Rare Bipartisan Agreement on SNAP Payments During Shutdown

In an increasingly rare instance of bipartisan agreement, a majority of all party IDs in the U.S. agreed recently that SNAP benefits – formerly known as food stamps – should continue to be paid out during the government shutdown. Three quarters of Americans said this should be the case in a survey carried out by YouGov and The Economist between October 31 and November 3, including 90 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents, 73 percent of Independents and 57 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners.

The last couple of days have seen much back-and-forth about the topic of SNAP payments, which should have started for the first batches of recipients on November 2. While the Trump administration initially delayed payments and said it could only pay 50 percent of the benefits because its funds were frozen due to the government shutdown, it later instructed states to lower payments to just 35 percent of original value. A federal judge then ordered full benefits to be paid by Friday, but the Supreme Court stayed this decision Sunday, prompting the government to ask states to take any paid-out benefits back.

Essential services are expected to continue running during a government shutdown, but the current administration decided not to use emergency funds made available by Congress when funds in the Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, were running low.