A federal judge in Washington on Monday blocked the Trump administration's attempt to stop Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, recipients in five states from buying soda, candy and other restricted foods with federal benefits, handing a sharp setback to Brooke Rollins and the White House's Make America Healthy Again push.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the Agriculture Department had gone beyond its authority in approving the state waivers covering Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia.
Judge Says SNAP Food Limits Broke The Law
The news came after US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled on Monday that the Agriculture Department had gone beyond its legal powers when it signed off those pilots.
In a 68‑page decision, she found that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had misapplied federal law by treating the waivers as if they allowed states to rewrite what counts as 'food' under SNAP, rather than simply testing new ways of running the programme.
'With her solicitation and approval of the pilot projects in this case, the Secretary purports to waive not just a mere administrative or technical obstacle, but the very definition of "food" as it was laid down by Congress,' Jackson wrote, pointing directly to the statutory language that describes what SNAP benefits can buy.
She also held that officials had flouted their own rulebook. Under regulation 7 C.F.R. § 282.1(b), the department must publish notice of any pilot project in the Federal Register thirty days before it starts if the scheme is likely to have a significant public impact.
In this case, Jackson said, the terse claim that the pilots would not significantly affect the public was 'entitled to little deference' and 'directly contrary to the facts in the administrative record.'
How The SNAP Food Restrictions Took Shape
For starters, the pilots were part of a broader ideological push. Under the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, banner, Rollins and Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr urged governors to seek SNAP waivers that would block purchases of items they deemed unhealthy, from cola to certain sweets.
According to Agriculture Department data quoted in court filings, at least 23 states had applied for such waivers, each crafting its own list of banned products.
States drew their nutrition lines differently, so a sports drink might be allowed in one state and banned in another. Critics of the pilots pointed out that there was little hard evidence the restrictions would actually improve health outcomes for participants, but plenty of scope for confusion at tills and potential embarrassment for shoppers whose cards were suddenly declined.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, SNAP recipients in the five pilot states, argued that the waivers did more than inconvenience people.
In a complaint filed in March against the Agriculture Department and Rollins, they contended that the limits exceeded the secretary's statutory authority, that the approvals were 'arbitrary and capricious', and that the process was procedurally defective because USDA skipped legally required notice and comment.
Jackson did not even need to reach the second argument. Because she concluded that the department lacked the authority to approve the projects in the first place, the question of whether the approval had been arbitrary and capricious under administrative law was left on the table.
Make America Healthy Again Takes A Legal Hit
The ruling is a serious blow to one of the highest‑profile policy wins claimed by the Make America Healthy Again programme. Rollins and Kennedy had sold the waivers as a way to address 'health, nutrition, and obesity issues prevalent in the low‑income population', language cited directly in the court record.
Kennedy went further, tying some rural health care funding to whether states had applied for permission to limit SNAP purchases, a move that critics saw as an attempt to strong‑arm state officials into line.
Supporters of the agenda insist that the government has every right to guide what tax dollars buy. A spokesperson for the Agriculture Department had earlier said that it 'will not be backing down from the fight to Make America Healthy Again.'
Jackson, though, was careful to draw a line between goals and methods. 'The court's analysis should not be taken as a comment on whether the pilot projects are a good idea or not. That is a question of policy that is not before the court,' she wrote.
In one of the ruling's clearest passages, she added that the federal defendants and the states 'may have a genuine desire to improve the health of SNAP households by encouraging healthy choices at the store and they can take lawful steps to meet those goals. But what they cannot do is violate the law and their own regulations along the way.'
SNAP Recipients And Advocates Claim A Major Win
In case you missed it, the lawsuit was brought by five individual SNAP beneficiaries, backed by the National Center for Law and Economic Justice and law firm Shinder Cantor Lerner. For them, this was never an abstract fight about obesity statistics, it was about what they could reliably buy to feed their families without being tripped up by shifting state‑by‑state rules.
After the ruling, Katharine Deabler‑Meadows, a senior attorney at the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, called the decision 'a major step in restoring essential food assistance to the millions of families that rely on SNAP nationwide.'
Opponents of the pilots had warned of exactly that risk. They argued that complicated lists of permitted and forbidden products could deter eligible households from signing up at all, or make it harder for people with conditions such as diabetes to manage their diets if a familiar item suddenly disappeared from the approved list.
For low‑income shoppers, having to guess whether a particular drink counts as a 'prepared dessert' is not just annoying, it is a genuine barrier.
The Agriculture Department did not immediately respond to fresh requests for comment after Jackson's ruling.
Just Food reported that the agency had been asked for its reaction, but there was no public statement as of this writing.
For now, at least in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia, people on SNAP can put a bottle of cola and a packet of sweets back in their trolley without worrying that the till will say no. How long that remains true across all 23 states that fancied trying something else is another question entirely.
The case centred on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the country's largest food aid scheme. Under waivers approved by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, five states, Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia, had launched pilot projects restricting the use of SNAP benefits for items such as soda, energy drinks, confectionery and some desserts.
The trials were pushed hard by Rollins and Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who argued that federal money should not be underwriting junk food.
