On Nov. 6 a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump-Vance administration to find the necessary funds to restore full payments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by Friday, Nov. 7. There has been a growing call for the Agriculture Department to use the $23 billion in programs known as Section 32 funding for school lunch and child nutrition programs. Chief U.S. District Judge Jack McConnell said: “The evidence shows that people will go hungry. Food pantries will be overburdened, and needless suffering will occur. … This is a problem that could have and should have been avoided. Therefore, the court … orders the administration to make the full SNAP payment to the states by tomorrow.”
On Oct. 31, Judge McConnell worked with the administration to arrange for partial SNAP payments to begin no later than Nov. 5. The Trump administration did not comply with the court order. In his oral ruling, Judge Jack McConnell said: “The court was clear that the administration had to either make the full payment by this past Monday, or it must ‘expeditiously resolve the administrative and clerical burdens it described in its papers,’ but under no circumstances shall the partial payments be made later than Wednesday, November 5th, 2025. The record is clear that the administration did neither.” Judge McConnell added that the USDA “cannot now cry that it cannot get timely payments to beneficiaries for weeks or months because states are not prepared to make partial payments. USDA arbitrarily and capriciously created this problem.”
