It’s an old game for the president to try to win a government shutdown fight by cutting off payments for whatever he doesn’t like, while mysteriously finding money to pay for the things he still wants to do. As usual, Donald Trump is taking this to a new level, not just using his presidential discretion but violating the law.
In this case, he illegally shifted around funds to pay salaries in the military, while refusing to spend a contingency fund specifically set aside by law to pay SNAP food subsidies.
MSNBC reports:
President Donald Trump can prevent nearly 42 million Americans from losing funding for their food aid benefits on Saturday. And he’s done it before.
That’s the view of experts who follow government appropriations, including a former government official, who say the administration is making a political choice by asserting its hands are tied and that benefits will run dry. …
“The crucial point here is that the Trump administration is choosing to violate the law and choosing not to spend money it has available to it to pay for food for poor people,“ said Samuel Bagenstos, former general counsel to the Office of Management and Budget, referring to requirements laid out in the Food and Nutrition Act. …
The Food and Nutrition Act states that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, or the USDA, must provide assistance to all eligible households that make applications. According to the2024 and 2025 appropriations bills passed into law, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, has what’s called acontingency reserve pot of money that totals around $6 billion, and $3 billion of it remains available until Sept. 30, 2026, while roughly another $3 billion is available to be legally used by the administration until 2027.
The USDA agreed to pay some of this money to fund SNAP partway through the month after a court ordered it to do so. But Trump has since declared that they won’t pay it, openly defying the court’s order.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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