Trump administration to use emergency funds to pay partial food aid benefits
The Trump administration has said in a court filing that it plans to partially fund food aid for millions of Americans after two judges ruled last week that it must use contingency funds to pay for the benefits in November during the government shutdown.
This is per a snap updated from the Reuters news agency and I’ll bring you more on this as we get it.
Key events
Further to that, the Trump administration said $600m would be used to fund states’ administrative costs in administering Snap benefits, leaving $4.65bn that will be obligated to cover 50% of eligible households’ current allotments.
The partial payments are unprecedented in the program’s history. A USDA official warned in a court filing that at least some states, which administer Snap benefits on a day-to-day basis, would need weeks to months to make system changes that would allow them to provide the reduced benefits.
US district judge in Rhode Island John McConnell and another judge in Boston, US district judge Indira Talwani, said on Friday the administration had the discretion to also tap a separate fund holding about $23bn.
Patrick Penn, deputy under secretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services at the USDA, said in a court filing the agency was carefully considering using those funds but determined they must remain available for child nutrition programs instead of Snap.
Per my last post, the administration laid out the US Department of Agriculture’s plan in a filing in federal court in Rhode Island at the direction of a judge who had last week ordered it to use emergency funds to at least partially cover November’s Snap benefits.
The justice department said the USDA is complying with US district judge John McConnell’s order and “will fulfill its obligation to expend the full amount of Snap contingency funds today”.
But while the administration said it would fully deplete the $5.25bn in contingency funds, it would not use other funding that would allow it to fully fund Snap benefits for 42 million Americans, which cost $8bn to $9bn per month.
Trump administration to use emergency funds to pay partial food aid benefits
The Trump administration has said in a court filing that it plans to partially fund food aid for millions of Americans after two judges ruled last week that it must use contingency funds to pay for the benefits in November during the government shutdown.
This is per a snap updated from the Reuters news agency and I’ll bring you more on this as we get it.
Per that last post, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer quipped on social media today.
“Maybe I should file a complaint with the FCC against the Trump White House for editing his unhinged 60 Minutes interview,” the top Democrat wrote on X. “It will use the exact same language Trump lodged against Vice President Harris.”
Jeremy Barr
The CBS News program 60 Minutes heavily edited down an interview with Donald Trump that aired on Sunday night, his first sit-down with the show in five years.
Trump sat down with correspondent Norah O’Donnell for 90 minutes, but only about 28 minutes were broadcast. A full transcript of the interview was later published, along with a 73-minute-long extended version online.
The edits are notable because, exactly one year before Trump was interviewed by O’Donnell at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Friday he had sued CBS over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, which he alleged had been deceptively edited to help her chances in the presidential election.
While many legal experts widely dismissed the lawsuit as “meritless” and unlikely to hold up under the first amendment, CBS settled with Trump for $16m in July. As part of the settlement, the network had agreed that it would release transcripts of future interviews of presidential candidates.
At the beginning of Sunday’s show, O’Donnell reminded viewers that Paramount settled Trump’s lawsuit, but noted that “the settlement did not include an apology or admission of wrongdoing”.
Ahead of election day across the country, my colleague Carter Sherman, has been covering how reproductive rights will be back on the ballot in this off-cycle year.
Carter notes the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia could have sweeping consequences for abortion access in two states that have become havens for women fleeing abortion bans. In Pennsylvania, what should have been a relatively sleepy judicial-retention election has evolved into the most expensive race of its kind in nearly 50 years, largely due to heated fighting over abortion. With voters weighing whether to keep three Democratic justices on the state supreme court, advocates fear that liberals may lose control of the bench and, ultimately, lose abortion access in the purple state.
Read more of her reporting here.
As Trump decries filibuster, Johnson continues to defend it as important ‘safeguard’
When asked by reporters about the president’s insistence for lawmakers to abolish the filibuster, Mike Johnson said that he had spoken to Donald Trump over the weekend and shared his thoughts with him.
“I hear my Senate Republican colleagues, some of the most conservative people in Congress, who say it’s an important safeguard. It prevents us, it holds us back from the Democrats’ worst impulses,” Johnson said. “What would the Democrats do if they had no filibuster impediment, no speed bump at all?”
The House speaker added that he speaks “frankly and honestly” with the president and noted that he was very “passionate” about this issue. “I think what you see in this, this, this debate we’re having on our own side is a reflection of the anger that we feel, the real desperation that we feel, because we want the government to be reopened,” Johnson said.
House speaker says that issuing Snap contingency funds is ‘not as easy as hitting go send on a computer’
Mike Johnson has said that issuing payments to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) beneficiaries in the midst of the shutdown is “not as easy as hitting go send on a computer”.
In recent days, two federal judges ordered the administration to use the program’s contingency funds to pay to Snap recipients. Today, Johnson said this was more complicated than it looked.
“It costs over $9bn to fund Snap for a month, and we only have, I think it’s $5.2bn in the contingency fund. So you have a big shortfall,” he said. “You got to go through and recalculate partial payments to the 42 million recipients of the program.”
Johnson noted that the president was not appealing against the rulings from the respective judges. “He wants that to be done,” Johnson said. “But he doesn’t see the mechanism to do it. So you have treasury, you have USDA, you have the other agencies involved that are working overtime, literally around the clock over the weekend, trying to figure out how to do this. But everybody needs to know, it’s not the full amount, assuming they could get this done and processed.”
Johnson says ‘extremism on the left’ is the direct cause of American suffering
Throughout today’s press conference, Mike Johnson has continued to blame Senate Democrats for shuttering the government for 34 days. He, and many congressional Republicans, have claimed that the reason that lawmakers on the left have consistently rejected the House-passed funding bill is due to pressure from the progressive wing of the Democratic party.
“They fear that personally for their own political future,” Johnson said today. “And they care more about that than they care about Snap benefits flow into hungry families, about air traffic controllers being paid so they can keep the skies safe, border patrol, troops and all the rest … It is extremism on the left that is the direct cause of American suffering right now.”
In a short while, Republican House speaker Mike Johnson will hold a press conference, on the 34th day of the government shutdown.
We’ll bring you the latest lines, particularly when it comes to reopening the lower chamber, as the shutdown is poised to be the longest on record (likely to beat the 35 days during Donald Trump’s first administration).
Trump says that he would reluctantly prefer Cuomo to win NY mayoral race
In an interview with CBS News’ 60 Minutes, Trump said that he’s “not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other”, but he would rather see the former governor win against the progressive frontrunner and state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani to be the next mayor of New York City.
“If it’s gonna be between a bad Democrat and a communist, I’m gonna pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you,” Trump said.
Early voting in the closely watched mayoral race ended on Sunday. More than 735,000 New Yorkers cast their ballots ahead of Tuesday’s election.
