The Trump administration specifically sought to challenge a ruling issued by a lower court on Thursday. In that scathing order, Judge John J. McConnell Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, directed the government to tap an ample store of leftover federal money to fund food stamps in their entirety for this month.

In doing so, the judge faulted President Trump and his top aides for using the nation’s largest anti-hunger program as a political bargaining chip. And he gave the government a Friday deadline to comply and send full payments to states, which administer food stamps for roughly 42 million people.

But lawyers for the government asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to halt that requirement and render a ruling before 4 p.m. If the administration prevails, it could severely cut or delay aid that helps many families purchase groceries.

In doing so, the Justice Department defended its refusal to tap accounts totaling tens of billions of dollars that would allow the government to provide full nutrition benefits swiftly to the roughly one in eight Americans who receive them.

The government said the order “makes a mockery of the separation of powers,” since it is Congress that possesses the power to set the nation’s spending. The comments contrasted sharply with the president’s other moves during the shutdown to reprogram billions of dollars without the approval of Congress, including to pay officials conducting mass deportations.

The Justice Department also said that officials could not legally tap some of the funds for SNAP. And it rejected the suggestion that Mr. Trump had politicized the nutrition program, even though the president had threatened days earlier to withhold all aid until Democrats caved to his fiscal demands. Instead, lawyers for the administration said Mr. Trump was merely “stating the facts” that the program had no remaining money.

“Unfortunately, by injecting itself with its erroneous short-term solution, the district court has scrambled ongoing political negotiations, extending the shutdown and thus undercutting its own objective of ensuring adequate funding for SNAP and all other crucial safety-net programs,” the government told the appeals court.

The legal wrangling offered no comfort to the millions of Americans now facing the imminent risk of hunger and severe financial hardship as the federal shutdown stretches into its sixth week, the longest in U.S. history. For now, some states including California, Michigan, Oregon and Wisconsin said they had started to process full food stamp payments, even with federal funding in new legal jeopardy.”