by Ty Tagami | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The one in eight Georgians who rely on the government for food may have to wait for weeks to get their spending allotment on the cards they use to buy groceries.
In Georgia, deposits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, normally start arriving on the fifth of each month, rolling out on odd dates to recipients through the 23rd.
But on Wednesday, the 36th day of the government shutdown, a new record, one Atlanta shop owner said about a dozen customers had not received their normal allotment.
“People have come in saying that they traditionally get their benefits on the fifth and they didn’t get anything today,” said Jasmine Crowe-Houston, the owner of Goodr Community Market on Edgewood.
Justin King, policy director for Propel, an information service for 5 million SNAP recipients, foresaw this due to the complexity of federal guidance that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) sent to states Tuesday. The agency will be giving $5 billion to states to administer SNAP this month. That is about half the normal amount, and it will require states to recalibrate their systems for dividing up the funding for each recipient.
“It’s going to take some time for the states to figure out exactly how to implement the rules that they’ve been given,” King said Tuesday. “They’re not going to start on time.”
King pointed to an official statement in one of the federal lawsuits that compelled the administration of President Donald Trump to issue SNAP benefits during the shutdown. (Officials had said late last month that they would not, prompting two federal lawsuits.)
Judges ordered Trump to send the money, and the administration said it would comply. But in a filing Monday in the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island, USDA official Patrick A. Penn said to expect delays.
“For at least some States, USDA’s understanding is that the system changes States must implement to provide the reduced benefit amounts will take anywhere from a few weeks to up to several months,” wrote Penn, the deputy under secretary of USDA’s Food Nutrition and Consumer Services, the agency that handles SNAP.
On Tuesday, not long after USDA issued the guidance to states to pay recipients an average of half their normal allotment, Trump sowed confusion with a social media post.
He seemed to say on Truth Social that the administration would reverse course and disobey the court orders that had been issued Friday, writing that SNAP benefits “will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government.”
But later on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed the president’s post, saying at a news briefing that the administration was, indeed, complying with the court orders.
“But it’s going to take some time,” she said, because the payments must be “prorated” and are coming from a contingency fund.
That could mean hunger for the 1.4 million Georgians — an eighth of the population — who rely on SNAP.
The Georgia Department of Human Services disburses the benefits to recipients through a contractor. On Wednesday afternoon, the agency could not confirm when people will get their deposits.
“We are working with our federal partners for clarification and are also working with our vendor, and will provide updates as soon as any new developments occur,” a spokesperson said.
Food banks will try to fill the breach, but they can only do so much, said Eliza McCall, chief programming officer for Second Harvest of South Georgia.
The Valdosta-based group stockpiled millions of pounds of food to distribute to surrounding communities, but McCall said SNAP feeds nine people for every one normally served by organizations like hers.
“We are committed to helping our neighbors in need, but that’s not a hole that we can fill,” she said, noting that other federal programs that send commodities to food banks have also been disrupted.
