The Trump administration has indicated it will appeal a judge’s ruling that it must act by Friday to provide food stamp benefits to the tens of millions of Americans nationwide who rely on the government program.
“People have gone without for too long,” U.S. District Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island said at a hearing Thursday. “Not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable.”
McConnell strongly rebuked the administration for ignoring his original order to restart payments to recipients under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, noting they include 16 million children at risk of going hungry.
“It’s likely that SNAP recipients are hungry as we sit here,” the judge said in his ruling from the bench, adding that the administration is causing “irreparable harm.”
McConnell said the Trump administration must fully fund SNAP benefits for the month of November “considering the finding of irreparable harm that would occur.”
The Department of Agriculture under President Donald Trump chose not to tap its contingency fund reserves beginning Oct. 1, when the ongoing government shutdown began, to pay for SNAP benefits. McConnell said the government could transfer $4 billion from the Child Nutritional Program to fully fund SNAP benefits without depleting its own money.
“USDA cannot now cry that it cannot get timely payments to beneficiaries,” said McConnell, who grew visibly irritated with the Justice Department lawyer representing the Trump administration in the SNAP case.
That lawyer, Tyler Becker, insisted that the administration had begun the process of providing payments to states to allocate benefits, saying, “We resolved all of the burdens that the government is responsible for.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
