Lawsuit stops cuts to SNAP food assistance for 700,000 unemployed Americans

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced Thursday that the United States District Court for the District of Columbia has permanently blocked an effort by the Trump administration to revoke vital Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility for more than 700,000 unemployed Americans. 

A lawsuit filed in January by a multistate coalition, including Michigan, challenged a new rule from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) that would have severely limited states’ flexibility to provide food assistance to individuals struggling to find work. The coalition successfully argued that the rule change violated the federal rulemaking process, contradicted law and Congress’s intent for SNAP, and lacked a sound rationale—making it arbitrary and capricious.
Agreeing on all three fronts, the Court on Sunday vacated the rule entirely, granting continued access to SNAP benefits for thousands of Michigan residents currently relying on the program. 

SNAP has served as the country’s primary response to hunger since 1977, and a critical part of federal and state efforts to help lift people out of poverty. The program provides access to nutrition for millions of Americans with limited incomes who would otherwise struggle with food insecurity. 

While the federal government pays the full cost of SNAP benefits, it shares the costs of administering the program on a 50-50 basis with the states, which operate the program. In its 1996 federal welfare reform law, Congress limited the time period that unemployed able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs) could access SNAP benefits for up to three months in any 36-month period. Still, the law granted states the ability to request waivers for that time limit if the state or part of the state had an unemployment rate above 10 percent, or did not have a sufficient number of jobs to provide employment for the SNAP recipients who resided there. Congress has reauthorized the statute four times without limiting states’ discretion over these matters—including in the 2018 Farm Bill, in which a bipartisan coalition rejected nearly identical restrictions to those later created by the rule. 

Shortly after President Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill into law, USDA announced a proposed rule seeking to do that which Congress had just expressly rejected. Despite strong opposition from a broad range of stakeholders, USDA’s final rule went even further in restricting state discretion over waivers and exemptions than what it initially proposed, and would have produced significant obstacles for the states.

In the 67-page decision, Chief Judge Beryl Howell noted that “the backdrop of the pandemic has provided, in stark relief, [the] procedural and substantive flaws” of the rule change. Within two months of the start of the pandemic, over 6 million Americans enrolled in SNAP. The Court observed that USDA was “icily silent” on the question of how many of these enrollees would be locked out of SNAP benefits as a result of USDA’s proposal.