A Thursday court ruling requiring the federal government to fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for November has once again thrown Missouri's SNAP benefits into the unknown.
A Rhode Island federal judge on Thursday ordered the Trump administration to find the funds necessary to fully fund SNAP benefits for the month of November. The lapse in funding is due to the ongoing shutdown of the federal government.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has appealed the ruling and therefore has placed November SNAP benefits back in limbo for states, including Missouri.
The Missouri Department of Social Services said they are looking into Thursday's court order and are waiting for further instruction from Food and Nutrition Services.
The new ruling comes the same week as the USDA announced it would release funds to partially pay for SNAP benefits in November. The program, which is fully funded by the federal government, costs roughly $8 billion a month.
The USDA funding that was set to be released due to a separate court order totaled around half that, at $4.65 billion. That again changed Wednesday evening when the USDA revised its plan to provide larger partial benefits.
On Wednesday, the Missouri Department of Social Services said the agency was processing programming changes and testing in order to distribute partial payments.
DSS said that its Family Assistance Management Information System is not designed to issue partial payments and that "there are still a lot of moving pieces."
In an emailed response, Baylee Watts, spokesperson for Missouri DSS, said once testing was complete, the department was going to work with its EBT vendor to issue the partial benefits.
Now, with the court order to fully fund SNAP for November and the appeal, the status of SNAP benefits in Missouri is once again unknown.
The Missouri Budget Project said that in fiscal 2024, SNAP served an average of 655,000 Missourians in more than 323,000 households each month.
The overview also said that the average monthly SNAP benefit was $397 per household during the last fiscal year.
In an interview Thursday before the latest court order, Missouri Senate Minority Leader Doug Beck, D-Affton, said the partial payments were just going to create more confusion.
"We know President Trump can fund this thing right now and the entire thing, if you wanted to, but they're not doing it," Beck said. "And it's so frustrating that they're using this hunger, and they're using this as leverage on this, on this shutdown, and trying to get their way to cut people off their health care."
Beck said a lot of this uncertainty around SNAP didn't need to happen as the program was fully funded during the shutdown in 2018.
"They waited 'til the very last minute, so they got a court order, and then the same administration that defies court orders said, all of a sudden, start saying, 'Well, okay, we'll, listen to the court order, but we don't know how to implement it,'" Beck said.
The lapse of SNAP benefits in Missouri has also created additional pressure on the state's food banks.
Kim Buckman, director of advocacy and communication for Feeding Missouri, the state association for the six regional Feeding America food banks, said the need was increasing before November even began.
"They were seeing neighbors that they hadn't seen before, just with the uncertainty and that kind of that impending moment that they were going to either lose their benefits or not lose their benefits," Buckman said.
Buckman said the food banks are seeing an uptick in people coming in, even with this time of year already being the busiest for food banks.
"It's unprecedented. We've never experienced it, and I know it's probably happened before, but to my historical knowledge, the food banks have not faced a whole bunch of people losing SNAP or getting cuts to SNAP," Buckman said. "And again, what we're dealing with right now is that there's still people that do not have it."
Additionally, Buckman said that higher traffic includes phone calls and visits to food bank websites.
"Traffic to our website and to our helpline shot up like 600% so we saw a lot more people either trying to navigate help for others, like loved ones, neighbors, or for themselves and their families," Buckman said.
Gov. Mike Kehoe last week announced an expedited $5 million to state food banks from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funding.
Even though that was funding that food banks were already going to receive this year, Buckman said getting those expedited funds is helpful.
"Anytime that we can get a commitment that we know we're going to receive funds that makes our ability to respond a lot better," Buckman said.
As of Thursday, Buckman did not yet know if the food banks had already received that $5 million. However, she said knowing that funding is coming does allow food banks to move some funds around.
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