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The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily blocked Friday night 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.
High court challenge
In a Friday evening brief to the Supreme Court that followed a day of conflicting messages from the administration, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the high court should step in to protect the executive branch’s power from what he characterized as unprecedented overreach by McConnell.
By demanding that the USDA transfer money from a $23 billion fund for child nutrition programs to pay for November SNAP benefits, McConnell substituted his judgment for the agency’s, a violation of the constitutional separation-of-powers doctrine, Sauer argued.
The department’s decision to pay for partial November benefits, by using the roughly $5 billion remaining in a contingency fund, rather than by paying about $9 billion for a full month of benefits, was its decision to make and not reviewable by courts, Sauer said.
“USDA reasonably determined that the best course was to combine partial SNAP payments with stable funding for Child Nutrition Programs—versus jeopardize the latter to guarantee full payments with the former,” Sauer wrote. “The district court would have done otherwise. But it had no legal basis to ‘substitute its own policy judgment for that of the agency.’”
Confusion in states
The lower court order — as well a midday Friday letter from the USDA to state SNAP administrators — had also led to confusion among states who started to demand SNAP funds in a way Sauer compared to a bank run.
Several states announced full funding would be available and began sending money to beneficiaries.
Immediately after McConnell’s order was published, Wisconsin demanded “100% of SNAP benefits,” Sauer wrote. Even though the USDA system rejected the file, the private-sector processor of the payment “moved forward, resulting in Wisconsin currently overdrawing its letter of credit by $20 million,” he said.
Kansas made a similar move. And some California SNAP users received their full benefits, according to Sauer’s brief.
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 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.
“It obviously was not unlawful for the agency to see things differently—and refuse to starve Peter to feed Paul, by gambling school lunches tomorrow in exchange for more SNAP money today,” he wrote. “Indeed, that sort of hard tradeoff is precisely the sort of decision that Congress committed to agency discretion and placed beyond the reach of judges.”
While the USDA had not denied that it was able to move money to different priorities after Congress had appropriated it, the government did not have to do so, Sauer said.
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, News From The States
