Judge mulls ordering feds to extend SNAP payments

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Oct 30, 2025

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A federal judge Thursday said she was considering ordering the Trump administration not to suspend Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food benefits amid the ongoing government shutdown.

District Court Judge Indira Talwani sounded like she mostly agreed with the demand by New York Attorney General Letitia James and 24 other Democratic-led states that federal officials should tap an emergency fund to keep SNAP benefits flowing to about 42 million low-income Americans.

“You are not going to make everyone drop dead because it’s a political game someplace,” Talwani told a lawyer for the federal U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program.

The judge presiding over a preliminary hearing in Boston federal court noted that Congress appropriated money for the contingency fund and suggested she doesn’t buy the Trump administration’s claim that the shutdown doesn’t qualify as an emergency.

“It’s hard to me to understand that this is not an emergency, when there is no money and a lot of people are needing their SNAP benefits,” Talwani said.

Talwani told lawyers that if the federal government can’t afford to cover the entire program, it could partially fund payments to states that administer the food stamps program.

“The steps involve finding an equitable way of reducing benefits,” said Talwani, who was nominated to the court by former President Barack Obama. “If you don’t have money, you tighten your belt.”

The hearing came two days before the USDA planned to freeze SNAP payments because funding lapsed during to the government shutdown.

The USDA had previously said it could use the contingency fund to pay SNAP benefits as it has done in previous shutdowns, including in Trump’s first term.

The program, which costs about $8 billion per month, serves about 1 in 8 Americans and is a major piece of the nation’s social safety net. About 3 million people in New York state and 2 million in NYC’s five boroughs depend on SNAP funds, which are loaded onto recipients’ debit cards every month, to buy groceries.

A government lawyer warned Talwani that providing partial SNAP payments would require states to recalculate the benefits,“involving complicated system changes and processes” that would take weeks.

It’s unclear how quickly the debit cards that beneficiaries use to buy groceries could be reloaded after a potential ruling.

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