The Trump administration announced today that it will partially fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps or EBT.

This comes after two judges ruled Friday that the government has to use emergency funds to keep paying benefits, which about 42 million people rely on.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture had said people wouldn’t get SNAP benefits at all in November if the government was still shut down. So, how's this going to play out now?

Millions of people around the country were supposed to get their November SNAP benefits in the last few days and haven’t. It’s been unclear whether they would get them this month all. 

Now we know they will get something, but it’s still unclear when and how much.

“I would anticipate that individuals are going to receive something like 50% of the amount that they normally get,” said Jimmy Chen, CEO of Propel, an app that lets people manage government benefits including SNAP.

He said the pot of emergency funds the USDA will use to pay out partial benefits this month is about $4.6 billion — a little more than half of what it would take to pay out full benefits.

“It still remains to be seen exactly how this will get rolled out with states and how states will handle the payments,” he said.

Chen said the federal government should release the funding in the next couple of days. But states will then have to calculate how much every recipient will get. And according to USDA, that could take time — anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.

“I think that that is people being incredibly cautious and not wanting to overly excite particularly families in need,” said Anna Sever, president of government solutions at Conduent, a company that works with 16 states to deliver SNAP benefits.

She said the process is cumbersome.

“The funds have to flow from the feds, the states have to give us the names. But… most of the processors of SNAP also went through events such as disaster SNAP or COVID SNAP where we had to be incredibly flexible and move on a dime,” she said.

And she’s optimistic it will be possible to get benefits out quickly. 

Still, this is just a temporary fix, said Stacy Dean at George Washington University’s Global Food Institute.

“The contingency funds that USDA have available will run out in November, and so that creates just another serious concern for December,” she said.

If the shutdown continues that long.