Mamdani Secures Nationwide 90-Day Delay on New SNAP Rules After Appeal to Trump

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday announced a deal with the Trump administration that will give stores across the country more time to comply with new federal rules governing food assistance benefits, the latest product of his unusually warm relationship with President Donald Trump.

The Department of Agriculture rules, which took effect last week, require retailers to stock a wider variety of products in order to keep accepting SNAP benefits. Shortly before they kicked in, Mamdani signed onto a bipartisan letter to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins urging the administration to postpone the requirements.

Mamdani warned that the mandates could threaten the survival of the city's more than 10,000 bodegas and corner stores, along with the New Yorkers who depend on them, if businesses failed to meet the new standards in time and lost the ability to process SNAP payments.

Following negotiations with Rollins and Trump, the mayor secured a 90-day extension for small retailers to come into compliance. The reprieve applies nationwide, not only in New York City, and took effect Friday. Mamdani said he personally raised the request with the president after City Hall contacted the federal government.

"What I told the president was that this is a rule that, if allowed to be implemented on the timeline as it was scheduled, would be one that would throw the lives of so many working New Yorkers into a real place of anxiety and chaos," Mamdani said. "And the president took that concern seriously."

The mayor declined to say how frequently he speaks with Trump. "I'll keep the cadence of that between the two of us," he said, while emphasizing that their conversations continue.

The announcement comes as the two men near the one-year mark of an unexpected alliance that has delivered tangible results for City Hall. After their first Oval Office meeting on Nov. 21, the threat of an immigration enforcement surge in New York on the scale of the one in Minneapolis largely faded.

In February, Mamdani successfully petitioned Trump to release a Columbia University student who had been taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and he has continued to make similar requests privately, as POLITICO reported this week. The two have also discussed federal involvement in a large development project that would span the Sunnyside Yard rail depot in Queens.

The arrangement has come at a political cost that Mamdani's base has so far tolerated: the mayor rarely criticizes Trump directly and deflects questions about their private calls. Elsewhere in New York political news Friday, Gov. Kathy Hochul said the resignation of former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang would not derail the state's semiconductor investments, state Sen. Liz Krueger said she is not seeking the Senate housing committee chairmanship, and Mamdani declined to endorse Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's bid to keep leading his caucus.