WASHINGTON -- Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson late Friday temporarily halted a court order that would have required the Trump administration to fund food stamps in full, in a move that fueled new uncertainty around the immediate fate of the nation’s largest anti-hunger program.
The justice did not rule on the legality of the White House’s actions. Instead, she imposed a pause meant to give an appeals court more time to weigh legal arguments in the case, as the government forged ahead in its bid to withhold funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program during the federal shutdown.
The order, known as an administrative stay, came as a growing number of states, including New York, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Oregon, had started to release full benefits to their residents anyway. Many announced their plans on a day when even the Agriculture Department had suggested in guidance that it could soon make the money available for food stamps, after initially refusing to do so.
But it remained unclear late Friday how the new, temporary hold imposed by the Supreme Court might now affect some of those payments, or whether SNAP benefits might once again face delays, cuts or other restrictions.
Jackson, a member of the court’s three-justice liberal bloc who has spoken forcefully against many of the Trump administration’s policies, issued a decision on the stay because she is responsible for emergency applications from that region of the country. She said in the order that she expected the appeals court to evaluate the matter and issue a more complete ruling swiftly.
Still, many Democrats around the country erupted in anger Friday night, with some accusing President Donald Trump of trying to turn nutrition assistance — a program on which 1 in 8 Americans rely — into a bargaining chip while the government remains closed.
“Trump fought for this,” Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, said in a post on social media. “He doesn’t care if millions of Americans go hungry.”
The intervention of the Supreme Court capped a frenetic day for the roughly 42 million Americans who use monthly SNAP benefits to purchase groceries. Once again, these low-income Americans found themselves bearing the weight of a shutdown that has become the longest in U.S. history.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.