WASHINGTON — SNAP benefits have been thrown into chaos for 42 million people after the Trump administration told states not to make full food stamp payments for November.
Multiple states, including New York and Connecticut, began rolling out full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments — despite the Supreme Court on Friday pausing a previous order from the lower court the said full benefits should be paid for November.
“To the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized,” a Saturday memo from the Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP, said.
“States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025,” the memo went on. “Failure to comply with this memorandum may result in USDA taking various actions, including cancellation of the Federal share of State administrative costs and holding States liable.”
Only 65% of SNAP benefits will be funded for now, according to the Department of Agriculture memo, which was first reported by the New York Times.
Funding for SNAP lapsed on Nov. 1 due to the shutdown.
One in eight Americans receive SNAP benefits to help pay for food, and the average payment per household is $332 a month.
The Trump administration has tapped into the $4.65 billion contingency fund for SNAP, which is usually reserved for disasters, to keep the program partially afloat.
That’s not enough to pay for all recipients for all of November — the program costs $8.5 to $9 billion per month.
Last week, the Trump administration said it would not fill the gap in the funding from a different potential source — the Child Nutrition Program, due to uncertainty over whether Congress would replenish that money.
“Child Nutrition Program funds are not a contingency fund for SNAP,” the administration stressed in court documents last week.
“Using billions of dollars from Child Nutrition for SNAP would leave an unprecedented gap in Child Nutrition funding that Congress has never had to fill with annual appropriations, and USDA cannot predict what Congress will do under these circumstances.”
There were also concerns that using Child Nutrition Program funding to make up the SNAP shortfall would “stray from Congressional intent” in how that money was allocated.
Despite concerns about dipping into the program, which provides food to millions of children, elderly Americans, and disabled adults daily, a federal judge out of Rhode Island argued it is “highly unlikely” that using those funds for SNAP would lead to “immediate and permanent gaps in Child Nutrition Program funding.”
“This Court is not naïve to the administration’s true motivations,” Judge John McConnell, an Obama appointee, wrote in an order last Thursday. “Far from being concerned with Child Nutrition funding, these statements make clear that the administration is withholding full SNAP benefits for political purposes.”
Then, on Friday, liberal Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stepped in and temporarily paused that order until the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals makes a ruling on a challenge against it.
Just before that Supreme Court intervention, the Trump administration told states that SNAP would be fully funded.
The government has been in a record-breaking shutdown, which hit its 40th day Sunday, since Oct. 1 due to a funding dispute.
Senate Democrats have used the filibuster to block a House-passed “clean” stopgap measure to keep the government open while leveraging the fight to extract concessions from Republicans on healthcare.
Republicans need five defections in the Senate to get the government’s lights back on.
