A federal judge in Washington has blocked the Agriculture Department from letting five states bar SNAP recipients from buying soda and candy with food benefits, ruling the agency exceeded its legal authority when it approved the restrictions in the first place. The June 22 order in Aragon v. Rollins applies only to Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia, where the bans were either newly in effect or about to take hold. Roughly eighteen other states with their own approved soda-and-candy waivers are unaffected and can continue rolling their versions out on schedule.
What The Lawsuit Actually Challenged
Five SNAP recipients living in the affected states sued Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in March, arguing the department overstepped its authority when it approved state requests to redefine what counts as an “eligible food” under SNAP well beyond the categories Congress wrote into the program. The case, filed before Judge Amy Berman Jackson and numbered 1:26-cv-00861, argued USDA violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act by exceeding its statutory authority and approving the waivers without the notice-and-comment process the law requires, according to the case record kept by the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. The court agreed, and the June 22 ruling vacated USDA’s approval of the waivers in those five states specifically rather than striking down the underlying demonstration authority nationwide.
The court’s reasoning centered on which part of federal law USDA used to approve the waivers. According to the Food Research and Action Center’s account of the ruling, USDA relied on a section of the Food and Nutrition Act meant for pilot projects that improve program administration and efficiency, but the judge found the food restrictions actually pursued the health and nutrition goals Congress assigned to a separate section — one that requires rigorous, publicly evaluated pilot designs USDA never used. The court also found USDA skipped a required 30-day public notice in the Federal Register for a policy affecting entire state SNAP populations and thousands of retailers, then granted the plaintiffs summary judgment without a trial.
The distinction matters because it leaves the broader push intact. According to the Food and Nutrition Administration’s own tracker, states including Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah have restrictions on soda, candy or other items already in effect or scheduled through 2028, with no litigation notice attached to any of them. The court’s reasoning in Aragon could theoretically apply to those waivers too, since they relied on the same USDA process and legal theory, but only the five states actually named in the suit are covered by this specific order.
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How The Reversal Reached Retailers
USDA’s tracker shows the practical fallout state by state. Iowa, Nebraska and West Virginia each carry a formal “Retailer Notice: Stop Waiver Implementation” document instructing stores to halt enforcement of the restrictions those states had approved — Iowa’s would have restricted nearly all taxable food and beverage items, Nebraska’s targeted soda and energy drinks with a planned expansion to candy on November 1, and West Virginia’s applied only to soda. Colorado’s and Tennessee’s waivers, covering soft drinks and a broader list of processed foods and candy respectively, carry the same vacatur notice without a separate retailer bulletin listed on the page.
For a SNAP recipient in one of the five states, the practical effect is straightforward: the checkout-lane restriction that was newly in place, or about to be, no longer applies, and the normal SNAP eligible-food rules — which already exclude alcohol, tobacco, vitamins, hot prepared food and non-food items but do not exclude soda or candy — are back in force. Retailers who had begun training staff or reprogramming point-of-sale systems to block certain items in those states received the stop notices directly from USDA.
The Fight Over Food Choice In SNAP Is Not Over
USDA describes the underlying restriction push as part of a broader effort, framing the state waivers as a way to “restore nutritional value” in the program and give states flexibility to limit purchases of items it characterizes as non-nutritious. That framing is unchanged by the Aragon ruling, and the agency’s tracker shows no sign it has stopped approving new waivers elsewhere — Kansas, Missouri, Nevada and Wyoming all carry target implementation dates stretching into 2027 and 2028, well after the June court order.
What the ruling does establish is that a state’s soda-and-candy restriction is not automatically safe from legal challenge simply because USDA approved it. Whether recipients in other approved-waiver states mount a similar suit, or whether USDA revises how it approves future requests, will determine if Aragon becomes a template or stays limited to the five states where it was actually litigated.
Several states have already been enforcing similar restrictions for months without a court challenge reaching them. Indiana’s ban on soft drinks and candy took effect January 1, Utah’s soda restriction the same day, and Oklahoma’s and Idaho’s candy-and-soft-drink limits started in mid-February — all still listed as active on USDA’s tracker with no litigation notice attached. Louisiana’s restriction on soft drinks, energy drinks and candy followed in mid-February, Texas’s sweetened-drinks-and-candy limit started April 1, and Florida’s ban on soda, energy drinks, candy and prepared desserts has been running since late April. Each of those states redefined SNAP-eligible food on its own terms, meaning a shopper’s experience at checkout now depends heavily on which state issued their benefits.
For a household that moved between states this year, or that shops across a state line, the patchwork created by the Aragon ruling can be confusing in practice: an item blocked at a register in Oklahoma may scan normally at a store just across the border in a state where no waiver was ever approved, or in one of the five where the waiver has now been vacated. USDA’s page is the only place that tracks which version of the rule currently applies where, and it is being updated as litigation and new state requests continue to move.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
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