WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Friday it was working to comply with a judge’s order to pay full food aid benefits for nearly 42 million low-income Americans within the day, even as President Donald Trump’s administration urged an appeals court to relieve it of that obligation.
The USDA memo came the same day that the administration also asked a federal appeals court to block the judge’s order. The order issued Thursday blocked the administration’s prior plan to only partially fund benefits during the longest-ever federal government shutdown.
“FNS (USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service) is working towards implementing November 2025 full benefit issuances in compliance with the November 6, 2025, order from the District Court of Rhode Island,” said the memo sent from Patrick Penn, deputy under secretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services at the USDA, to state and regional SNAP administrators.
The USDA did not respond to questions about the memo.
It sent the memo out even as the U.S. Department of Justice urged a federal appeals court to block a Thursday order by a Rhode Island judge requiring USDA by Friday use $4 billion set aside for other purposes to ensure Americans receive full rather than reduced SNAP benefits in November.
SNAP benefits lapsed at the start of November for the first time in the program’s 60-year history. Recipients have turned to already strained food pantries and made sacrifices like foregoing medications to stretch tight budgets.
SNAP benefits are paid monthly to eligible Americans whose income is less than 130% of the federal poverty line. The maximum monthly benefit for the 2026 fiscal year is $298 for a one-person household and $546 for a two-person household.
STATES BEGIN TO ISSUE AID
Several states including New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts announced after the USDA issued its memo that they had directed state agencies to issue full federal SNAP benefits for November.
“President Trump should never have put the American people in this position,” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healy, a Democrat, said in a statement.”
Meanwhile, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston on Friday afternoon had not yet ruled on the administration’s appeal, despite a request by the Justice Department for it to do so by 4 p.m. EST.
McConnell and another judge had ruled last week that the administration must at least tap $5.25 billion in emergency funding to partially fund SNAP benefits, which cost $8.5 billion to $9 billion per month.
On Saturday, McConnell said the USDA could either use agency contingency funding once it resolved the “administrative and clerical burdens” of paying reduced benefits, or tap additional funding to fully pay out November’s SNAP benefits.
The USDA opted on Monday to use only contingency funding, which after subtracting $600 million for states’ administrative costs would leave $4.65 billion to cover benefits.
On Thursday, McConnell agreed with a coalition of cities and nonprofits represented by the liberal legal group Democracy Forward that the USDA failed to consider it could take weeks or months for some states to change their systems to process reduced benefits, prolonging delays.
The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, accused the Trump administration of withholding SNAP benefits for “political reasons.”
The plaintiffs said in a Friday brief that the administration showed disregard for the harm that would befall nearly one in eight Americans if the 1st Circuit agreed to halt McConnell’s decision and allow anything short of full benefit payments to proceed.
“The Court should deny Defendants’ motion and not allow them to further delay getting vital food assistance to individuals and families who need it now,” the lawyers wrote.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh, Leah Douglas in Washington, Nate Raymond in Boston and Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler and David Gregorio)
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