Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a temporary administrative stay late Friday evening, November 7, 2025, blocking a federal judge’s order that would have required the Trump administration to fully fund November SNAP benefits by the end of the day. The emergency ruling gave the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals time to consider the administration’s appeal while preventing what Solicitor General D. John Sauer characterized as irreparable harm from the district court’s unprecedented intrusion into executive budget authority.
At issue was whether a federal judge can compel the government to use $4 billion from Section 32 of the Agricultural Adjustment Act Amendment of 1935 to fund November SNAP benefits. U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. of Rhode Island had ruled Thursday that the administration must transfer the funds by Friday evening, rejecting Trump administration arguments that such funds needed to be maintained for emergency child nutrition programs.
In his request to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General John Sauer wrote that given the imminent, irreparable harms posed by these orders which require the government to transfer an estimated $4 billion by tonight, the Solicitor General respectfully requests an immediate administrative stay of the orders pending the resolution of this application by no later than 9:30 pm this evening.
Conservative legal scholars celebrated Jackson’s decision to temporarily block the lower court order as appropriate recognition that federal judges cannot usurp Congress’s constitutional power of the purse by ordering the executive branch to spend money not appropriated for specific purposes. The administration’s position that only congressional action can resolve funding lapses reflects fundamental separation of powers principles that liberal judges have repeatedly violated through judicial overreach.
The “unprecedented” order by U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. “makes a mockery of the separation of powers,” Solicitor General Sauer wrote. Sauer acknowledged that the “funding lapse” due to the 38-day government shutdown “is a crisis,” but he called it “a crisis occasioned by congressional failure and one that can only be solved through congressional actionl.”
The legal battle over SNAP benefits became one of the defining confrontations of the government shutdown, with Democrats arguing that the administration possessed legal authority to maintain payments using contingency funds while Republicans insisted that only Congress could appropriate money to restore benefits suspended during the funding lapse.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Friday temporarily paused a lower court order that required the Trump administration to cover full food stamp benefits for tens of millions of Americans in November, siding with the administration on a short-term basis in a legal fight that has quickly become a defining confrontation of the government shutdown. The decision, while temporary, put at risk full benefits for millions of Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to feed themselves and their families.
The order does not resolve the underlying legal questions raised by the case, and the Trump administration has already committed to using the program’s contingency fund. However, Jackson’s willingness to grant even temporary relief demonstrated judicial recognition that McConnell’s aggressive order raised serious constitutional concerns about the proper role of courts in budget disputes between coordinate branches of government.
The administration had made a similar emergency appeal to a Boston-based federal appeals court Friday morning, but the court had not yet weighed in by the time the USDA sent guidance which also said the process to make full funding for November available should be completed later on Friday. The appeals court in a brief order Friday night declined to put the payments on hold temporarily while it reviewed the case as quickly as possible.
The 1st Circuit’s refusal to grant a stay forced the administration to seek Supreme Court intervention, with Jackson’s administrative stay preventing the $4 billion transfer until the appeals court could properly consider the government’s arguments. Conservative commentators noted the irony that Jackson, President Biden’s first Supreme Court appointee, provided the Trump administration with crucial procedural relief that the Biden-appointed appeals court judges had denied.
In its emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, the administration said such a funding lapse is a crisis but it is a crisis occasioned by congressional failure and one that can only be solved through congressional action. The district court’s ruling is untenable at every turn, Solicitor General Sauer told the Supreme Court.
McConnell obliged after ruling the administration had not worked fast enough to ensure at least partial benefits reached millions of the program’s recipients and that it had acted arbitrarily and capriciously when it decided against providing the full benefits this month. People have gone without for too long, McConnell said during a hearing Thursday, adding that not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable.
Conservative legal analysts characterized McConnell’s emotional reasoning as precisely the type of judicial activism that threatens constitutional governance. Federal judges lack authority to order executive agencies to spend money Congress has not appropriated, regardless of how sympathetic the affected population or how strong the judge’s personal convictions about the urgency of their needs. The proper remedy for inadequate government services during shutdowns is political pressure on Congress to pass funding legislation, not judicial usurpation of the appropriations power.
Under McConnell’s ruling, the government was required to transfer additional unused tariff revenue used to support child nutrition programs in order to pay full SNAP benefits for November. The administration argued that raiding these funds would jeopardize other vulnerable populations including infants and pregnant women who depend on WIC nutrition programs, creating an impossible choice where judges substitute their priorities for those of elected officials accountable to voters.
The order keeps in place at least for a few more days a chaotic situation where people who depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to feed their families in some states have received their full monthly allocations including Oregon while others have received nothing. The geographic variation reflected different state decisions about whether to advance full benefits pending federal reimbursement, demonstrating that local officials possessed flexibility that federal judges attempted to eliminate through nationwide injunctions.
The U.S. Senate on Monday passed legislation to reopen the federal government with a plan that would include replenishing SNAP funds, with Speaker Mike Johnson telling members of the House to return to Washington to consider the deal a small group of Senate Democrats made with Republicans. The political progress toward ending the shutdown rendered moot much of the legal controversy, though the constitutional questions about judicial authority to order appropriations remained unresolved.
The Trump administration’s decision to appeal Jackson’s temporary stay and seek extension of the order blocking full payments demonstrated determination to establish precedent limiting judicial interference in budget matters. Conservative constitutionalists argue that allowing district judges to reallocate executive branch funds based on their personal assessments of programmatic priorities would fundamentally undermine congressional control over federal spending and transform the judiciary into a super-legislature.
Still, the Trump administration said in a Supreme Court filing Monday that it shouldn’t be up to the courts, with the answer to this crisis not being for federal courts to reallocate resources without lawful authority but rather the only way to end this crisis which the Executive is adamant to end is for Congress to reopen the government.
The broader implications of the SNAP litigation extend beyond the immediate question of November benefits to fundamental issues about separation of powers and the proper role of federal courts during political standoffs between the executive and legislative branches. Liberal judges’ willingness to issue sweeping orders commanding executive agencies to spend money Congress has not appropriated represents dangerous expansion of judicial power that threatens constitutional governance regardless of the sympathetic circumstances that motivate such activism.
As the government shutdown entered its second month, the legal battles over SNAP payments illustrated how budget crises create opportunities for judicial overreach when activist judges substitute their policy preferences for the political judgments of elected officials. The Supreme Court’s willingness to grant at least temporary relief from McConnell’s aggressive order suggested that even liberal justices recognize limits on courts’ authority to micromanage executive branch budget decisions during funding lapses, though the underlying constitutional questions await full resolution once the shutdown ends and cooler heads can assess the precedential implications without the immediate humanitarian pressure that colored the district court’s reasoning.
