Tony Romm

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.

And as a result of that, it's going to make partial payments to people, but those partial payments may be perhaps half of what families are expecting to see in the month of November.

And it's not even clear when that money might reach the millions of people who depend on SNAP.

So while in some ways it was a bit of a victory for people who subscribe to this program, it's a little unclear if it's actually going to provide the kind of relief that these families truly need.

No, no, we haven't seen anything like this with the SNAP program.

I mean, there are fights around federal safety net programs all the time.

But, you know, both sides admitted while they were in court that there had never really been anything like this.

So SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and it's the largest anti-hunger program that the federal government offers.

There are about 42 million or so people who receive benefits under SNAP every single month, which amounts to about one in eight Americans.

And these are people located all over the country.

They live in rural and urban areas.

They live in Democratic and Republican-leaning communities.

Many of them are children.

Some of them are veterans.

They're seniors.