Tony Romm

SNAP is in a very difficult place, and the concerns that you're hearing out of West Virginia are concerns that we're hearing nationally nationally.

as this shutdown now lapses almost into its sixth week.

SNAP is a program that serves about 42 million people across the country.

And even though it's a permanent fixture in law, lawmakers have to put money into that program every year.

But because the shutdown has gone on so long, SNAP has exhausted its normal budget.

And so that's left this program at a bit of a crossroads.

We've seen a number of cities and states and nonprofits file lawsuits against the Trump administration.

over the way that it has handled SNAP during the government shutdown.

And this all stemmed from a decision that the administration made just a few weeks ago.

Initially, USDA said it was going to tap a special set of emergency funds to pay SNAP benefits if the shutdown dragged into November.

This is a pot of money that was roughly about $5 billion or so as of late October that's supposed to be used in instances where SNAP doesn't have enough

to cover benefits for everybody.

And that's a lot, but still not enough to hit the roughly $8 billion or so that it needs every month to keep those benefits flowing.

But sort of abruptly, the administration said it wasn't going to use this money after all.

And that created this huge fiscal financial cliff that we were seeing for the program as we entered November.

And so cities and states and religious groups and others filed lawsuits against the administration, essentially to force the release of funds.

In both cases, federal judges have found serious issues with the way that the Trump administration has handled the SNAP program.

But only one of those courts, at least so far, has ordered the administration to spend that money and told the administration that it had until Monday to essentially say how it was going to do so.

We finally got that information from the administration.

And the short of it is that the Trump administration is just going to tap only the small set of emergency funds that it has for SNAP and not some of the other money it has laying around across government.