Christine Tully, 78, worried that November would come but her food assistance from the federal government would not.

Maybe she could will a good outcome, she thought, by writing down her grocery list for the month as usual. Chicken. Apple juice. Carrots. And if she could find them on sale, she wrote, “a pack of three steaks.”

Millions of low-income Americans are in a similar position as the new month begins, wondering how long they will have to wait for a vital type of support.

“I’m just so confused,” Tully, a great-grandmother and retired diner cook in Miami, said Friday, trying to figure out the status of the federal program that provides her with $285 in monthly help. “How did we get here?”

A judge in Rhode Island on Friday ordered the Trump administration to keep paying for food st

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