Good evening. I'm John Yang. There is uncertainty tonight for the tens of millions of low-income

Americans who rely on the government's biggest nutrition program. Two federal judges have told the Trump

administration it must use available emergency funds to provide at least partial benefits for the

supplemental nutrition assistance program or SNAP,

what used to be called food stamps.

This afternoon, one of the judges said full SNAP benefit payments must be made by Monday.

But even if the administration complies, there will likely still be at least a temporary

lapse in benefits.

Chris Yarrow is Politico's Food and Agriculture Policy Reporter.

Grace, why is that? Why would there still be a lapse even if the administration starts putting out this money?

Absolutely. So USDA, which controls SNAP, told state agencies and state administrators of the program starting October 10th, they put out a memo to states, instructing them to delay

preparing November benefits. So at this point, we're weeks behind where state agencies and administrators

typically are in the process of preparing those benefits for SNAP participants and putting

those benefits on EBT cards. So even if the Trump administration complies with this court order, which is still TBD,

we could be seeing days to weeks of delays in SNAP benefits for November.

Are there states that are going to use their own money to fund this while this is going on?

Yeah.

Part of the difficult thing is that the federal government pays over $9 billion for SNAP benefits

each month.

So a lot of state budgets just don't have the money to make up for that.

Some of them are tapping some emergency disaster funds or declaring states of emergency so

that they can access some money.

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