Millions of SNAP recipients in five states will keep buying soda and candy with federal benefits after a federal judge struck down USDA-approved waivers that would have banned those purchases. The ruling in Aragon v. Rollins, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, blocked restrictions that Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, and West Virginia had planned to enforce in 2026. The decision lands as USDA had been expanding the waiver program to additional states, raising the stakes for a policy fight over what food stamps can buy.
Why the court order freezes a growing state-by-state experiment
The immediate effect is straightforward: grocery stores and convenience retailers in all five states will continue processing SNAP transactions for sugary drinks and candy exactly as they do now. No checkout-system changes, no new product exclusion lists, and no retailer compliance deadlines will take hold under these waivers. For the roughly one in eight Americans who use SNAP benefits, purchasing rules remain unchanged nationwide.
The timing of the ruling matters because USDA had been accelerating approvals. Secretary Rollins had recently cleared waivers for six additional states, including Hawaii, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Virginia, as described in a department announcement outlining the next wave of restrictions. Those approvals, together with a separate Tennessee waiver, were also intended to take effect in 2026. The court’s reasoning, which found that USDA lacked statutory authority to redefine eligible food through waivers alone, casts doubt on every pending and future restriction built on the same legal framework.
One question raised by the ruling is whether states that received approval later in the rollout had less time to build the restrictions into retailer point-of-sale systems, and whether that gap will affect how quickly those states wind down their plans. Nebraska offers a partial answer. The state’s Department of Health and Human Services had already published implementation details for its Healthy Choices Waiver before the court struck down USDA’s approval. That page now acknowledges the ruling and tells retailers to pause preparations. Colorado, Iowa, and West Virginia have not posted equivalent public updates confirming suspension steps, which suggests that states deeper into implementation may take longer to formally withdraw or revise their plans.
Retailers in the affected states had been bracing for complicated compliance demands. Chains would have needed to reprogram bar-code databases to distinguish between, for example, sugar-sweetened and unsweetened beverages, or between candy and other packaged snacks. Smaller stores, particularly in rural areas, faced the prospect of manual workarounds at checkout or costly software upgrades. With the injunction in place, those changes are on hold, and industry groups that had warned of confusion at the register now have a legal ruling to point to in future negotiations with state agencies.
Statutory limits and the Aragon v. Rollins docket
The case, docketed as 1:26-cv-00861 in the District of Columbia, centered on whether USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service could use its demonstration-project authority to strip specific product categories from the statutory definition of eligible food. The judge concluded it could not, emphasizing that Congress had already drawn the line on what SNAP can buy and that an agency may not use pilot projects to rewrite that baseline. As the Associated Press reported, the ruling rested on procedural and statutory constraints rather than the policy merits of restricting unhealthy purchases.
USDA had framed the waivers as part of a broader “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. On its own waiver overview, the agency described how participating states would bar the use of SNAP dollars for categories such as sugar-sweetened beverages, candy, and certain snack foods, while tracking health and spending outcomes. Iowa’s waiver, for instance, singled out sugary drinks and candy as test categories, with the state arguing that the changes would nudge families toward healthier options without cutting overall benefit levels.
Florida pursued a parallel path. In a separate section of the waiver site, USDA summarized how Florida officials proposed to limit purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages and selected high-sugar snacks, positioning the project as a way to study whether targeted exclusions could reduce obesity and diabetes rates among low-income households. While Florida was not part of the Aragon lawsuit, the same legal logic could threaten its waiver if plaintiffs there bring a similar challenge.
The judge in Aragon stopped short of ruling on whether it is wise public health policy to let SNAP dollars pay for soda and candy. Instead, the opinion focused on who gets to make that call. By holding that USDA cannot use waiver authority to narrow the definition of eligible food, the court effectively told states and the federal agency to take their arguments to Congress. Any nationwide shift toward banning sugary drinks or candy from SNAP would likely require new legislation, not just administrative experimentation.
For now, the ruling freezes a high-profile test of how far states can go in reshaping federal nutrition benefits. Advocates who favor tighter rules on sugary purchases warn that the decision will slow efforts to align SNAP with dietary guidelines. Anti-hunger groups, meanwhile, argue that the outcome protects program consistency and prevents low-income shoppers from facing a different set of rules every time they cross a state line. With waivers stalled and implementation plans in limbo, the broader debate over what SNAP should buy is poised to move from agency pilot projects into a more overtly political fight on Capitol Hill.
