The Trump administration on Nov. 7 asked an appeals court to put on hold a judge’s order that requires the federal government to fully fund food stamps in November.
The emergency motion was filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
The motion comes after Judge John McConnell Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to pay states the money by Nov. 7 for distribution to the nation’s roughly 42 million Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants.
“People have gone without for too long. Not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable,” McConnell said.
USDA officials had declined to fund SNAP amid the government shutdown, arguing that they could not use contingency money or revenue from tariffs for the program. McConnell, in response to a lawsuit, recently said that the administration could either partially fund November benefits with contingency money or fully fund benefits for the month with that money and the tariff revenue.
The government said in the new motion that it cannot spend money that Congress has not authorized it to spend. Congress, it said, has not appropriated SNAP funds to cover benefits for the current federal fiscal year that began on Oct. 1.
“Even after exhausting the entirety of the SNAP contingency reserve—a step that the Department of Agriculture took earlier this week in response to a temporary restraining order issued by the district court—there is only enough money to pay partial November SNAP benefits. This is a crisis, to be sure, but it is a crisis occasioned by congressional failure, and that can only be solved by congressional action,” the motion said.
Instead, a single federal district judge is making “a mockery of the separation of powers” by ordering USDA to make up for the SNAP shortfall “by transferring billions of dollars that were appropriated for different, equally critical food-security programs—and to do so within just one business day (i.e., by today),” it added.
The separation of powers is a constitutional doctrine that divides the government into three branches to prevent any single branch from accumulating too much power.
Courts are neither allowed to appropriate funds nor to spend them, but are responsible for enforcing the law. The law specifically states that SNAP benefits are subject to currently available appropriations, the motion said.
When there is a shortfall in funding, regulations require USDA to direct the states to reduce benefit payments, “which is precisely what USDA did this week,” it said.
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