In a 67-page ruling, a federal judge described President Donald Trump’s plan to deny food stamps to nearly 700,000 unemployed Americans as “arbitrary and capricious,” according to The Washington Post.
A coalition of attorneys general from 19 states, the District of Columbia and the City of New York filed a lawsuit in January, challenging the USDA rule to block a rule that would have stripped them of the ability to extend Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits -- or SNAP -- to people who were not working.
Essentially, the states sued for the ability to waive work requirements in their most economically distressed areas, something the new rules would have ended. And they won.
The order to end benefits for non-working Americans came through the Department of Agriculture, with Secretary Sonny Perdue saying at the time that the changes were made "in order to restore the dignity of work to a sizable segment of our population and be respectful of the taxpayers who fund the program."
In her ruling Sunday, Judge Beryl Howell wrote that the Agriculture Department had been "icily silent" about the number of people who would be affected, adding that one estimate from May 2020 found "SNAP rosters have grown by over 17 percent with over 6 million new enrollees" in the pandemic.
Howell, of the US District Court in Washington, said Trump’s plan “radically and abruptly alters decades of regulatory practice, leaving States scrambling and exponentially increasing food insecurity for tens of thousands of Americans.”
Meanwhile, Michigan has extended additional benefits for SNAP families through October.
The additional benefits impacted about 350,000 families who have been receiving food assistance since March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The benefits give a Michigan family of four $646 in food assistance a month, and increase or decrease depending on family size.
“No Michiganders should worry about how to put food on the table for themselves and their family, especially during a pandemic," Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said in a news release. "COVID-19 is still a very real threat to our public health and Michiganders’ economic well-being. That’s why it’s so important that we continue providing this vital assistance to low-income families who need help putting food on the table."