund at that level, he wrote.
Instead, the decision “predictably magnifies the harm and undermines the very purpose of the program it administers,” McConnell wrote.
While federal agencies have judicial discretion, he said such “misuse” of decision-making power must be addressed.
“Contrary to Defendants’ claims, the 29 million children participating in the Child Nutrition Program are not at risk of immediate starvation if transferred,” he stated. “Instead, SNAP beneficiaries – 16 million of whom are children – will go hungry if they do not receive SNAP benefits this month.”
“Starve Peter to Feed Paul”
Sauer, however, responded that this was not McConnell’s order.
The trial judge’s ruling incorrectly assumed that Congress would eventually replenish funding for the child nutrition program, but the USDA was entitled to take a more cautious approach to protecting child nutrition funds, the attorney general said.
“Of course, it would not have been illegal for the agency to see things differently and refuse to starve Peter to feed Paul by way of tomorrow’s gambling school lunches in exchange for more SNAP money,” he wrote. “Indeed, this type of hard compromise is precisely the type of decision that Congress has left to agency discretion and placed beyond the reach of judges.”
While the USDA did not deny that it was able to reallocate the money for other purposes after Congress appropriated it, the government did not have to do so, Sauer said.
The government argued that leaving McConnell’s ruling in place would create a panic in the legal process.
“If this decision is upheld, it will metastasize and cause further chaos related to plant closures,” Sauer said. “Any federal program beneficiary can go to court, point to the agency’s general discretion to set funding priorities, and argue that in the absence of a priority
the program they chose was arbitrary and capricious.”
Trump’s social media post
Sauer also said McConnell read too much into Trump’s social media post this week, which threatened to withhold SNAP funding during the shutdowns.
McConnell cited in his order a post in which Trump stated that SNAP benefits “will only be awarded when Radical Left Democrats open the government, which they can easily do, and not before!” showed that the real purpose of the USDA’s move was for political influence.
Sauer said it was inappropriate.
“The court below was not justified in diverting billions of school lunch dollars to its preferred program based on a biased view of the administration’s “true motivations.”
In a statement, Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, an advocacy group that is spearheading the lawsuit to force SNAP payments, said the group will continue to work to “secure benefits for the American people.”
“The Trump-Vance administration continues to try – over and over again – to take food away from families, seniors, workers and children,” Perryman said. “And every time they tried, the courts told them what the law already makes clear: they can’t. American families should not be used as political props in a White House-induced shutdown.”
