Supreme Court Issues Emergency Stay Allowing Trump Administration to Withhold $4 Billion in SNAP Food Benefits

The Supreme Court issued an administrative stay at least temporarily allowing the Trump administration to withhold approximately $4 billion in SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) payments affecting 42 million Americans, blocking a federal district court order that had required full November payments by Friday. The order came via Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and gave a lower appeals court additional time to consider the administration’s request to only partially fund food stamps for November, citing insufficient funds due to the government shutdown.

The emergency stay overrode U.S. District Judge John McConnell’s November 6 ruling from Rhode Island that ordered the USDA to provide full SNAP benefits by using funds from a separate child nutrition program with $23.35 billion in funding derived from tariffs. Judge McConnell had ruled Thursday that the Trump administration acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” and stated “People have gone without for too long. Not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable.” His order required the administration to tap Section 32 child nutrition funds in addition to SNAP contingency reserves to ensure complete November payments reached states.

The Supreme Court’s intervention came even as some states had already begun distributing full November SNAP benefits based on Judge McConnell’s order, creating chaos as the Trump administration subsequently demanded states return benefits that had been distributed. The legal battle revealed the administration’s strategic use of the government shutdown—itself a political choice—to justify cutting food assistance to tens of millions of low-income Americans, while framing any judicial requirement to use available federal funds as judicial overreach. The $4 billion at stake represented one month of benefits for a program serving more than 40 million people, many of whom rely on SNAP as their primary means of affording adequate nutrition.