Trump Administration To Pay Partial SNAP Benefits After Judge Orders Disbursement of Funds

The Department of Agriculture will begin paying reduced food stamps benefits, it announced in a court filing on Monday. In a declaration to a federal judge who ordered the Trump administration to release the funds, the deputy undersecretary for nutrition programs at USDA, Patrick Penn, said that he is going to send out reduced benefits over the course of the month rather than the full benefits because that would require raiding money from a different program.Democrats have been urging President Trump to release the SNAP funds since last week, when it became clear that neither the SNAP contingency fund nor the president’s tariff revenue would be used to make that program whole. A group of churches, community centers, and labor unions then sued the agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, to force her to release the money — a demand that a federal judge granted over the weekend. In the court filing on Monday, Mr. Penn declared that the Department of Agriculture has more than $4.5 billion in SNAP “contingency funds” that were allocated by Congress last year. He says those dollars will be used to pay reduced benefits between now and the end of November, or whenever the government re-opens. Mr. Penn says that it would require an additional $4 billion to pay full benefits for the month. Mr. Penn says that the Department of Agriculture considered tapping funds from a different nutrition program for children, though he says that USDA officials believe that such a move would “stray from congressional intent.” “Amid this no-win quandary and upon further consideration following the Courts’ orders, USDA has determined that creating a shortfall in Child Nutrition Program funds to fund one month of SNAP benefits is an unacceptable risk, even considering the procedural difficulties with delivering a partial November SNAP payment,” Mr. Penn says. “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 USDA said in a separate filing announcing that the partial payments would be sent. The department says that it “will therefore have made the necessary funds available and have authorized the States to begin disbursements once the table is issued.”The jurist overseeing the case, Judge John McConnell — a nominee of President Obama — says the reduced payments must be sent out by Wednesday at the latest. Democrats rallied on Capitol Hill for much of last week to decry the fact that Mr. Trump would not make emergency funds available in order to keep SNAP payments flowing. “We are here today to send a very loud and a very clear message to President Trump: Obey the law,” Senator Bernie Sanders said at a press conference alongside some of his more liberal colleagues in the chamber. “Do not let children in America … go hungry. Do not go down as the first president in American history to manufacture a hunger crisis.”“Release these funds,” Mr. Sanders declared.Senate Democrats will not be able to rely on the executive branch for eternity, however. They are still pushing the GOP to make a deal with them on extended Biden-era health insurance subsidies, though Republican leadership — including Mr. Trump himself — has insisted that no deal will be made so long as the government is closed. Sensing that this shutdown may last for several more weeks, two senators — Republican Josh Hawley and Democrat Ben Ray Luján — have introduced pieces of legislation to fund the food stamps program fully even if the government is shut down. Mr. Hawley’s bill, which has 10 Republican co-sponsors, would only fund SNAP, while Mr. Luján’s legislation would fully fund both SNAP and the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program. Democrats have said they will enthusiastically vote for Mr. Hawley’s bill should it come to the floor.

Trump Administration To Pay Partial SNAP Benefits After Judge Orders Disbursement of Funds

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