The Trump administration doesn’t care about the welfare of “We the People “. The next question is when will the Republican Congress care about their constituents? Are there no patriots left?
Now from the Atlantic:
Two weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the ongoing government shutdown was “starting to cut into muscle.” Now it appears to be nearing the bone: For the first time in its 61-year history, SNAP, the federal food-assistance program for low- and no-income people, is set to run out of money. If November’s payments don’t arrive in people’s accounts on Saturday, roughly 42 million Americans will need to figure out another way to pay for their meals.
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees SNAP, announced in a memothat it would not tap into the roughly $6 billion contingency funding set aside for the program. According to the memo, the reserve is “not legally available to cover regular benefits,” and “the best way for SNAP to continue is for the shutdown to end.” A coalition of 25 Democrat-led states and the District of Columbia is suing the Trump administration, alleging that not only is the administration able to use those funds—it must use them. (When I emailed a USDA spokesperson for comment, I received an automated response saying they had been furloughed and could not respond.) The disruption would be unprecedented; not even the longest government shutdown in history, during President Donald Trump’s first term, interfered with SNAP funding.
The timing of the USDA’s mandate is questionable. Congress set aside that $6 billion for SNAP over the past year and a half. And earlier this month, the agency had a 55-page memo on its website detailing how it might use the reserve for SNAP in the event that funding lapsed, per requirements set by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (SNAP costs the government about $8 billion a month; the OMB is run by Russell Vought, who has used the shutdown to cut into government funding writ large). But the plan has now mysteriously disappeared from the USDA site. The agency’s new memo from Friday contends that “the contingency fund is a source of funds for contingencies,” a category for which a government shutdown doesn’t appear to qualify.
Legal scholars and budget experts have largely disagreed with that interpretation. Bobby Kogan, of the Center for American Progress, told me that the administration is employing “the narrowest interpretation you could possibly have” of the law to avoid paying for SNAP, in contrast with the “broadest interpretation” of the law now being used to justify a private donor paying the military during the shutdown. As Dottie Rosenbaum, of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explained to me, “The idea that SNAP’s contingency funds could not be used for SNAP benefits stands in sharp contrast to what the face of the law says,” as well as previous USDA guidance. David Super, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown Law, put it simply on his blog: “Terminating SNAP is a choice, and an overtly unlawful one at that.”