President Donald Trump can prevent nearly 42 million Americans from losing funding for their food aid benefits on Saturday. And he’s done it before.
That’s the view of experts who follow government appropriations, including a former government official, who say the administration is making a political choice by asserting its hands are tied and that benefits will run dry.
It’s also the view of the Government Accountability Office, or the GAO, a nonpartisan congressional agency, according to a 2019 report it issued during Trump’s first term after the president paid for the food assistance benefits before an impending cliff hit.
“The crucial point here is that the Trump administration is choosing to violate the law and choosing not to spend money it has available to it to pay for food for poor people,“ said Samuel Bagenstos, former general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget, referring to requirements laid out in the Food and Nutrition Act.
The former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget says the Trump administration isn’t “just wrong” to claim that using the money would violate the law. “It’s very likely that they’re violating the law by not using this money that’s sitting there,” he said.
Bagenstos said the Trump administration isn’t “just wrong” to claim that using the money would violate the law. “It’s very likely that they’re violating the law by not using this money that’s sitting there,” he said.
The Food and Nutrition Act states that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or the USDA, must provide assistance to all eligible households that make applications. According to the 2024 and 2025 appropriations bills passed into law, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, has what’s called a contingency reserve pot of money that totals around $6 billion, and $3 billion of it remains available until Sept. 30, 2026, while roughly another $3 billion is available to be legally used by the administration until 2027.
When a December 2018 shutdown continued into the new year, Trump and Sonny Perdue, then the secretary of the U.S. Agriculture Department, took money from an expired government funding bill to pay for the benefits early, before a February cutoff of benefits hit. The government watchdog found that it was illegal for Trump to use the pot of money he pulled from at the time and also violated a part of the law that says people can only receive a benefit payment once a month.
But the GAO said there were other funds at Trump’s disposal that he could have legally used to pay for the SNAP benefits to low-income Americans.
“During the funding gap, USDA may have had some or all of a $3 billion contingency fund available to pay for SNAP benefits,” the GAO said, noting that contingency funds are in reserve and can be used “as may become necessary to carry out program operations.”
“There’s no need for an appropriations bill to fund November benefits,” said David Super, an administrative and constitutional law professor at Georgetown University. “That’s a choice the administration made. Their shutdown plan that they posted on September 30 said that a contingency fund was available to pay November benefits, and then they took it down and reversed their position to pressure Democratic senators.”
The White House has not provided any answers on why the Trump administration’s own shutdown plan dated September of this year said contingency funds could be used to pay for SNAP benefits during a shutdown but was then erased and changed.
When asked by MSNBC what is legally stopping the White House from funding SNAP when a government watchdog previously said they could use contingency funds during a shutdown, an Office of Management and Budget spokesperson simply responded Thursday “there is no money legally available.”
“Democrats chose to shut down the government knowing full well that SNAP would soon run out of funds,” the same Office of Management and Budget spokesperson said earlier this week. “It doesn’t have to be this way, and it’s sad they are using the families who rely on it as pawns.”
A memo from the USDA on SNAP benefits claims the contingency fund “is a source of funds for contingencies” like the disaster SNAP program, which provides short-term food assistance benefits in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
“For example, Hurricane Melissa is currently swirling in the Caribbean and could reach Florida. Having funds readily available allows the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to mobilize quickly in the days and weeks following a disaster,” the USDA memo states.
But Bagenstos said that’s a red herring because there is nothing stopping the president from calling Congress back to pass an emergency disaster relief bill. Bagenstos and Super also pointed out that nowhere in the USDA memo does the administration point to anything in the appropriations act, or in any other law, that says the money is not available.
Vice President JD Vance, pressed by reporters on Thursday, didn’t directly answer why the president is refusing to move funds around for SNAP despite recently doing so for the food aid program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC.
“Why don’t the Democrats just stop this entire charade and reopen the government so that we don’t have to try to make this thing work on a shoestring budget,” Vance said Thursday. “We’re going to find out the hard way with SNAP benefits — the American people are already suffering, and the suffering is going to get a lot worse, not because the president of the United States has failed to make the shutdown painless. He’s tried to do everything that he can to make it as unpainless as possible.”
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