More than 40 million Americans — that’s 1 in 8 people in this country — count on help from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to afford groceries each month. Many of them will wake up this morning to find their November benefits have not arrived. That’s because, for weeks, the Trump Administration has been saying it won’t provide those benefits, claiming that the government shutdown prevents funding them.
On Friday, in separate rulings, two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to use emergency funding to pay SNAP benefits. They confirmed the administration is legally required to tap contingency funds that Congress provided for precisely this scenario. They also confirmed that the administration can transfer additional funding to SNAP — as they did recently to shore up the WIC program — to supplement those contingency funds, which alone aren’t enough to fund full benefits.
About 16 million children get food assistance through SNAP each month.
Friday evening, the president wrote on TruthSocial, “I have instructed our lawyers to ask the Court to clarify how we can legally fund SNAP as soon as possible.” But there’s no need for more deliberation or clarification. The administration is sitting on billions in contingency funds and needs to release them. The administration could have, and should have, taken steps weeks ago to be ready to use these funds. To further delay will rip away vital food assistance from millions of low-income families right before the holidays.
About 16 million children get food assistance through SNAP each month. So do eight million older adults and four million people with disabilities. SNAP also helps millions of low-income workers and their families. In fact, most SNAP participants who can work do work, with many in industries such as service or sales, where the pay is often low and the work hours inconsistent.
SNAP households have very low incomes. To qualify, a household’s gross monthly income generally must be at or below 130 percent of the poverty line, or roughly $2,850 a month (about $34,600 a year) for a three-person household. More than half of SNAP benefits go to households that are deeply poor, with incomes below 50 percent of the poverty line.
People of all racial and ethnic backgrounds participate in SNAP. Roughly 42% of the heads of SNAP households are white, 25 percent are Black, 23 percent are Latino, and 4 percent are Asian. SNAP participants come from all kinds of communities, rural, suburban, and urban.
SNAP benefits are modest: just $6.20 per person per day. But even that limited aid protects families from hunger and hardship by helping them afford enough food and freeing up room in their budgets for other basic needs such as rent, utilities and medical care. Participating in SNAP reduces the share of households who are food insecure (meaning they don’t have access to adequate food) by up to 30%. It’s even more effective for children and for families with “very low food insecurity,” where one or more household members have to eat less due to lack of money.
Not only are contingency funds available, but the administration is legally required to use them. In short, SNAP helps millions of families lift themselves out of poverty. Its positive effects aren’t limited to its recipients either. The program also stabilizes the economy during downturns and supports businesses where SNAP dollars are spent, as well as their suppliers. But all those benefits hinge on continued federal funding. The administration’s decision to starve SNAP during the shutdown is consistent with the president’s — and congressional Republicans’ — treatment of the program in their “One Big Beautiful Bill” enacted in July. It imposed the biggest cuts in SNAP’s 50-year history, including expanding punitive policies that take SNAP away from people who don’t meet rigid, paperwork-laden work requirements to apply to parents of many school-age children, adults as old as 64 and veterans. My Center on Budget and Policy Priorities colleagues and I estimate that roughly four million people, including one million children, will see the food assistance they need to afford groceries terminated or reduced substantially under the new law. The law’s SNAP cuts, plus its massive cuts in health care coverage, are designed to partly offset the cost of enormous tax cuts favoring wealthy households. Those making more than $1 million a year, for example, will get an average tax break of $100,000 apiece, while millions more struggle to put food on the table. The administration created this crisis and can just as easily solve it. First, USDA should release SNAP contingency funds as the law allows. USDA should also augment those funds by using its discretion to transfer other funding to SNAP, as it did for WIC. The millions of people who count on SNAP deserve no less. And the American people deserve a government that will never inflict unnecessary hardship on vulnerable people.
Ty Jones Cox
Ty Jones Cox is the vice president for food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. 
