Congress
Food-aid cliff bears down on Democrats as shutdown nears 1-month mark
Missed paychecks, canceled infrastructure projects and mass firings haven’t yet convinced congressional Democrats to change their government shutdown stance. But they are now facing down another pressure point threatening a program they’ve long championed benefiting millions of Americans.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps feed more than 40 million people, will start to run out of funds Nov. 1, President Donald Trump’s USDA is warning. At least 25 states plan to cut off benefits starting on that date — including California, the overwhelmingly Democratic state with 4.5 million SNAP recipients.
The food-aid cliff has largely flown under the radar as Democrats focus on another Nov. 1 development: the launch of open enrollment for Affordable Care Act insurance plans in most states. They believe massive premium hikes prompted by the expiration of key federal subsidies will compel Republicans to relent and negotiate an extension at that time.
So far, despite the possible food assistance fallout in just over a week, top Democrats are pushing ahead and refusing to shore up the votes to reopen the government.
Asked Tuesday if the cliff would change his party’s calculus, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it would not: “It should change Republicans’ calculus, that they should sit down and negotiate — negotiate a way to address this crisis.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), asked if it was worth pushing the shutdown beyond Nov. 1 given the risk of food aid lapsing, replied, “Worth it to whom? To people who will lose their health care or to people who will lose their food?”
“We’re people who want Americans to have health care and food,” she added. “The Republicans, evidently, don’t care whether they have either.”
Trump and members of his administration have acted selectively to ease shutdown impacts on agencies and programs they perceive as benefiting their political allies — shifting funds to pay active duty troops, for instance, while letting civilian workers go unpaid.
That approach appears to be playing out at USDA, where there is no firm indication the Trump administration will act to patch the impending SNAP lapse. A separate initiative delivering baby formula and other nutrition aid under the Women, Infants and Children program is also at risk next month after the White House moved to use some tariff revenue as a backfill early in the shutdown.
At the same time, the administration is planning to partially reopen key farm loans and shuttered local USDA offices beginning Thursday — addressing a key GOP shutdown pain point that Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other farm state Republican lawmakers have pressed the White House on since the shutdown started four weeks ago.
For now, Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers are eager to blame Democrats for risking hunger among millions of low-income Americans right before the holiday season.
“The shutdown is Democrat performance art — the audience starves while the elitist critics applaud,” said one White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) added, “What’s it gonna take … for the Democrats to say, ‘Gee, huh, maybe — maybe people should be able to eat.”
But it’s not just blue states like California and New York that will suffer. Red states are also at high risk, as well as large pockets of rural America that voted for Trump. For instance, Louisiana — home to Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise — has one of the highest SNAP participation rates in the country, and Scalise noted Wednesday more than 800,000 Louisianans rely on the program.
White House officials are keenly aware of the consequences for their own voters, even as they continue to needle Democrats on the topic. Several Republican governors have already reached out to the administration to understand what the consequences will be.
The Trump administration has options, which officials are weighing, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss the private deliberations: Democrats want USDA to deploy a SNAP contingency fund that currently holds about $5 billion to offset the roughly $9 billion in funding needed to cover costs for November. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, is among senators also pushing the administration to use tariff revenue as they’ve done with WIC.
“I would argue that the same authorizations exist for [SNAP] as well,” Luján said.
But some Trump officials say finding a SNAP patch won’t be so simple. Tapping the contingency fund wouldn’t leave money for other emergencies that are known to pop up with the program, and if the full $9 billion can’t be covered, it could take weeks to mete out a smaller percentage of money to each state’s program — meaning families would miss their Nov. 1 food benefits anyway. Meanwhile, the legality of using tariff revenue for SNAP is unclear and would also pull money from child nutrition programs — which the Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to replenish.
Republicans privately believe the food aid cliff could motivate some more moderate Democratic senators to relent and vote for a GOP-led stopgap bill that would reopen the government. With five additional votes needed to pass that measure, they are eyeing Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Kristen Gillibrand of New York and Gary Peters of Michigan, among others.
Peters, who is retiring, said in an interview he has “a lot of concerns” about the possible loss of food aid but that it was up to Republicans to come to the table.
“It’s just so curious that Republicans are not willing to come together on health care — when the ACA tax credits go away, it hits primarily Republican congressional districts and Republican states,” Peters said. “So Republicans don’t care about their own people.”
That rhetoric was echoed by a host of Democrats this week, including California Sen. Alex Padilla, who said “the best way to address that is for Republicans to come to the table, work with Democrats to reopen the government and address the spike in health care costs.”
Others are frustrated that Republicans appear to be using food aid as leverage after moving to cut more than $200 billion in spending from the SNAP program as part of their sweeping domestic policy bill passed this summer along party lines.
“They’re the ones that made the cuts to SNAP to begin with, and they should be funding SNAP,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee. “So it’s very rich if they’re saying they’re going to cut SNAP when they made all the cuts to begin with.”
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) estimated 361,000 people in his district — nearly half his constituency — could be affected by the SNAP cliff. But he also noted the high number of families who relied on ACA health insurance subsidies and said he did not see a reason for Democrats to relent right now — pointing to some perceived cracks on the GOP side, such as Thune’s offer to Senate Democrats of a vote to extend the Obamacare tax credits.
Asked how many days Democrats could hold out, Cuellar referenced the record-long shutdown during Trump’s first term. ”Last time,” he said, “we did 35.”
Grace Yarrow contributed to this report.
Congress
Schumer rolls out Democrats’ midterm energy pitch
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rolled out an energy and climate change agenda Wednesday as a preview of what Democrats have in store if they take the chamber’s majority in November’s elections.
Schumer’s five-point plan seeks to ride the national momentum on affordability, framing Democrats as the party not just of clean energy and fighting climate change, but of lower electricity bills and more jobs.
It touches on some longtime Democratic priorities — like bringing back the Inflation Reduction Act clean energy tax incentives that President Donald Trump and Republicans rolled back last year — and easing permitting hurdles for wind, solar and other zero-emissions energy sources.
“We can bring new voters and allies into the fight for a cleaner environment by showing how clean energy is affordable energy,” Schumer said.
“With this new expanded coalition, putting us back in the majority, we have an opportunity to put forward new policy solutions, strong policy solutions, that tell the American people we can both lower costs and make real progress on climate change,” he continued.
Schumer presented the plan at the League of Conservation Voters’ annual Capital Dinner, gathering hundreds of donors, lawmakers, environmental staff and others.
The group, long a major Democratic ally, is one of the nation’s top election spenders, and is poised to be a major part of Democrats’ attempts to recover from their 2024 losses.
Clean energy, Schumer said, is “the cheapest and fastest way to add energy to the grid, and reduces our emissions at the same time.”
The Democrats’ plan seeks to build out more electricity transmission and storage, make sure data centers pay their fair share for energy, and better protect consumers from electricity bill increases.
While many of the pillars are longtime priorities on the left, Schumer emphasized some new priorities. The plan puts geothermal and nuclear energy, including fusion, on a similar level to renewables like wind and solar.
Schumer is also promising “a thorough re-examination of the entire structure and incentives within our energy systems … to prioritize lowering costs,” and new efforts to make electricity bills “easier to understand.”
While Democrats have been engaging with Republicans toward bipartisan permitting legislation for all forms of energy, Schumer presented a more partisan permitting concept in his speech.
“Democrats will provide legislative certainty for clean energy projects, so that workers and investors can rebuild the clean energy project ecosystem that Trump has destroyed,” he said, adding that permitting legislation “never, never must come at the expense of our obligation to protect local communities and safeguard the environment.”
Democrats have not been particularly vocal on climate change in their drive to take the Senate and House majorities, as they reexamine the issue’s palatability with voters. Schumer’s rollout shows at least some willingness to focus on climate, but keeps the party’s priority on affordability.
Democrats currently hold 47 of the Senate’s seats, so they would need a net gain of four seats to get the majority. The party is focusing on candidates like former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Gov. Janet Mills in Maine and former Rep. Mary Peltola in Alaska to get there, but it’s an uphill battle.
The party has also taken recent steps to push its energy agenda in the Senate. Earlier Tuesday, Democrats forced a vote on a resolution that sought to undo Trump’s implementation of clean energy tax policies. More such resolutions are forthcoming.
Congress
Special election shocker has Florida Republicans nervous about redistricting
Florida has been viewed for months as the potential capstone of a GOP redistricting campaign, but now Sunshine State Republicans are growing wary after the dramatic flip of two legislative seats in the state — including one where President Donald Trump votes.
Republicans already hold a commanding 20-8 edge over Democrats in the Florida House delegation, and some in the GOP — including Gov. Ron DeSantis — believe they could pick up as many as five more seats with a rare mid-decade redraw of district lines.
Some Florida incumbents are now warning in stark terms it could backfire.
“I think the Legislature needs to be very cognizant of the fact that if they get too aggressive … you could put incumbent members at risk,” GOP Rep. Greg Steube said. Some seats that Republicans previously won by eight or nine points, he said, could instead have only a four- or five-point GOP advantage — putting them in reach for Democrats in a wave election.
DeSantis, citing a state Supreme Court decision from last year and a potential ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, has already called a special session of the state Legislature in April to push ahead with new lines. So far there have been no official maps produced or any signs that lawmakers have started working on them.
Republican anxiety has only grown further after Democrats notched surprising wins in special elections Tuesday, including a Palm Beach County district that contains the Mar-a-Largo resort where Trump lives and votes.
While many in the GOP have brushed off the Democratic gains there and in other states as anomalies, private qualms are growing among the incumbents whose seats could be put at greater risk due to redistricting.
“We keep saying these are kind of one-off things that haven’t gone our way,” said one Florida House Republican granted anonymity to speak candidly. “But I’m not seeing any of the one-offs that are going our way.”
“To talk as aggressively as some of what we’ve heard, there’s no way to get there without significantly weakening some districts,” the member added.
House Democrats are hoping to capitalize on the opportunity. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries quickly sent a warning Tuesday night that redistricting could backfire.
“We will crush House Republicans in November if DeSantis tries to gerrymander the Florida congressional map,” Jeffries said in a post on X.
Others are openly objecting to redistricting on more high-minded grounds. Rep. Daniel Webster, a veteran Republican from central Florida, called it a “slippery slope.”
“I’ve been around enough reapportionments to know it can come back and bite you,” he said.
“I don’t like this redistricting stuff,” Jacksonville-area Rep. John Rutherford said, noting south Florida would likely bear the brunt of any changes. “But if they think they can get another two seats or something, have at it.”
Any significant redraw in Florida would likely focus on changing districts that were drawn based on racial considerations, the subject of the court rulings DeSantis has cited. While much of the focus has been on seats held by Democrats, Republicans concede it could lead to changes to the Miami-area district represented by GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.
Some incumbents are also worried that redistricting — still weeks away — is hindering their reelection campaigns as the midterms approach.
“Why would you knock on doors if you don’t know if those doors are gonna be in your district or not?” Steube said.
The hand-wringing over Florida comes as the fallout from Trump’s monthslong redistricting push continues to ripple through the House. Republicans kicked things off with a surprise effort to draw new maps in Texas, but Democrats countered with an effort to draw California’s lines in their favor.
After months of wrangling in about a dozen states, the whole effort looks to end up close to a wash — after some Republicans tried to warn party leaders the heavy-handed effort could backfire.
A group of House Republicans from Florida privately discussed their concerns about the fallout of yet another redistricting push in their state, several Republicans confirmed — especially amid rising anxiety that Hispanic voters could be turning away from the GOP.
House GOP leaders mostly brushed off the Florida special elections in public comments Wednesday, arguing that low-turnout, off-cycle races shouldn’t be considered midterm bellwethers. But some suggested there are lessons to be learned from Tuesday’s results.
“Surely you look at those and see, are there things we can learn and improve upon when the big election comes?” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters Wednesday. “And obviously, November is the election that we are focused on.”
The top leaders of the House GOP’s campaign arm, Reps. Richard Hudson of North Carolina and Brian Jack of Georgia, both deferred to the state Legislature on redistricting in Florida Wednesday.
Hudson, the NRCC chair, said Florida’s growing population means redistricting “makes sense to do,” but he said he was more concerned about turnout and other factors.
Jack, the group’s deputy chair for recruiting, similarly talked up the candidates Republicans would be fielding in Florida and elsewhere. As for redistricting, he said, “I defer to the Legislature.”
“It’s up to them,” he said, “not up to us.”
Congress
Arrington: Fraud cuts for war funding
House Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington is making clear he will push for the “fraud prevention” spending cuts he wants across state and social safety net programs in order to pay for any Iran war funding in a second GOP reconciliation bill.
The Texas Republican is meeting soon this afternoon with Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in Graham’s office to discuss plans.
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