WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a memo Friday the agency’s contingency fund cannot legally be used to provide food assistance benefits for more than 42 million people in November, as the government shutdown drags on.

The position is a reversal from the department’s earlier stance, according to a since-deleted copy of the USDA’s Sept. 30 shutdown plan that said the department would use its multi-year contingency fund to continue paying Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits during the ongoing shutdown.

SNAP has about $6 billion in the contingency fund — short of the roughly $9 billion needed to cover a full month of the program, putting November benefits in jeopardy.

Because of a stalemate in Congress over a stopgap spending bill, the governm

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