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 stamps during the shutdown, finding that it had acted unlawfully by refusing to tap emergency funds to sustain the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Late Friday, President Donald Trump said that the administration would provide the funding for food stamps in November once a federal court could clarify “how we can legally” supply the money. But he indicated that a delay was inevitable.

“It is already delayed enough due to the Democrats keeping the Government closed through the monthly payment date,” he wrote on social media, “and, even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while states get the money out.”

Typically, the issuance of SNAP benefits involves state agencies, vendors who load the program’s debit-style cards, grocery stores, other retailers and also the federal government.

Even if SNAP benefits are disbursed at some point this month, there remain broader concerns about how the most vulnerable Americans will weather the effects of the federal shutdown and other cuts to the country’s social safety net.

“It feels like we’re standing on the shore, and we see a tidal wave coming,” said Robyn Hyden, director of Alabama Arise, an organization that advocates for policies to help low-income people. “But we don’t exactly know how it is going to hit, where it’s going to hit, because there’s still uncertainty over whether they’re going to be able to fix any of this.”

The disruption to SNAP is just one example of how federal programs have been imperiled — not just by the month-old shutdown, but also by the administration’s efforts to curtail spending on social programs as part of the domestic policy and tax cut law that Trump signed in July.

Federal funding for several anti-poverty programs will dry up this month because of the shutdown, affecting tens of millions of Americans who depend on subsidies for child care and utilities as well as food.

Some 6.7 million women and young children who participate in a grocery voucher program known as WIC may lose access to infant formula, food, breastfeeding support and health care screenings. As the weather turns colder, nearly 6 million households that receive help to pay for utility bills through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program may face higher heating costs or service cutoffs.

And for more than 65,000 children and families enrolled in Head Start early-education programs that depend on immediate federal funding, the shutdown means finding new child care options as early as next week.