(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that food assistance aid for millions of Americans will be given out only when the federal government shutdown ends, as lawyers for cities and nonprofits urged a federal judge in Rhode Island to force his administration to fully fund the benefits.
Trump, in a post on his social media platform Truth Social, said Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”
The Republican president’s threat to withhold SNAP benefits for 42 million Americans came a day after the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it would use emergency funding to pay for reduced benefits in November after a judge blocked its plans to suspend payments during the shutdown.
The White House and USDA did not respond to requests for comment to clarify Trump’s statement.
The prolonged government shutdown on Tuesday entered its 35th day, matching a record set during Trump’s first term for the longest in history, as Republicans and Democrats in Congress continue to blame each other for the standoff, which has put SNAP benefits in jeopardy.
U.S. District Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island had given the administration the option of either using $5.25 billion in emergency funding to provide partial benefits once it resolved “administrative and clerical burdens” or tapping additional funding to provide SNAP benefits in full in November.
The USDA on Monday said that, in light of his ruling, it would use the contingency funding to partially pay for SNAP benefits, which cost $8 billion to $9 billion per month.
But the administration declined to tap other funding and said that it could take some states, which administer SNAP on a day-to-day basis, weeks to months to calculate and distribute the unprecedented partial payments.
Lawyers for the cities and nonprofits at the liberal legal group Democracy Forward in a motion on Tuesday told McConnell that the USDA’s statement about delays demonstrated that the administration had failed to resolve the “burdens” entailed by making only partial benefits available.
“Time is of the essence when it comes to hunger,” the lawyers wrote.
They urged McConnell, an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama, to force the administration as a result to release funding in its entirety for November SNAP benefits. McConnell scheduled a Thursday hearing to consider the request.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Katharine Jackson, Leah Douglas and Doina Chiacu in Washington; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Franklin Paul and Alistair Bell)
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