The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced on Friday that states will receive full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits this November. This decision follows a federal judge’s rejection of a previous plan by the Trump administration to distribute only partial benefits.
In a communication to regional SNAP directors, the USDA’s Food and Nutritional Services stated, “FNS is moving forward with the implementation of full benefit distributions for November 2025, as per the November 6, 2025, directive from the District Court of Rhode Island.”
The agency elaborated, “Today, FNS will finalize the procedures required to allocate funds, enabling you to forward full issuance files to your EBT processor. We will keep you informed of any further updates and value your ongoing collaboration in supporting program beneficiaries nationwide. State agencies with inquiries should reach out to their FNS Regional Office representative.”
Approximately 42 million Americans, including 28 million children, depend on SNAP benefits each month to meet their nutritional needs.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge John McConnell ordered the Trump administration to distribute full SNAP benefits, utilizing a $5 billion contingency fund. This is the same judge who, the previous week, instructed the administration to maintain SNAP benefits amid the government shutdown.
The administration has since appealed to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, seeking to overturn McConnell’s ruling.
“This is a crisis, to be sure, but it is a crisis occasioned by congressional failure, and that can only be solved by congressional action,” the Justice Department wrote in its motion,” the Justice Department wrote in its motion Friday.
Vice President JD Vance late Thursday called McConnell’s ruling “absurd.”
“What we’d like to do is for the Democrats to open up the government of course, then we can fund SNAP and we can also do a lot of other good things for the American people,” Vance said in a roundtable with Central Asian leaders at the White House. “But in the midst of a shutdown we can’t have a federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation.”
