A sign in a convenience store along Barlowe Road in Hyattsville, Maryland, on Oct. 28, 2025, advertises that it accepts SNAP benefits. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)

This report has been updated.

A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration Thursday to pay roughly $9 billion for a full month of nutrition assistance benefits by the next day.

Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr., who was appointed by Democratic former President Barack Obama, said the administration blew its chance to choose to pay only partial benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, when it failed to release funds by a Wednesday deadline.

He said a social media post by President Donald Trump showed the president sought to use hunger for political leverage during the government shutdown, which stretched into day 37 on Thursday.

Earlier, in a Friday oral order that he expanded in a Saturday written order, McConnell had said the government must either pay full benefits by Monday or partial benefits from a contingency fund by Wednesday. 

The government did neither, he said Thursday.

The administration had argued it was impossible to pay the benefits, which go to 42 million Americans, within a few days, saying that the USDA had never calculated partial benefits and that coordinating new payments for SNAP, a federally funded program administered by the states, was difficult. 

The administration quickly appealed the ruling to the 1st Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

“Today is a major victory for 42 million people in America. The court could not be more clear – the Trump-Vance administration must stop playing politics with people’s lives by delaying SNAP payments they are obligated to issue,” said Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, co-counsel for the coalition challenging the administration.

‘USDA cannot now cry’

But McConnell said the department created the problem, in part by failing to prepare for it far earlier. USDA was obligated to spend from a contingency fund to ensure SNAP benefits flowed into November uninterrupted, he said. 

“USDA did not do so,” he said. “Even when Nov. 1 came, USDA refused to use the congressionally mandated contingency funds. USDA cannot now cry that it cannot get timely payments to beneficiaries for weeks or months because states are not prepared to make partial payments.

“USDA arbitrarily and capriciously created this problem by ignoring the congressionally mandated contingency funds and failing to timely notify the states.”

McConnell also pointed to Trump’s post on Truth Social on Tuesday that indicated he would not authorize payments consistent with the judge’s order until Democrats agreed to his terms to end the government shutdown.

“The day before the compliance was ordered, the president stated his intent to defy the court order when he said, ‘SNAP payments will be given only when the government opens,’” McConnell said Thursday.

Child nutrition funding suggested

The USDA had said it would pay only partial November benefits from a contingency fund holding about $4.5 billion, rather than tap into other money at its disposal, including a $23 billion fund for child nutrition programs.

The coalition of cities and nonprofit organizations that sued to force the administration to pay SNAP benefits for November has argued the court should force USDA to pay full benefits for November. 

In addition to the missed Wednesday deadline, the move violated a fundamental administrative law requiring federal agencies not to make arbitrary and capricious decisions, Kristin Bateman of the Democracy Forward Foundation, which is representing the groups, said Thursday.

The child nutrition program would not need its billions of dollars until June, she said, meaning that transferring funds for SNAP would only actually hurt the child nutrition program if the shutdown persists until then.

“A decision on such a highly unlikely set of events is not reasoned decision-making,” Bateman said. “It’s particularly unreasonable because the defendants have not explained why they would choose to let 42 million Americans, including 16 million children, go hungry now in order to guard against the extreme outside chance that come June, there won’t be enough money to fund child nutrition programs.”

McConnell agreed that invoking the child nutrition fund was “entirely pretextual,” which was demonstrated in part by Trump’s post and other statements by administration officials.

“The defendants’ stated desire to conserve funding for the child nutrition programs is entirely pretextual, given the numerous statements made in recent weeks by the president and his administration officials who admit to withholding full SNAP benefits for political reasons,” he said.

McConnell also noted that the case should be resolved as soon as possible to help provide food to hungry people or “needless suffering will occur.”

‘A state problem’

Tyler Becker, who argued on behalf of the USDA, said the department had done its part by making available to states a table showing how they should allocate partial November benefits for households of differing circumstances.

SNAP is a complex program, requiring coordination between the federal government and all 50 states, each of which has a different system for distributing benefits.

“The government did make the payments, is making the payments to the states,” he said. “That’s all the government does in the SNAP program.”

He added that the government had shown earlier in the case some of the administrative difficulties of paying partial benefits.

In a separate case in Massachusetts federal court, some states said they could process the benefits immediately, while others cannot.

“This is a state problem,” he said.

But McConnell cut him off shortly after, saying the federal government was responsible for ensuring people got their SNAP benefits.

“The problem that the government identified needed to be resolved one way or the other by Wednesday,” he said. “And if it wasn’t resolved by Wednesday, then you had to make the full payments, because that’s the only way we could get money to people immediately and alleviate the irreparable harm, whether you could or couldn’t do anything about that.”

In a Sept. 30 contingency plan about how to proceed during a government shutdown, the USDA itself said it would pay for continuing benefits through the contingency fund, which at the time held $6 billion. The administration later reversed that plan and said it could not tap the contingency fund.

In the Massachusetts case, which was brought by 25 Democratic states and the District of Columbia, the states argued Thursday that confusion stemming from a miscalculation the USDA made in determining November partial benefits was a reason to force the administration to pay for a full month.

USDA corrects miscalculation

The hearing followed a late Wednesday night filing from the USDA correcting an error it made in calculating the amounts beneficiaries would receive under its plan for partial payments. 

The department said it will reduce the largest monthly food assistance payments by about 35% in November, down from a 50% cut the department initially estimated.

USDA miscalculated how to adjust benefit payments for SNAP to account for a lack of full funding during the government shutdown, a department official said in a filing to the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island. 

The formula the government initially used and sent to states Tuesday would have resulted in about a 50% cut to the maximum monthly benefits, and left some households without benefits. 

SNAP pays benefits on a sliding scale depending on the size of a household, the household’s income and other expenses such as housing. By cutting the maximum benefit by one-half, the department would have spent about $3 billion from a SNAP contingency fund instead of the full $4.65 billion in the fund, which is what the court ordered it to spend.

The mixup created confusion for state administrators, the states in the Massachusetts litigation said.

“The fact they have been asked to suddenly shift on a dime yet again as a result of these entirely new tables, causing further chaos and delay, underscores that USDA’s approach here is untenable and unlawful,” the states wrote in a Thursday brief.

The error was first reported to McConnell by the coalition of cities and nonprofit organizations that sued to force the government to pay SNAP benefits this month. 

Think tank discovers discrepancy 

An analysis submitted by Sharon Parrott, a former White House budget officer who now leads the left-leaning think tank Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, showed that the table the department submitted to the court and sent to states on Tuesday would fall short of the court’s order to spend the entire contingency fund.

The groups said the department’s error was another reason the court should compel the government to transfer funds to pay out full benefits for November.

“Defendants’ approach means that only around $3 billion—out of the $4.65 billion Defendants have said is available—will be spent on SNAP benefits in November, leaving more than $1.5 billion in contingency funds unspent,” they wrote in a Wednesday brief. “Defendants opted for partial (and delayed) SNAP payments, but even then, did not manage to do that correctly.”

The department said in its filing later Wednesday that it independently discovered its miscalculation and worked to fix it before Parrott’s declaration hit the court docket.

“Defendants realized this error and worked to issue new guidance and tables as soon as it was discovered, not in response to Plaintiffs’ notice filed earlier this evening,” USDA’s brief said.