Nearly 700,000 unemployed Americans no doubt breathed a sigh of relief Monday after they learned that a federal judge had thrown out the Trump administration’s move to cut off their food stamps.
“In a scathing 67-page opinion, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of D.C. condemned the Agriculture Department for failing to justify or even address the impact of the sweeping change on states,” reported the Washington Post.
Howell’s ruling, issued Sunday, branded the USDA’s action “arbitrary and capricious.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has put four times as many people out of work as there were before it struck. Unsurprisingly, the number getting food stamps from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) escalated as well, by more than 6 million new recipients.
The rejected rule change “could have resulted in 688,000 non-disabled, working-age adults without dependents” losing their food stamps, according to the Agriculture Department estimates, for a savings of about $5.5 billion over five years. Those estimates were calculated before the pandemic set in.
“Some 10% of adults live in households where there was either sometimes or often not enough to eat in the last seven days, according to a Census Bureau survey from mid- to late-September,” CNN reported.
Food banks and pantries around the country provided more than 1.9 billion meals to hungry Americans last spring alone.
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.