WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has found creative ways to cover military pay during the ongoing government shutdown, but says it can’t do the same for federal food benefits.
Justice Department lawyers told a federal court this week that even though there are piles of money it could use for food assistance, it would be too risky to do so for November’s benefits.
In response to a lawsuit from Democratic-led states demanding the continuation of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments, the Justice Department said doing so with emergency funds “would be both legally dubious and practically disastrous.”
The government has been shut down since the beginning of the month as Democrats demand Republicans agree to an extension of expiring tax credits that help more than 20 million Americans afford health insurance.
During the last shutdown, in 2019, the Trump administration made extra effort to distribute SNAP benefits as a funding standoff entered its second month. In a striking reversal, the Trump administration now says its hands are tied. As a result, next month, more than 20 million households representing 42 million people will miss out on SNAP benefits averaging about $350 per household.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the nutrition program, has insisted it can’t pay the benefits despite the presence of $5.25 billion in a contingency fund — enough to cover a portion of the roughly $8 billion allotment that would start going out on Saturday.
The USDA “maintains the long-term emergency fund for disasters that may arise, rather than expending them all at once on partial payments and hoping that no emergency will require their use over the coming years,” the administration’s lawyers told a federal court in Massachusetts, where the Democrats lodged their complaint.
The administration also said it would be “exceedingly difficult” to send out partial benefits, something it claimed has never been done before.
“Any attempt to calculate and implement a nationwide reduction would long delay this round of benefits, any round of benefits restoring beneficiaries to the full amount for November, and a future round of benefits returning to the standard calculation,” the Trump administration said in its filing late Wednesday night.
(In 2013, the USDA implemented an across-the-board reduction in SNAP benefits without any technical problems coming to public attention.)
The White House told Axios this week it tapped three different accounts in order to cover the $5.3 million needed for military paychecks due Friday. One budget expert has argued the administration’s earlier moves to cover solider salaries were not strictly legal. The extra effort to find money for service members comes as Trump sends the National Guard to quell dubious crime emergencies in cities across the country, and as the Pentagon prepares a new “quick reaction force” for future domestic deployments.
The coming lapse of SNAP benefits could be the most severe impact yet of the government shutdown, which appears likely to become the longest one of all time, and Republicans in Congress are adamant it’s entirely Democrats’ fault for refusing to vote for their funding bill.
“As there are millions of Americans this morning that are bracing themselves for further pain and hardship,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Thursday, “the Democrats, incredibly, are showing no signs at all that they want to end their shutdown.”
HuffPost asked Johnson why the Trump administration shouldn’t do what it did in Trump’s first term, when it paid SNAP benefits several weeks early in case the shutdown dragged into a second month.
“Well, the president, his administration, has done exactly what he did in the first term, and that is bend over backwards to make sure that we mitigate the harm,” Johnson said, incorrectly.
Regarding the early benefits in 2019, the Justice Department noted in its brief that the Government Accountability Office said the early dispersal was unlawful, but also portrayed it as a successful gambit that’s just no longer available.
“In January 2019, though there were insufficient long-term emergency fund moneys available, USDA was able to structure ‘early issuance’ of benefits and the lapse ended before any shortfall in funds required drawing down the long-term emergency fund,” the administration’s lawyers said.
David Super, an expert on administrative law at Georgetown University Law School, questioned the administration’s decision to not to tap its contingency fund.
“USDA said that it would prefer to hold money in reserve to help victims of any future natural disasters,” Super told HuffPost in an email. “That is a strange preference when withholding SNAP’s contingency reserves means that 42 million real people will face immediate crises obtaining food.”
In response to the coming food cliff, Democrats have increased the number of press conferences they’re holding this week and introduced standalone bills to keep the SNAP money flowing, only to see the legislation blocked or ignored by Republicans.
Johnson said opening the government piecemeal, such as by funding the USDA for the distribution of food benefits, would weaken Republicans’ leverage over Democrats.
“If you do just part of this, it will reduce the pressure for them to do all of it, to do their basic job, and that is reopen the government,” Johnson told CNN.
One GOP lawmaker, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), introduced a SNAP bill of his own, but it appears unlikely Republican leaders will allow it to get a vote in the Senate. Hawley said he didn’t support the administration sending out SNAP benefits otherwise.
“I honestly don’t know legally if you can or not. They think they can’t,” Hawley told HuffPost. “But the bottom line is that even if he could, I don’t think he has enough at his disposal to fund SNAP fully.”
Igor Bobic contributed reporting.