Trump administration demands states ‘undo’ work to send full food stamps

People line up at the Church of the Good Shepherd food pantry in Manhattan, Nov. 1, 2025. The Supreme Court late Friday temporarily allowed the Trump administration to continue to withhold some funding for food stamps, the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, the latest twist in a dizzying legal battle with great stakes for millions of low-income Americans. (Marco Postigo Storel/The New York Times)

By TONY ROMM

The Trump administration told states that they must “immediately undo” any actions to provide full food stamp benefits to low-income families, in a move that added to the chaos and uncertainty surrounding the nation’s largest anti-hunger program during the government shutdown.

The Agriculture Department issued the command late Saturday in a memo, which The New York Times later viewed. That guidance threatened to impose harsh financial penalties on states that did not “comply” quickly with the new federal orders.

The memo surprised, vexed and frustrated many state leaders, and by Sunday, some had begun to explore their legal options to prevent any further disruptions to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. But the Trump administration held firm in its refusal to fund food stamps in full, telling a court in a strongly worded filing Sunday that states would be “responsible for the consequences” of their actions.

Caught in the middle were the roughly 1 in 8 Americans who depend on monthly federal assistance to purchase groceries — aid that has been imperiled for days as the shutdown approaches its sixth week. Multiple lawsuits to loosen that money remain unresolved, leaving many families at growing risk of hunger and financial hardship.

Some of the 42 million people enrolled in SNAP began to receive their full benefits Friday, after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to fully fund the program this month amid the shutdown. States such as New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin raced to release the aid to residents, some of whom had been without nutrition assistance for days.

Soon after, though, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the judge’s order so that an appeals court could further review it, leaving the entire program in legal limbo. That review remains underway, and the outcome could determine whether the government must tap its ample reserves — totaling into the tens of billions of dollars — to preserve full SNAP benefits this month.

The Agriculture Department did not respond to a request for comment. The White House budget office also did not respond.

Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, said in a statement that she believed that the Trump administration was “demanding that food assistance be taken away from the households that have already received it.”

“They would rather go door to door, taking away people’s food, than do the right thing and fully fund SNAP for November so that struggling veterans, seniors, and children can keep food on the table,” she said.

The food stamp program is federally funded but largely managed by states. To provide benefits, states send files to processors, which administer the electronic benefit transfer system, known as EBT. These vendors then make the funds available on EBT cards, which are the primary way that SNAP recipients purchase groceries.

In its guidance, the Agriculture Department late Saturday said states may not send EBT processors the files that would be required to provide full benefits. Rather, the agency said states must only send files for “partial” benefits, meaning that food stamp recipients would see their payments substantially cut.

“To the extent states sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized,” wrote Patrick A. Penn, a top official at the Agriculture Department. “Accordingly, states must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025.”

David A. Super, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said it would not be “legal” for the government to claw back benefits that it had already provisioned without affording people due process.

But, Super added, the federal government sought to thwart the states that hadn’t completed their work to release full SNAP allotments to low-income families. He said the memo could serve to “scare states partway along the process, and it’s telling the states to turn back.”

Officials in at least one state, Wisconsin, publicly refused to comply with the Trump administration’s new directive, citing the financial harm that it might inflict on residents.

“No,” Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said in a statement. He said his state would continue to fight “against the Trump administration’s efforts to yank food assistance away from Wisconsin’s kids, families, and seniors.”

Wisconsin officials also criticized the federal government Sunday for trying to obstruct some of the complicated, behind-the-scenes transactions that help to reimburse grocers that accept SNAP. They brought it to the attention of a federal judge in Massachusetts who is considering a request by roughly two dozen states, including Wisconsin, to force the Trump administration to restore all SNAP funds.

As part of that lawsuit, state leaders also asked the judge on Saturday to shield them from any federal punishment over their handling of food stamps during the current period of legal uncertainty. In a filing, they pointed to a series of conflicting instructions from the Agriculture Department, which at one point had signaled that it was preparing to release the funds for full food stamp payments after all.

Lawyers for the Justice Department strongly opposed the states’ request in a formal reply to the court Saturday. Their filing came as the Trump administration also ratcheted up its threats to punish local officials for allocating full food stamp payments.

In its memo, the Agriculture Department said that states could lose access to some federal money to manage the SNAP program if they failed to comply, and may be “liable” for funding full benefits that the federal government did not authorize.

“The cruelty is the point,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who leads her party on the chamber’s top agriculture committee. In a post Sunday on social media, she added: “It is their choice to do this.”