On October 18, in a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general for several states and the District of Columbia, a federal judge struck down an attempt by the Trump Administration to stop food benefits for nearly 700,000 unemployed people referred to by the USDA as “Able-Bodied Adults Without Dependents,” or “ABAWDs” in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). 

In the decision for District of Columbia et al v. U.S. Department of Agriculture et al., Judge Beryl A. Howell, the Chief U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Columbia, agreed with the plaintiffs, calling USDA’s proposed rule “arbitrary of people who would lose access to food, in the midst of a pandemic, if the dramatic rule change was implemented.” This order comes seven months after the same judge issued a temporary preliminary injunction halting part of the rule.

The new rule – adopted by the USDA in December 2018 one week after Congress had rejected legislation proposing the same rule – would have restricted state authority to provide waivers to the time limit for obtaining work for people who are unemployed and in need of food assistance. For the past two decades, states have been allowed to provide waivers according to the economic and employment situations in their state, which, as Judge Howell pointed out in her decision, is particularly precarious right now because of the pandemic. The USDA’s proposed rule was an attempt to take away state discretion in favor of a harsh one-size-fits-all rule that would have taken food aid away from hundreds of thousands of people who need it.

This project started for Pillsbury in March 2019 when the firm was contacted by the Western Center on Law & Poverty to join forces with it to challenge the USDA’s December 2018 amendments to SNAP. For nearly 12 months, the Pillsbury team and Western Center, later joined by the Impact Fund, researched, conducted factual investigation, and developed a draft class action complaint to file in California to challenge the amendments. However, the legal challenge was delayed and did not come to fruition before the filing of the attorneys general’s lawsuit in DC Federal court. So, in early 2020, the focus shifted from filing a separate and independent nationwide class action in California to supporting the existing nationwide class action filed by the attorneys general in Washington, DC.

To that end, the Impact Fund, Pillsbury, and the Western Center over this past summer were part of a coalition of 29 legal and advocacy organizations to submit an amicus brief, which appears to have had a substantial impact on the overall outcome of the case – particularly regarding the discretionary exemptions statute. In her decision, Judge Howell agreed with the group’s interpretation of that statute through explicit mention of the state plaintiffs’ reply brief, which refers heavily to the amicus brief.

The lead Pillsbury lawyer on the amicus brief was special counsel Cynthia Robertson in Washington, DC. The original Pillsbury team included Robertson; partner Thomas V. Loran III in San Francisco; and partner John Jensen and associates Robert Starling and Toghrul Shukurlu in Northern Virginia.