The Trump administration is telling states not to pay full November food stamp benefits, revising its previous guidance after winning a temporary victory at the Supreme Court on Friday.
USDA’s latest memo, sent Saturday to state directors of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, instructed states to deliver just 65 percent of benefits during the government shutdown and required those who already sent full payments to claw back that money.
“To the extent States sent full SNAP payment files for November 2025, this was unauthorized. Accordingly, States must immediately undo any steps taken to issue full SNAP benefits for November 2025,” the memo notes.
My state fully funded everyone’s cards the instant they were allowed to a couple days ago, which almost no other states were fast enough to do before the SC stepped in. There is no practical way to “claw back” these payments and even if there was, no local or state level politician would survive the next cycle if they did try to pull all that money off people’s cards and they know that.
There are already mechanisms built into the SNAP distribution system for repayment by the recipient. These include reversing the EBT payment to the extent of available funds, withholding the disputed funds from future disbursements, penalizing the recipient by withholding SNAP payments entirely for a certain number of months, and/or, if there are to be no further SNAP payments, simply presenting the recipient with a bill for whatever the state wants back because they think some amount was overpaid, fraudulently obtained, used outside permitted guidelines (traded for other valuables), whatever.
Unfortunately, even if they can’t immediately claw the payment itself back, they can and will try. Whenever the govt releases even the tiniest portion of funds via benefit payments to regular citizens, they always build in a number of ways to get it back. Always.
I’m sure that’s all correct, but in this case my State funded things as they were supposed to, when they were allowed to. The fact that window was narrow really has no impact. I get that there are was to get people’s money back if there is a reason to do so, I just don’t think that “Trump demands it” is on that list of reasons.
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