USDA’s window to appeal a federal court ruling on state SNAP food-purchase waivers closed on August 21, 2026, sixty days after the decision came down. The Department of Agriculture filed its notice of appeal on August 20, one day before that clock ran out, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to revive soda-and-candy restrictions a district judge had already vacated in five states. The timing carries a real dollar consequence: how the appeal resolves will decide whether SNAP recipients keep the flexibility to spend benefits on any food Congress defined as eligible, or lose it depending on where they live.
A Notice of Appeal Filed One Day Before the Clock Ran Out
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled on June 22, 2026, that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins exceeded her statutory authority when USDA approved waivers letting Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia strip soda, candy and similar items from the list of foods SNAP benefits can buy. Jackson found the waivers rewrote the Food and Nutrition Act’s own definition of food rather than fixing the narrow administrative or logistical problem Congress had in mind when it wrote the waiver statute. Her summary judgment vacated all five approvals outright, on the merits, not on a technicality.
Filing a notice of appeal does not undo that outcome. USDA’s papers, filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on August 20, leave Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia without a valid waiver until an appellate panel says otherwise, and the agency met that deadline with a single day to spare. The Justice Department and USDA’s general counsel spent the weeks after Jackson’s decision deciding whether the case was worth appealing at all, a review the department has said is still finishing even as the matter moves to the circuit court.
According to the National Agricultural Law Center, which has tracked the case since five SNAP recipients sued in March 2026, the parties have not yet briefed the issues, and a D.C. Circuit ruling realistically remains months away. That leaves the five affected states in limbo: they cannot enforce restrictions the district court struck down, but they cannot treat the fight as settled either, since a reversal on appeal would let USDA reinstate the waivers on whatever effective date each state originally set.
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Three States Delay Their Own Soda and Candy Bans
The June ruling technically bound only the five states named in the lawsuit, but it changed USDA’s approach to every waiver still waiting to take effect. South Carolina and North Dakota had been set to start their own SNAP soda-and-candy restrictions on August 31 and September 1, and Ohio’s version was due to begin October 1. USDA asked all three to push those start dates back to November 1, telling South Carolina’s human-services agency that the delay would give department lawyers time to finish reviewing Jackson’s decision before another waiver went live.
The new plan is to run each pending waiver through a Federal Register notice and a public-comment period first, the formal rulemaking step Jackson found missing from the original five approvals. USDA told South Carolina it intends to publish that notice at least 30 days before the new implementation date, and Ohio’s state agency has told residents its restriction is on hold pending further federal guidance. Virginia has followed a similar path on its own, delaying its waiver twice, from an original April 1 target to October 1 and now to November 1.
For SNAP households in Ohio, South Carolina and North Dakota, the delay only postpones the date when soda, candy and other newly excluded items stop counting as an eligible purchase. Once a waiver activates, a benefit that currently covers a bag of candy or a case of soda at checkout will no longer cover that item, and a household has to pay cash for it or substitute something else within the same fixed monthly allotment. Arkansas shows what that transition looks like in practice: its own waiver took effect July 1, 2026, just nine days after Jackson’s ruling, because Arkansas was never one of the five states in the lawsuit.
Twenty-Three States, One Unresolved Legal Question
USDA has approved SNAP food-restriction waivers in 23 states since the waiver push began in 2025. Eighteen of those waivers operate without interruption because they were never touched by the ruling; only Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia are frozen by the vacatur, and only South Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio and Virginia have voluntarily paused their own start dates while USDA runs a comment process it skipped the first time.
That split means a SNAP recipient’s ability to buy soda or candy with benefits now depends almost entirely on geography and on how each state built its waiver request. A shopper in Nebraska can still use benefits on soda while the appeal is pending; a shopper in a state whose waiver survived the June ruling cannot. Emily Stone, a staff attorney at the National Agricultural Law Center, has said the Colorado case could function as a roadmap other SNAP recipients use to challenge additional state waivers, meaning the 18 waivers currently in effect are not necessarily permanent either.
The D.C. Circuit’s eventual ruling will decide more than the fate of five vacated waivers. Because Jackson’s decision turned on whether USDA can redefine what counts as food under the Food and Nutrition Act at all, a ruling that upholds her reasoning would call into question the legal foundation under all 23 approved waivers, not just the ones currently blocked. A ruling that reverses her would let USDA reinstate the five original waivers and clear the way for South Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio and Virginia to finish the comment process they started in August without further legal risk. Either outcome will arrive only after briefing that, as of early September, had not yet begun.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team.
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