The New York Review, December 2025
Most of us grumbled through the latest federal government shutdown, vexed by airport delays, minimally staffed national parks, and shuttered local offices. But the forty-three-day disruption in federal service hit hard for hundreds of thousands of furloughed federal employees going without pay and for the roughly 42 million Americans served by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, which at around $100 billion in annual spending is both the nation’s largest food assistance program and one of its largest anti-poverty programs for the non-elderly. A month into the shutdown, despite having access to nearly $6 billion in contingency funds, the Trump administration chose to stop issuing SNAP benefits—the first time in the program’s sixty-one-year history that it failed to deliver support to which enrollees were entitled.
States sued, and federal courts ruled that the administration acted illegally, but the White House continued to withhold full SNAP funding as it appealed to the Supreme Court. The legal tussle was mooted with the end of the shutdown on November 12, and the US Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, moved to transfer SNAP funds to the states for eventual transmission to enrollees.
