Only a day after the Department of Agriculture announced it would begin sending out partial SNAP payments to food stamp recipients, President Trump says he is slamming the brakes on that effort and telling Americans that no such payments will go out despite a federal judge’s order that his administration do so immediately. 

Mr. Trump expressed a willingness to pay out SNAP funds after his agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, was sued by a group of churches, community centers, and labor unions in Rhode Island. The undersecretary who oversees SNAP said in a court filing in that case that partial benefits would be paid out for the month of November beginning on Wednesday. 

On Tuesday morning, however, Mr. Trump said in a Truth Social post that he will be holding on to those funds as long as the government remains shut down. 

“SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office (Due to the fact that they were haphazardly ‘handed’ to anyone for the asking, as opposed to just those in need, which is the purpose of SNAP!), will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!” the president wrote on social media. 

The president’s threat appears to be in defiance of an order by the federal judge to send out the money. On Monday, in a filing to Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island, the deputy undersecretary for nutrition programs at the department, Patrick Penn, stated that the federal government would send the necessary funds to states in compliance with the order. 

“Defendants have worked diligently to comply with the Court’s order on the short timeline provided by the Court and during a government shutdown,” lawyers for the department said in another filing to Judge McConnell. The department “will therefore have made the necessary funds available and have authorized the States to begin disbursements once the table is issued,” lawyers stated.

Speaking to reporters at a briefing on Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, gave what can only be described as a confusing answer on the subject. She insisted that the White House is complying with the court’s order to send out benefits starting on Wednesday, while also not answering directly if the contingency fund for SNAP is being tapped to do so. The Department of Agriculture said in its legal filing to Judge McConnell it would be using contingency funds. 

“We are complying with the court’s order. We are getting the payments out the door as quickly as we can,” she said, without addressing the president’s message in which he said explicitly that SNAP funds will not be disbursed. 

In a legal filing to the judge on Tuesday, the plaintiffs asked him to release the entirety of November SNAP funding, saying that such a move is the only way to comply with his original order. 

“Because it is now clear that due to Defendants’ course of conduct, and by their own admission, undertaking a partial payment plan at this point cannot meet the Court’s directives or adequately remedy the harm Plaintiffs are suffering, the Court should grant Plaintiffs’ motion to enforce and should temporarily enjoin and compel Defendants to release the withheld funding, in its entirety, for November SNAP benefits,” the plaintiffs demanded.

Judge McConnell has scheduled a Thursday hearing on the motion.

Speaker Mike Johnson praised Mr. Trump earlier on Tuesday morning for sending out SNAP benefits, though that was before the president issued his new threat to defy the court order. 

“What did the president do? In good faith — showing again that he’s willing again to bend over backwards to help the American people when Democrats are not — he went to the court and said, ‘Fine, show me how to do it,’” Mr. Johnson said at a press conference. 

“I can tell you that the president is dialed in on this,” the speaker said just one hour before Mr. Trump said he would not send the payments. “The president is trying to protect and cover the American people as he always does. The president is trying to get the government open again.”

The SNAP program grew far more costly during the pandemic and in the years that followed, though the cost did start coming down as a result of a bipartisan deal in 2023 which implemented some new work requirements for food stamps recipients. 

Last year, the total cost of benefits being sent to households totaled just over $93 billion, which was up significantly from the cost during Mr. Trump’s first term in office. In 2017, just over $81 billion was spent on benefits. The annual cost of the program peaked in 2021 under the Biden administration, when benefits shot up to more than $126 billion a year. 

The Department of Agriculture did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. The White House also did not respond to an email message seeking clarification.