Yesterday evening, in what many are calling a bold overreach, John J. McConnell Jr. of the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order forcing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to divert roughly $5 billion from the nation’s child-nutrition / school-lunch funds and reroute it into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits by end of day today, Friday November 7.
According to the brief by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the court’s directive is “utterly lawless,” forcing the USDA to pull money meant for school-lunch programs and instead use it for SNAP, a significant shift in funds built for wholly different purposes.
The DOJ’s filing points out something else: when it tried to respond earlier, the First Circuit Court of Appeals clerk’s office made things impossible, staying offline after business hours, refusing emergency filing procedures, and thereby forcing the government’s legal clock to tick in a way that disadvantages them. The combination: a judge issues a sweeping order late in the day, and the appellate process is locked out until the next business morning. Not the way things are supposed to work.
Congress is the body that authorizes spending and sets the budget. When courts start telling agencies to triage scarce funds in a shutdown, pulling from one program to prop up another, it risks destabilizing the system for everyone. This isn’t just about SNAP vs. school-lunch. It’s about which branch decides where taxpayer dollars go when there’s no appropriations.
The solution is simple. Reopen the government.
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