A federal court has thrown out five states’ Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program waivers that barred soda and candy purchases with food-stamp benefits, and the online claim that 18 states currently enforce such restrictions has not caught up with the change. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on June 22 that the agency overseeing SNAP exceeded its authority in approving the bans in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia, and the agency has since posted formal notices on each affected state’s page confirming the waivers cannot be enforced. For SNAP households in those states, every federally eligible food item is back on the list a benefit card can buy.
What the Federal Court Actually Ruled on June 22
The ruling came from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in Aragon et al. v. Rollins et al., a case filed by SNAP recipients in the five affected states. The court found that the Food and Nutrition Administration, the agency formerly known as the Food and Nutrition Service, lacked statutory authority to approve the waivers under the general pilot-project provision it relied on, and that it separately failed a stricter set of requirements written specifically for projects aimed at improving beneficiaries’ diet and health. On top of that, the agency skipped a mandatory 30-day public notice in the Federal Register before rolling the restrictions out.
The court vacated the five waivers and sent them back to the agency, and the agency’s own website now reflects that outcome directly. Tennessee’s waiver page, for example, carries a notice stating that the court “ordered that FNA’s approval of the waiver be vacated and that the waiver’s implementation may not proceed,” language that mirrors the notices posted for Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska and West Virginia. Tennessee’s restriction had not even taken effect yet — its approval letter set a July 31, 2026 start date — so the ruling blocked it before it reached store shelves.
The ruling reaches beyond the five waivers themselves. The court also vacated and remanded the agency memorandum that had exempted these food-restriction waivers from the 30-day notice requirement in the first place, meaning any future SNAP food-restriction request now has to satisfy the same procedural step the court said this round skipped.
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Why 23 Approved Waivers Don’t Equal 23 Active Bans
The Food and Nutrition Administration has approved waiver requests from 23 states seeking to restrict what SNAP benefits can buy, covering categories that vary by state — soda and sugar-sweetened drinks in some, energy drinks and candy in others, prepared desserts in a few. Each waiver carries its own effective date, its own list of restricted items, and now, for five of them, a court order blocking enforcement entirely. Treating that list as one static number obscures how differently each state’s restriction actually functions on the ground.
That is the gap that widely repeated figures like “18 states” miss. A tally compiled before the June 22 ruling, or one that never accounted for waivers whose effective dates haven’t arrived yet, will not match what is actually happening in grocery stores today. Subtracting the five vacated waivers from the 23 total approved leaves eighteen other approved waivers nationwide — a coincidence that may be exactly where the “18 states” figure being repeated online originated, though applying it as a current, blanket description of active bans skips over the fact that it excludes the five states a court just vacated and blends waivers with different effective dates and restricted-item lists.
The only way to know whether a given state’s SNAP food restriction is currently enforceable is to check that state’s own waiver page on the agency’s SNAP Rule Waivers database, which describes these food-restriction demonstrations as pilot projects meant to test whether narrowing what benefits can buy improves health outcomes among low-income households, with results reported back to the agency on a quarterly basis. That evaluation structure assumes each waiver runs its full course — an assumption the five vacated waivers can no longer meet.
What Changes for SNAP Shoppers in the Five States Right Now
In Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia, SNAP participants can currently buy any federally eligible food item, including the soda, candy and other products the waivers had targeted, because the court’s order blocks implementation while the agency reconsiders the requests on remand. For a retiree or disabled SNAP recipient stretching a fixed monthly benefit, that matters less as a policy statement than as a practical fact at the register: there is no restriction to navigate, no risk of a purchase being declined for an item that was briefly off-limits, and no rule to track that is, for now, not in force.
It remains unclear whether the agency will appeal the ruling or attempt to refile the waivers using the stricter procedural path the court identified — the one built specifically for projects aimed at improving diet and health rather than general program efficiency. Until that happens, residents of the five states should treat the restriction as paused rather than permanently gone, since a corrected resubmission could revive some version of the same rule once the agency addresses the notice and authority problems the court cited.
The Other Approved States Aren’t Affected by This Ruling
The June 22 decision applies only to the five named states; it does not touch the remaining waivers the agency has approved elsewhere, which continue operating under their own terms and timelines. That distinction is easy to lose in secondhand reporting, where a single national figure gets applied uniformly to every state regardless of whether that state was ever part of the lawsuit. Anyone trying to track which SNAP restrictions are currently enforceable needs a state-by-state answer, not a single number repeated without a date attached to it.
The safest current answer is the narrowest one: five states’ soda-and-candy waivers are vacated and unenforceable as of June 22, roughly eighteen other approved waivers were untouched by that ruling, and the total number of states with an active restriction on any given day depends on effective dates the agency has not consolidated into one public count. Until the agency resolves the remand or publishes an updated tally, SNAP recipients and retailers alike are better served by checking a specific state’s own waiver page than by repeating a number that stopped being accurate the day the court ruled.
This article was drafted with AI assistance and edited for accuracy.
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