Funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will be restored in full by Monday, November 17, at the latest, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Thursday.
Rollins warned that there may still be some bumps in the process of getting aid to beneficiaries. “Keep in mind, the SNAP program is funded by the federal government, but it is the 50 states and 50 different infrastructures that move that money out, which is what made it so complicated, the patchwork,” she told CNN.
States took different approaches to delivering food aid during the shutdown, which halted full payments earlier this month for the first time in the program’s history. Stewart Fried, an attorney who specializes in nutritional aid issues, told The Hill that 19 states have issued or are in the process of issuing full benefits. Another 18 states provided partial benefits, reflecting the SNAP system’s remaining balance, and it’s not clear how long it will take those states to calculate and deliver the rest of the aid. The remaining 13 states made no payments at all in November, and Fried estimated that it could take them more than a week to pay out benefits.
Moot point: The payment of SNAP benefits was the subject of numerous legal orders and challenges over the last few weeks, with the Trump administration deciding that it would not pay out full benefits in order to maintain reserves for an emergency.
The end of the shutdown means that an appeal filed by the Trump administration at the Supreme Court seeking to avoid paying full SNAP benefits — as ordered by a judge who said the administration should tap other nutrition-related reserves to do so — is no longer pertinent, and the appeal was withdrawn on Thursday.
Still, the administration is sticking to its guns on the issue, with officials saying it was defending the executive from judicial overreach when it moved to halt payments. And the administration continues to blame Democrats for any problems that people who receive SNAP benefits may have experienced during the shutdown.
“Fifteen different times the Democrats voted not to fund SNAP, 15, and this effort to put the blame on President Trump or on [the Department of Agriculture] is, from my perspective, comical,” Rollins said on CNN.
Rollins also raised questions about the program itself, saying the government found dead people on the benefit rolls in some states. “SNAP is a broken program,” she said. “SNAP is full of corruption.”
Roughly 42 million people receive nutritional aid through SNAP, which is now funded through the rest of the fiscal year. The program was targeted for cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that became law this past summer, with Republicans pushing through an estimated $186 billion reduction in spending over the next 10 years. Work requirements for the program have been tightened, and states will begin to start paying a higher percentage of administrative costs for the program starting in 2027, as well as a penalty for errors that occur in their aid systems.