Will SNAP benefits be paid in November? Here’s what we know

By Tami Luhby, Devan Cole, CNN

(CNN) — Food stamp recipients will only get half of their typical benefits in November, and for many, that assistance will likely be delayed.

The US Department of Agriculture said in a court filing Monday that it will only tap into the program’s contingency fund, which doesn’t have enough money to cover enrollees’ full allotments during the government shutdown. The agency said it will not use an additional pot of money to make up the difference in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the formal name for food stamps.

The move came after a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the USDA last week to either start providing full November benefits to recipients or partial benefits if the agency opts to only draw on SNAP’s contingency fund. A second federal judge also ruled last week that the agency is required at least to use the contingency fund.

The USDA’s unprecedented decision to halt food stamps benefits in November prompted a coalition of Democratic-led states and a group of cities, non-profits, unions and small businesses to sue last week.

Both judges said it was up to the agency whether to tap into other money to enable it to provide the full allocation. The agency has opted to transfer $750 million in unused tariff revenue dedicated to child nutrition programs to support the WIC nutrition assistance program during the shutdown but said it can’t do the same for SNAP without endangering the free and reduced-price school meals and other programs.

Delayed payments

The much-needed SNAP assistance won’t come that quickly for many food stamp recipients. Several procedural challenges must be overcome before the benefits can start flowing to the nearly 42 million people who receive food stamps. SNAP provides households with just over $350 a month, on average, as of May, according to the most recent USDA data.

States stopped the process of issuing benefits for November after the USDA sent them a letter on October 10 ordering them to do so. States send SNAP enrollees’ information to vendors every month so they can load funds onto recipients’ benefit cards, often days or weeks before the new month begins. Those steps need to take place before SNAP can restart.

The delay has been felt immediately. Some 3 million recipients should have received their benefits on November 1, according to an estimate by Code for America, which works with all levels of government to improve access to food assistance and other safety net programs. The number grows to nearly 13.7 million by November 5, with remaining SNAP enrollees getting their allotments on a staggered basis during the month.

“They are not going out on time,” Gina Plata-Nino, interim director of SNAP at the Food Research & Action Center, an advocacy group, told CNN last week of the November benefits.

What’s more, providing partial payments is much more complicated — and time consuming.

The USDA has never had to reduce benefits for all SNAP recipients before, according to a declaration filed Friday by the agency official who oversees the program. Also, state agencies will need to recode their systems to issue the smaller benefit amounts, which could result in errors.

“Given the variation among State systems, some of which are decades old, it is unclear how many States will complete the changes in an automated manner with minimal disruption versus manual overrides or computations that could lead to payment errors and significant delays,” said Patrick Penn, deputy undersecretary of the USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, in a second declaration filed Monday.

For at least some states, the process could take anywhere from a few weeks to several months, Penn said.

The USDA will provide guidance on calculating the partial payments to states on Monday, Penn told the court.

While some states have identified potential ways to issue smaller benefits quickly, the methods must be programmed, tested and verified, which could take time, Plata-Nino noted.

SNAP enrollees who receive partial benefits in November will get retroactive payments to make them whole once the government reopens, she said.

Providing full benefits would have been the fastest way to get assistance to food stamp recipients.

“If the administration complies with the courts’ rulings to release the SNAP contingency funds immediately and supplements those amounts using its legal transfer authority, which the courts also affirmed, then SNAP benefits could begin to be issued with only a short delay,” Dottie Rosenbaum, director of federal SNAP policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told CNN last week.

This story has been updated following the Department of Agriculture’s announcement that it would pay partial SNAP benefits for November.

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