The 43-day government shutdown is over, but its reverberations for millions of Americans continue. While the government was closed, the 42 million Americans who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to help them afford food had no idea when they would receive the funds. Some states, following instructions from the federal government, delayed sending out November benefits, which forced Americans to stretch their already meager benefits over more days and weeks.
Many turned to food banks, which have been overburdened since the Trump administration cut programs that helped them access funds. Some families had to surrender their pets to shelters when they had to choose between buying kibble and buying food for themselves or their children.
At the end of October, the USDA held SNAP benefits over the heads of Americans, explicitly politicizing the program: “We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats,” a spokesperson for the USDA said in response to a Democratic state-led lawsuit asking for benefits to be reinstated. “Continue to hold out for the Far-Left wing of the party or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive timely WIC and SNAP allotments.”
Now that the shutdown is over, the USDA, which administers SNAP, has instructed states to send out full November benefits. But turning off the logistically complicated SNAP system—which relies on the federal government, states, and private companies to function in concert—and then trying to turn it back on quickly is no easy task. Some SNAP recipients may continue to face delays—and when you’re talking about food, a delay of even a day or two can be catastrophic.
Before the shutdown ended, SNAP benefits were, to put it mildly, all over the place. A large minority of states had issued November benefits to all of their recipients. A handful of states had issued partial benefits, and now need to send out the remaining funds. Some states didn’t issue benefits at all, and will need to send them all out as soon as possible, which could overwhelm the already tenuous system.
States are facing an increasingly hostile USDA, which spent the shutdown threatening to retaliate against states that didn’t follow their dictates.
The states rely on two private companies to disburse benefits to recipients through the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) system that makes SNAP run: FIS and Conduent (which has lost tens of millions of dollars this year after a massive data breach exposed clients’ personal information).
Normally, state administrators prepare issuance files, which list the recipients and the amount of money they will receive, and send those out to the company that manages their EBT system. In most states, SNAP benefits are staggered, so recipients receive their funds on different days of the month. This gives the companies time to handle the issuance files throughout the month, instead of all on one day.
But now that USDA has instructed all states to issue November benefits “promptly,” the companies’ systems could be overwhelmed. David Super, a professor of economics and law at Georgetown University who studies SNAP, is concerned that the systems won’t be able to handle the volume of issuance files. If that happens, he estimates the delay would likely take no more than a week. For many SNAP recipients, those extra days without food would compound the harms already caused by the shutdown.
States are also facing an increasingly hostile USDA, which spent the shutdown threatening to retaliate against states that didn’t follow their confusing and, in the view of critics, illegal dictates during the shutdown.
Super laid out how states were dealing with conflicting information from USDA and the courts. On Thursday, November 6, the district court in Rhode Island issued two orders to USDA, requiring it to send out full November benefits. In response, USDA sent a letter to state SNAP administrators the next day, telling them that the agency was working toward full issuance and would be ready for the states to send out benefits within a matter of hours.
“The combination of the district court order and the USDA notice, which doesn’t say ‘we’ll change our policy if we get a stay,’ it just says ‘we’re working towards full issuance,’ leads lots of states, including some red states, to give full November issuances,” Super said.
“They seem to be wanting us to do it,” Super imagines state SNAP administrators thinking. “So we’re going to do it.”
It’s unclear which states actually went ahead and issued benefits on Friday afternoon, since not every state announced its intention to send out benefits. That was partially a strategic decision, to avoid attracting the USDA’s anger, since they acted before getting explicit permission from the agency.
Just a few hours later, on the night of Friday, November 7, the Supreme Court issued a stay of the Rhode Island district court’s order pending an appeals court review, slamming the brakes on benefit issuance and further muddying the waters. After the Supreme Court put a pause on the rollout of benefits, USDA issued threats to the states that had already sent out November benefits after reading the agency’s optimistic Friday letter and the Rhode Island court’s decision.
The threats USDA leveled at the states would increase the financial burden the program is already facing in the aftermath of the One Big Beautiful Bill. USDA threatened to withhold November administrative funds from states. Typically, states share the cost of administering SNAP 50-50 with USDA. Experts on SNAP have said for months that states simply don’t have the budgets to take on more of the administrative burden, and would likely have to cut the number of benefit recipients to make up the cost.
USDA also said it was considering treating the allegedly premature benefit issuances as overissuances, which get counted in the state’s error rate. The One Big Beautiful Bill introduced a system to penalize states for their error rates, forcing them to pay a larger chunk of SNAP’s administrative costs for higher error rates. If USDA acted on their threats, Super said, “that could both result in the state being fined in the near term and could increase the fraction of benefits the state will have to pay in the longer term.”
At one point, USDA went so far as to ask states to take benefit money back from SNAP recipients, which is illegal under the vast majority of circumstances. But Super described how little faith he has in today’s USDA to follow the law: “The administration has purged a great fraction of the experienced staff who run SNAP. So the people over there may not know that the regulations don’t allow it,” he said. “I knew tons of people over there, and everyone I know is gone … Some of them quit, some of them retired, but they’re all gone.”
Luckily, a coalition of blue states is insulated from USDA’s retaliation after suing the agency and getting an order from a district court in Massachusetts stipulating that USDA cannot punish them. Most Republican-led states, though, were not part of that lawsuit. “They’re actually not protected,” Super said. “In theory, USDA could do all the nasty things it threatened in its notice to the red states that issued.”
No matter how the USDA moves forward, the consequences of turning SNAP off, on, off, and then back on again will keep reverberating through the families that rely on SNAP to put food on their tables.
“SNAP is our most effective and largest anti-hunger program,” said Crystal FitzSimons, the president of the anti-hunger group Food Research & Action Center (FRAC). “The delay in families receiving SNAP, even for just 12 days, was catastrophic to families.”
FitzSimons is also concerned about what families have done to compensate for the dramatic falloff in benefits. “Food really is the most fungible part of a household budget,” she explained. “You have to pay for rent. You have to pay for gas for your car to get to work.” That squeeze forces recipients to find cuts somewhere. Maybe it means buying cheaper, less healthy, and less filling food. It could also mean parents eating less to insulate their children from the cuts.
FitzSimons hopes there will be at least one positive outcome from the last month of SNAP chaos: public support. SNAP was catapulted into the headlines, and FitzSimons hopes this increased visibility will garner more public support for the program and help insulate it from future cuts.
Still, the material consequences of the shutdown persist. “Lots of people have had to eat without SNAP, so they’ve used their rent money and their utility money, [so] we are likely to see a wave of evictions and utility shutoffs,” Super said. “I think we’re going to see a lot of disruptions in people’s lives for months to come.”