Food Stamp Cuts Expose Trump’s Strategy to Use Shutdown to Advance Agenda

As the federal shutdown stretched into its fifth week, imperiling the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, Vice President JD Vance insisted that there was little the White House could do to help.

“The American people are already suffering,” he told reporters, “and the suffering is going to get a lot worse.”

In fact, the administration had billions of dollars at its disposal — more, by its own admission, than it needed to sustain food stamps for the roughly 42 million low-income people who depend on them. And it was only after a federal judge intervened that President Trump signaled he could use the money for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP.

Even now, much remains unclear about whether or when poor families may receive their scheduled benefits. Still, the saga has laid bare the shutdown strategy at the White House, where Mr. Trump has been willing to shield only some Americans from the harms of a fiscal standoff that he has made no effort to resolve.

In what may become the longest federal stoppage in history, the president has frequently bent the rules of budget, primarily to reap political benefits or exact retribution. He has found new and untested ways to spare certain Americans, like the military, from the pain of the government closure, while claiming he has no power to help others, including low-income individuals who rely on benefits like SNAP.

The result is a shutdown unlike any other, one that has posed disparate and debilitating risks for those unlucky enough to depend on the many functions of government that Mr. Trump has long aspired to cut.

“They are willing to hurt people at the bottom when they take care of their friends and priorities,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. But Mr. Trump said in a social media post on Friday that he would release the funds for SNAP only after the court clarified its ruling.

At the heart of Mr. Trump’s actions is a belief that the president possesses vast power over the nation’s spending, even though the Constitution vests that authority with Congress. Mr. Trump and his budget director, Russell T. Vought, have dismantled entire agencies, fired thousands of workers and canceled or halted billions of dollars in federal spending — all without the express permission of lawmakers.

The White House has pursued these cuts in a bid to shrink domestic spending to its lowest level in modern history, primarily by targeting federal climate, education, health, housing and research programs, and a bevy of initiatives that aid the poor. All the while, the administration has proposed pumping new money into the military and the various agencies that conduct mass deportations.

It is a fiscal vision that Mr. Trump outlined in his 2026 budget, which he released in the spring, and one that he has sought to advance in a series of unorthodox moves since the government came to a halt on Oct. 1.

Soon after the shutdown began, the Trump administration began to shuffle around tens of billions of dollars to provide paychecks to military service members and law enforcement agents, including border officers. To do so, officials tapped a range of research, housing, procurement and legal funds, including money approved as part of the president’s recently enacted tax package.

Many budget experts described these moves at the time as unusual, and potentially illegal, given federal law generally prevents the government from spending and transferring money in ways Congress did not permit. Mr. Vance, for his part, likened the budget scenario last week to a “leak,” adding the administration was doing everything in its power to “plug it with bubble gum.”

“Why don’t the Democrats just stop this entire charade and reopen the government, so that we don’t have to try to make this thing work on a shoestring budget,” added Mr. Vance, who said the president had done “everything that he can” to stem the pain of the shutdown.

But Mr. Trump has offered no lifeline to the hundreds of thousands of workers across government who are furloughed. Instead, the Trump administration embarked on an effort to fire some of them, while aides threatened to deny out-of-work employees their automatic back pay once the shutdown concluded. It was Mr. Trump who signed the law in 2019 that would require the retroactive payments.

The push for mass firings punctuated Mr. Trump’s recent pledge to enact permanent cuts to “Democrat programs,” a term he has never clearly defined. Previously, though, the president has proposed to slash a wide range of anti-poverty initiatives — a set of benefits that Mr. Trump has allowed to languish during the current shutdown.

Despite all of its work to reprogram the budget, the White House has not announced plans to move around money to sustain Head Start, which funds child care and education. It is now facing a shortfall, threatening local programs that serve about 65,000 children. The administration at one point considered staggering budget cuts for Head Start in the 2026 fiscal year.

The White House has similarly said little about the fate of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps poor Americans cover home heating bills. The administration had proposed in its latest budget to eliminate the initiative, which faces a shutdown funding shortfall with winter approaching.

But the biggest blow was set to arrive on Saturday, when funding officially ran out for SNAP, which serves one in eight Americans. That raised the risk that millions of low-income families would lose benefits absent a last-minute federal intervention.

Initially, the Agriculture Department signaled that it would stave off an interruption to food stamps by tapping a set of emergency reserves, totaling about $5 billion — enough to provide at least partial payments. But the agency abruptly reversed course in late October, citing legal, technical and budgetary reasons for the change.

“It is only allowed to flow if the underlying program is funded,” Brooke L. Rollins, the agriculture secretary, told reporters on Friday.

She added that the emergency funding “doesn’t even cover, I think, half” of what would be needed to provision benefits this month.

The White House also refused to source funds from a second account with billions of dollars, comprised largely of tariff revenues. It declined to do so even though the administration had taken the same approach with another federal nutrition program during the shutdown.

Democrats in Congress quickly cried foul, framing the peril facing SNAP as the latest attempt by Republicans to starve a program they had already cut dramatically to help pay for their package of tax cuts this year. Believing the program to be saddled with waste, fraud and abuse, Mr. Trump imposed new work requirements on aid recipients, part of a series of changes that were expected to remove millions from SNAP.

The looming shutdown lapse also prompted cities, states, faith groups, nonprofits and others to file lawsuits, as they looked to spare millions of people from hunger and financial hardship. By Friday, two courts had found that Mr. Trump’s deputies had acted unlawfully, and one judge ordered the government to use its emergency funds to pay SNAP benefits this week.

Reacting to the news, Mr. Trump did not acknowledge that his administration could have tried to provision benefits sooner. But the president did call attention to his strategy of selective relief.

“If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding, just like I did with Military and Law Enforcement Pay,” Mr. Trump said.