The US Supreme Court has issued an emergency order temporarily allowing the Trump administration to withhold billions of dollars’ worth of funding for food benefits used by millions of low-income Americans.
The White House appealed to the country’s highest court after a lower court ruled that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), also known as food stamps, should be paid out in full to recipients by Friday.
The programme has been left in limbo by the ongoing federal government shutdown, with the Trump administration arguing it could only afford to partially fund it.
Friday’s ruling means $4bn (£3.04bn) can be temporarily withheld pending further legal hearings.
The Snap programme is issued by 42 million Americans – around one in eight – and costs almost $9bn (£6.9bn) a month.
On Thursday, a Rhode Island judge, John McConnell, accused the Trump administration of withholding food aid “for political reasons” and said that without the aid “16 million children are immediately at risk of going hungry”.
He ordered the administration to pay out the programme in full.
The Thursday ruling followed another that ordered the administration to dip into contingency funds to at least partially fund the programme for November.
The legal saga was spurred after the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the Snap programme, announced benefits would be halted in November due to the lack of funding over the shutdown.
Before the Supreme Court stepped in, the USDA said it was working to comply with the various court orders and was taking steps to doll out the full funds.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued the order late Friday, known as an administrative stay, effectively freezing the lower court’s ruling for two days while government lawyer’s pursue an appeal.
The row over food aid funding has become one of the bitterest of what is now the longest government shutdown in US history.
Government workers have been without pay for more than a month and air travel has been thrown into chaos as Democratic and Republican lawmakers fail to agree a deal to fund the government.
Some states have drawn on their own financial reserves to keep Snap payments going, which are worth around $6 per day to recipients via pre-loaded debit cards which can be used in grocery stores.
But some states have said they are unable to replace the funding which has been lost from the federal government.