funded

President Trump’s administration said Monday that it will partially fund SNAP after a pair of judges’ rulings required it to keep the food aid program running.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture had planned to freeze payments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program starting Nov. 1 because it said it could no longer keep funding it due to the shutdown. The program serves about 1 in 8 Americans and is a major piece of the nation’s social safety net. It costs about $8 billion per month nationally.

It’s not clear how much beneficiaries will receive, nor how quickly beneficiaries will see value show up on the debit cards they use to buy groceries. The process of loading the SNAP cards, which involves steps by state and federal government agencies and vendors, can take up to two weeks in some states. The average monthly benefit is usually about $190 per person.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the nation’s largest food program, said last month that benefits for November wouldn’t be paid out due to the federal government shutdown. That set off a scramble by food banks, state governments and the nearly 42 million Americans who receive the aid to find ways to ensure access to groceries.

Most states have boosted aid to food banks, and some are setting up systems to reload benefit cards with state taxpayer dollars.

It also spurred lawsuits.

Federal judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island ruled separately but similarly Friday, telling the government that it was required to use one fund with about $5 billion to pay for the program, at least in part. The benefits and administration cost over $8 billion per month.

The judges gave the government the option to use additional money to fully fund the program and a deadline of Monday to decide.

Judge John J. McConnell Jr., in Providence, Rhode Island, said if the government chose full funding, it would need to make payments Monday. With a partial version, which would require recalculating benefits, the payment deadline is Wednesday.

Trump said on social media Friday that he does “NOT want Americans to go hungry just because the Radical Democrats refuse to do the right thing and REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT.” He said he was telling government lawyers to prepare SNAP payments as soon as possible.

Benefits will be delayed in November because many beneficiaries have their cards recharged early in the month and the process of loading cards can take weeks in many states.

Democratic state attorneys general or governors from 25 states, as well as the District of Columbia, challenged the plan to pause the program, contending that the administration has a legal obligation to keep it running in their jurisdictions. Cities and nonprofits also filed a lawsuit.

The USDA has a $5 billion contingency fund for the program, but the Trump administration reversed an earlier plan to use that money to keep SNAP running. Democratic officials argue that the administration could also use a separate fund of about $23 billion.

U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, said SNAP must be funded using at least contingency funds, and he asked for an update on progress by Monday.

In an additional order Saturday, McConnell said if the government makes full payments, it must do so by the end of the day Monday. If it chooses partial ones — which involve recalculating how much recipients get — those would need to be issued by Wednesday.

That does not mean people would necessarily see the payments that quickly, because the process of loading cards can take up to two weeks in some circumstances.

McConnell also ruled that all previous work requirement waivers must continue to be honored. During the shutdown, the USDA has terminated existing waivers that exempted work requirements for older adults, veterans and others.

In Boston, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled the suspension was unlawful and said USDA has to pay for SNAP. Talwani ordered the federal government to advise by Monday whether they will use emergency reserve funds to provide reduced SNAP benefits for November or fully fund the program using both contingency funds and additional available funds.

Advocates and beneficiaries say halting the food aid would force people to choose between buying groceries and paying other bills. The majority of states have announced more or expedited funding for food banks or novel ways to load at least some benefits onto the SNAP debit cards.

Rhode Island officials said Monday that under their program, SNAP beneficiaries who also receive benefits from another federal program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, received payments Saturday equal to one-fourth of what they typically get from SNAP. Officials in Delaware are telling recipients that benefits there won’t be available until at least Nov. 7.

To qualify for SNAP in 2025, a household’s net income after certain expenses can’t exceed the federal poverty line. For a family of four, that’s about $32,000 per year. Last year, SNAP assisted nearly 42 million people, about two-thirds of whom were families with children.

Mulvihill writes for the Associated Press. AP reporter Kimberlee Kruesi in Providence, R.I., contributed to this report.

Violence remains widespread in Haiti, where powerful armed gangs have surged amid political and economic chaos.

The United Nations has said that efforts to address widespread economic and political dysfunction and debilitating violence in Haiti are falling far short, with a UN response plan receiving the lowest funding of any in the world.

In a briefing on Tuesday, coordinator Ulrika Richardson said that the UN hopes to raise more than $900m for Haiti this year, but that effort is just 9.2 percent funded.

“We have tools, but the response from the international community is just not at par with the gravity on the ground,” Richardson said.

The lacklustre funding numbers underscore concerns over flagging international efforts to assist the Caribbean island nation, which is reeling from violence as powerful armed gangs jostle for control of territory and resources amid political and economic instability.

Richardson said that a $2.63bn appeal for Ukraine is 38 percent funded and that a $4bn appeal for the occupied Palestinian territories is 22 percent funded, by comparison.

More than 1.3 million people have been displaced by the violence in Haiti, and more than 3,100 people have been killed this year.

Armed gangs, some with links to powerful political and economic figures, have taken control of large swathes of the capital of Port-au-Prince since the assassination of former president Jovenel Moise in July 2021.

The UN has said that cutting off the supply of arms pouring into the country, largely smuggled from the US state of Florida, is a key step towards staunching the violence, along with applying sanctions on networks connected to the gangs.

“Haiti can quickly spiral up again, but the violence needs to end,” said Richardson.

But international efforts to address the fighting thus far have little to show, and some Haitians are sceptical of such efforts given a long history of destructive interventions by outside powers.

A UN-backed policing mission, staffed largely by Kenyan security officers, has failed to bring stability to the country or tackle the gangs. Haiti’s government also declared a three-month state of emergency earlier this month, covering the West, Centre and Artibonite departments of the country.

The United States Supreme Court has reached a deadlock in a case over whether a religious charter school in Oklahoma should be publicly funded.

Thursday’s tie vote allows a lower court ruling to stand. Previously, Oklahoma’s state-level Supreme Court had barred the use of government funds to establish the St Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, citing constitutional limits to the government’s role in religion.

But the US Supreme Court’s split vote on Thursday leaves an avenue open for other, similar cases to advance. With no decision from the highest court in the country, no new precedent has been set to govern funding for charter schools, which are independent institutions that receive government funding.

It is relatively rare, though, that a Supreme Court case should end in a tie vote. The Houston Law Review in 2020 estimated that there had only been 183 ties at the Supreme Court since 1791, out of more than 28,000 cases.

Normally, there are nine justices on the court’s bench — an odd number, to ensure that the judges are not evenly split.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the hearings over the St Isidore school. Though she did not indicate her reasons, it is widely believed that Barrett stepped away from the case to avoid potential conflicts of interest.

Barrett has a close personal relationship with an adviser to the St Isidore school, lawyer Nicole Garnett. As young legal professionals in the late 1990s, they clerked together on the Supreme Court, and they eventually taught together at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

When US President Donald Trump nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court in 2020, Garnett even wrote an opinion column in the newspaper USA Today, praising her friend as “remarkable” and describing their lives as “completely intertwined”.

The Supreme Court’s brief, two-line announcement on Thursday acknowledged Barrett’s absence.

“The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court,” it read. “JUSTICE BARRETT took no part in the consideration or decision of these cases.”

That left the court split four to four, though the precise breakdown was not provided. Chief Justice John Roberts is thought to have joined with the three left-leaning justices on the bench to oppose the school’s use of government funds.

The Supreme Court currently has a conservative supermajority, with six justices leaning rightward.

In the past, the court has signalled receptiveness to expanding religious freedoms in the US, including in cases that tested the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution.

While that clause bars the government from “the establishment of religion”, what qualifies as establishing a religion remains unclear — and is a source of ongoing legal debate.

The Oklahoma case stretches back to 2023, when the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City submitted an application to open a taxpayer-funded charter school that would share Catholic teachings.

The school would have been the first of its kind, offering public, religious education online for children from kindergarten through high school. The plan was to open the following year.

The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board initially voted down the proposal in April, only to give it the go-ahead in June by a narrow vote of three to two.

That teed up a legal showdown, with opponents calling the school a clear violation of the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. But supporters argued that barriers to establishing a Catholic charter school limited their freedom of religion.

Plans for the school even ended up dividing Oklahoma’s government. The state attorney general, Gentner Drummond, opposed the charter school as a form of “state-funded religion”. The governor, Kevin Stitt, supported the proposal. Both men are Republicans.

In Oklahoma, as in the majority of other US states, charter schools are considered part of the public school system.

When the case reached the state-level Oklahoma Supreme Court in 2024, that distinction became pivotal. The fact that St Isidore was a public — not private — school ultimately caused the court to strike it down, for fear of constitutional violations.

The judges ruled in a six-to-two decision that establishing St Isidore with state funds would make it a “surrogate of the state”, just like “any other state-sponsored charter school”.

The school, the judges explained, would “require students to spend time in religious instruction and activities, as well as permit state spending in direct support of the religious curriculum and activities within St. Isidore — all in violation of the establishment clause”.

The school’s backers appealed to the Supreme Court, leading to arguments being held in April. It was unclear at the time which way the high court seemed to be leaning, with Roberts pressing both sides with questions.

But conservatives on the Supreme Court’s bench seemed in favour of backing St Isidore’s appeal. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for instance, argued that withholding taxpayer funds from the religious school “seems like rank discrimination against religion”.

“All the religious school is saying is, ‘Don’t exclude us on account of our religion,’” he said.

The left-leaning justices, meanwhile, indicated that a ruling in favour of St Isidore would pave the way for public schools to become religious institutions, a slippery slope that could require the government to fund faith-based education of all stripes.

On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has backed a separate lawsuit against the school, framed the deadlock at the Supreme Court as a victory for the separation of church and state.

“The very idea of a religious public school is a constitutional oxymoron. The Supreme Court’s ruling affirms that a religious school can’t be a public school and a public school can’t be religious,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.

But proponents pledged to keep on fighting. Jim Campbell, who argued in favour of St Isidore on behalf of Oklahoma’s charter school board, noted that the court may “revisit the issue in the future”, given the deadlock.

“Oklahoma parents and children are better off with more educational choices, not fewer,” he said.