Grocery carts in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia can hold soda, candy and other recently-banned items again without the SNAP card getting rejected at the register. A federal judge in Washington threw out the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s approval of each state’s food-restriction waiver, and the agency has since told grocers, in writing, to stop enforcing the rules in at least three of those states. For a household stretching a fixed SNAP allotment through a grocery run, the change means the short list of items an EBT card wouldn’t cover a few months ago is back to the ordinary SNAP-eligible list.
A federal judge in Washington voided five states’ SNAP restrictions
The order came in Aragon et al. v. Rollins et al., No. 1:26-cv-00861, a case filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by SNAP recipients living in the five states. On June 22, 2026, Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that USDA exceeded its statutory authority and skipped the public notice-and-comment process the law requires before approving state requests to strip items like soda and candy from what a SNAP card can buy. Her decision found USDA also failed to engage in the “reasoned decisionmaking” federal law demands of an agency before it changes a program that touches millions of grocery budgets — a separate, independent basis for throwing the approvals out.
USDA’s own tracking page confirms the result in plain terms: next to Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia, the agency states that the June 22 order “ordered that FNA’s approval of the waiver be vacated and that the waiver’s implementation may not proceed,” language the agency was still posting on that table as of its August 25, 2026 update.
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What comes back on the SNAP-eligible list, state by state
The five vacated waivers were not identical, and neither is what changes at the register. Iowa’s waiver was the broadest of the group: it would have narrowed SNAP purchases to items exempt from the state’s own sales tax, cutting off nearly everything except unprepared groceries and food-producing plants or seeds. Nebraska’s version targeted soda, other soft drinks and energy drinks, with candy scheduled to join the restricted list on November 1, 2026, before the ruling stepped in. Tennessee’s waiver covered processed foods and beverages, including soda, energy drinks and candy. Colorado’s and West Virginia’s rules were narrower, limited to soft drinks or soda alone. In all five states, none of those limits are currently enforced — a SNAP card there buys what it bought before each waiver took effect.
USDA has told retailers, in writing, to stop enforcing the bans
A court order voiding a federal approval doesn’t automatically reach every cash register, so USDA has been issuing its own retailer notices state by state. The agency’s guidance portal carries a formal “Stop Waiver Implementation” notice for Iowa and a matching one for West Virginia, both issued July 2, 2026 and both instructing stores to reverse the restriction rather than wait for further guidance; Nebraska carries the same type of notice. Colorado’s and Tennessee’s waiver pages currently point retailers to their state agencies rather than a standalone federal stop-notice, but both states are listed under the identical vacatur language as the other three. For SNAP retailers, that means the point-of-sale restriction codes tied to each waiver are supposed to already be switched off in all five states.
USDA is appealing, but the block stays in place for now
USDA hasn’t dropped the fight. The agency filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on August 20, 2026, asking the appellate court to review Judge Jackson’s summary judgment ruling. Filing that appeal does not reinstate the five state programs, which stay blocked unless the D.C. Circuit stays or reverses the district court’s order — something that had not happened as of this writing. Secretary Brooke Rollins has publicly criticized the ruling, arguing SNAP dollars shouldn’t fund what she calls “sugar bombs,” so households in the five states should expect the legal fight, not a return of the grocery-aisle restriction, to be the live issue through the fall.
The other approved waivers aren’t affected
Nothing about the ruling touches USDA’s food-restriction approvals in the states that weren’t part of the lawsuit. The same USDA tracking table lists 23 states total with an approved waiver; only the five named in Aragon v. Rollins were vacated. States including Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah already have their own restrictions running, and a cluster of others are set to switch on this fall regardless of what happens in the Aragon appeal: South Carolina’s waiver targets August 31, North Dakota’s is set for September 1, Montana’s for September 30, and Ohio’s and Virginia’s for October 1. Several more — Hawaii, Kansas, Missouri, Nevada and Wyoming among them — have waivers approved for implementation dates further out, into 2027 and 2028. A household shopping across a state line from West Virginia into a neighboring state with one of those unaffected waivers would still run into a different, narrower list of what a SNAP card covers there.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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