Trump Administration Seeks Pause in Judge’s Food-Aid Order (1)

The Trump administration asked an appeals court to pause a judge’s order requiring the US to fully fund November food-aid benefits to 42 million eligible Americans by Friday, arguing the government shutdown has left only enough money for partial payments.

The Department of Agriculture and other US agencies filed an emergency motion to stay a decision issued Thursday by a federal judge in Rhode Island who rejected an administration plan to only partially fund the program during the government shutdown.

US District Judge John McConnell had ordered the government to tap alternative reserve funds to send states the $8.5 billion to $9 billion needed this month for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as the budget impasse in Congress drags on.

The judge said that the administration must make all of the funds available to states by Friday, finding that the government had failed to comply with his earlier order and that people will go hungry if the funds are not made available.

President Donald Trump’s administration is seeking to put the ruling on hold while it challenges the decision in the US 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, saying in its filing on Friday that “there is only enough money to pay partial November SNAP benefits.”

“This is a crisis, to be sure, but it is a crisis occasioned by congressional failure, and that can only be solved by congressional action,” the government said in the appeals court filing.

The Rhode Island State Council of Churches and other groups that filed the lawsuit responded to the request with a separate filing on Friday, arguing the government was incorrectly claiming that tapping funds from child nutrition programs would put those programs at risk.

Those programs “have $23 billion on hand and require only $3 billion per month to operate,” the groups said. “Tapping child nutrition funds poses no realistic threat of leaving those programs underfunded.”

The administration previously had committed to covering 65% of benefits this month after losing an earlier round in court, while warning that the recalculation process was likely to cause weeks or even months of delays.

McConnell said that officials had failed to comply with his earlier order and that the “irreparable harm” continued “by the minute.”

“The evidence shows that people will go hungry,” McConnell said in his ruling.

McConnell had rebuffed arguments by a Justice Department lawyer that the administration had done all it could to comply by making the partial funding available to states earlier in the week. The federal government couldn’t control how fast states recalculated amounts that households were eligible to receive and processed the revised benefits, the government lawyer said.

(Updates with response filed by plaintiffs.)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net

Elizabeth Wasserman, Anthony Aarons

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