A group of local governments and nonprofits are urging an appeals court to keep in place an order requiring the Trump administration to pay November SNAP benefits in full.
The Trump administration has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to issue an emergency stay of a judge’s ruling Thursday ordering the administration to fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. for today, saying they are saving additional funds to pay for child nutrition programs known as WIC.
The Trump administration requested that the appeals court issue a ruling by 4 p.m. ET today.
The question is whether a federal judge can force the government to use $4 billion from Section 32 of the Agricultural Adjustment Act Amendment of 1935 to fund November SNAP benefits.
The Trump administration argues that those funds are necessary to support WIC programs and that using that money to pay for SNAP would essentially “starve Peter to feed Paul.”
“Indeed, if each beneficiary of a mandatory spending program could go to court and force the agency to transfer funds from elsewhere, the result would be an unworkable and conflicting plethora of injunctive measures that would reduce the federal treasury to a gigantic game of deception,” they argued in their presentation.
The groups that filed the lawsuit on Friday rejected the government’s argument.
President Donald Trump speaks during an event on drug prices, Nov. 6, 2025, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.
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“Defendants’ brazen claim that they will face irreparable harm is completely baseless, and they callously ignore the serious harm that plaintiffs and millions of Americans will suffer if they are successful,” they wrote, saying that the $23 billion in remaining funding is more than enough to cover both WIC, which requires $3 billion a month to operate, and SNAP, which typically requires about $8.5 billion.
During a tense court hearing Thursday, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. accused the Trump administration of “withholding SNAP benefits for political reasons.”
Last week McConnell ordered the government use emergency funds pay SNAP in time for Nov. 1 payments, but the administration, saying they had to save the additional funds for WIC, committed to only partial financing BREAK.
McConnell, in his ruling Thursday, ordered the Trump administration to fully fund SNAP for the month of November by Friday. He directly rebuked President Donald Trump for declaring “his intention to defy” a court order when Trump said earlier this week that SNAP will not be funded until the government reopens its ongoing activities. government shutdown.
In its court filing Friday, the Trump administration said Trump was “simply stating a fact” and was not using SNAP as leverage.
“The district court also accused the president of bad faith for declaring that full SNAP benefits would not resume until the government reopens. But that was just a fact finding: the allocation has expired and it is up to Congress to resolve this crisis,” the document says.
The government has asked the circuit court to allow the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which operates SNAP, to continue partial payment of SNAP and “not force the agency to transfer billions of dollars from another safety net program without certainty of its replenishment.”
McConnell himself denied a request from the government to suspend his own decision, saying: “The request for a stay of this decision, whether a stay or an administrative stay, is denied. People have been without money for too long. Not making payments to them for even one more day is simply unacceptable.”
“People have been without money for too long, not paying them even one more day is simply unacceptable,” the judge said.
