When families are struggling to put food on the table, the last thing they need is the government playing games with what counts as groceries. Last week, a federal judge ruled that the USDA overstepped its authority when it tried to block SNAP recipients from buying certain foods — and Tennessee was one of five states caught up in that program. Judge Amy Berman Jackson found that the agency effectively rewrote the law to restrict benefits that Congress never intended to restrict. That kind of overreach doesn't protect families. It punishes them.
Here in Tennessee, nearly 900,000 people rely on SNAP to feed their households. These are working families, seniors on fixed incomes, and children. When federal officials experiment with restricting those benefits, it creates real uncertainty for real people — and it costs our state money when programs get tangled up in legal battles that were entirely avoidable. The court has now spoken clearly: those restrictions went beyond what the law allows.
I'm asking you to go on record supporting Tennessee families' access to SNAP benefits as they are written under federal law, and to oppose any state-level effort to layer additional restrictions on top of a program that a federal court just found was already being pushed past its legal limits.
Please stand with Tennessee families and publicly oppose any further restrictions on SNAP benefits in our state.
