Supreme Court temporarily pauses ruling on November SNAP payments

Updated on Nov. 7 at 9:34 p.m.

The Trump administration on Friday night asked the Supreme Court to pause a ruling by a federal judge in Rhode Island that requires the government to pay $4 billion to fully fund the federal food-stamp program for November. The “unprecedented” order by U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell, Jr. “makes a mockery of the separation of powers,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote. Sauer acknowledged that the “funding lapse” due to the 38-day government shutdown “is a crisis,” but he called it “a crisis occasioned by congressional failure and one that can only be solved through congressional action.”

Sauer asked the court to issue an administrative stay – that is, to put the ruling on hold to give it time to consider his request – by 9:30 p.m. EST on Friday.

Congress funds the program, known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, during its annual appropriations process. The program was fully funded through Sept. 30, 2025, the end of the 2025 fiscal year, but there has been no appropriation for the 2026 fiscal year.

On Oct. 24, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, announced that it had suspended benefits for November because of the government shutdown. That prompted a group of nonprofits and cities to go to federal court in Rhode Island, where they argued that the suspension of benefits violated the federal laws governing administrative agencies. They asked McConnell to require the agency to use emergency funds to pay for the November benefits.

McConnell initially offered the Trump administration a choice between quickly making partial payments from the emergency funds or fully funding the November benefits using funds from other sources. The Trump administration chose the former option, but on Thursday, McConnell ordered the Trump administration to go with the latter option and pay the November benefits in full by Friday.

The Trump administration appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit. When it filed its application, the court of appeals had not acted on the government’s request. In a letter distributed to reporters shortly after the Trump administration’s application was filed, Sauer told the justices that the 1st Circuit had denied the government’s request for an immediate administrative stay but indicated that it would act “as quickly as possible” on the request for a stay pending appeal.

Urging the justices to block McConnell’s ruling, Sauer argued that “the SNAP statute is explicit that SNAP benefits are subject to available appropriations, and it states plainly that SNAP payments shall not exceed the funds appropriated for the program.” If there is not enough funding, he wrote, “USDA will direct States to reduce their benefits—which is exactly what USDA did this week.”

Moreover, Sauer warned, if McConnell’s ruling is “allowed to stand,” it will “metastasize and sow further shutdown chaos. Every beneficiary of a federal program could run into court, point to an agency’s general discretion to prioritize funding, and claim that failing to prioritize their chosen program” violated the federal law governing administrative agencies.

Finally, Sauer continued, once the funds have been paid out, “there is no ready mechanism for the government to recover” them.

In an order released to reporters at 9:17 p.m. EST on Friday night, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued the administrative stay that the government had requested, giving the court of appeals time to weigh in on the Trump administration’s motion for a stay pending appeal. The order states that “[t]his administrative stay will terminate forty-eight hours after the First Circuit’s resolution of the pending motion, which the First Circuit is expected to issue with dispatch.”