The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to the emergency request presented by the president’s government donald trump to temporarily suspend an appeals court injunction that forced his administration to fully fund the food assistance program (SNAP) during the government shutdown.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, in charge of reviewing emergency appeals from the Supreme Court in Washington, issued an “administrative suspension”which halts, for now, compliance with the order issued by a lower court in Rhode Island, which required the transfer of $4 billion before the end of the day, to ensure full food aid payments for more than 40 million Americans through the month of November.
The temporary decision gives the appeals court additional time to study the case, which confronts the federal government with groups defending access to food.
The measure leaves in uncertainty some 40 million beneficiaries who depend on the program to cover their basic needs.
The Department of Agriculture had previously reported that, as the legal dispute continued, would use contingency funds to offer partial payments to households enrolled in SNAP.
Later on Friday, the Department of Agriculture assured that full SNAP benefits for the month of November would be paid, while a Court of Appeals ruling upheld a lower court’s ruling ordering this to be done.
The case has become one of the main legal fronts of the current government shutdown, the longest in the country’s history, which has affected the financing of several social programs and the normal work of many federal agencies.
The direct suspension of the distribution of food aid comes after the Trump government, through the Department of Justice, went to the Supreme Court with an emergency request, to reverse the previous court order, under the criterion that They cannot execute funds until Congress has allocated them.
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· Trump asks the Supreme Court to block the order to pay SNAP to the maximum even though it is already being paid