The Trump administration said Monday that it will partially fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program using a $5.3 billion contingency fund, but it could take weeks or longer for the money to start flowing to roughly 42 million beneficiaries.
About $4.65 billion of the contingency fund will go directly toward benefit payments, enough to cover about half the amount scheduled to be paid to SNAP beneficiaries in November. The remaining $600 million will go toward state-level administrative expenses and food aid for Puerto Rico and American Samoa.
The announcement came after a federal judge on Friday ordered the White House to use the contingency account to fund the food aid program, despite protestations from the administration that it lacked the authority to do so.
In a statement filed with the court, Patrick Penn, a Department of Agriculture official who oversees SNAP, said the administration would deplete its contingency fund. “This means that no funds will remain for new SNAP applicants certified in November, disaster assistance, or as a cushion against the potential catastrophic consequences of shutting down SNAP entirely,” he said.
Penn explained that his department must notify states that the November payments will be reduced, and the states must then “recode their eligibility systems to adjust for the reduced maximum allotments” — a process that could take time to complete.
“There are procedural difficulties that States will likely experience which would affect November SNAP benefits reaching households in a timely manner and in the correctly reduced amounts,” Penn said. “Given the variation among State systems, some of which are decades old, it is unclear how many States will complete the changes in an automated manner with minimal disruption versus manual overrides or computations that could lead to payment errors and significant delays.”
Separate fund untouched: The administration said it would not tap a separate fund dedicated to child nutrition and school lunches containing roughly $23 billion to cover the full cost of the November SNAP payments. Penn said that any transfers from the fund could put those aid programs at risk in the future.
Some Democrats and anti-hunger activists have called on the Trump administration to make use of those funds, which come under the Section 32 Child Nutrition Program. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the senior Democrat on the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, said the Trump administration should tap the funds to pay November SNAP benefits in full.
“The courts have ordered the administration to use its contingency fund to partially cover food assistance to families in need this month — and have made clear it can use its transfer authorities to fully fund SNAP,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “It is not enough to do the bare minimum — the administration should stop playing politics with hunger and use all available resources to ensure Americans can put food on the table.”