Two federal judges issued decisive rulings compelling the Trump administration to release billions of dollars in contingency funds to keep the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps, operating during the lengthy government shutdown. This unprecedented legal intervention arrived as the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) was poised to suspend benefits for over 42 million Americans beginning in November. A lapse would have marked the first such cutoff in the program’s decades long history. The rulings in federal courts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island offered a crucial temporary lifeline, effectively challenging the administration’s earlier claim that it lacked the legal authority to tap into the
