A shrunken social safety net. Flight delays. And more missed paychecks. The effects of the government shutdown may have been slow to take hold, but they are about to burst into the open as federal dollars start drying up for key programs.
Three key thoughts for you this morning…
Number one: Here’s what to know about the cascading deadlines of the next few days.
Hundreds of thousands of federal employees — including the country’s 14,000 air traffic controllers — will miss their first full paycheck today. Other workers will either miss a full paycheck on Thursday or already did last Friday. In total, around 1.4 million civilian federal employees are going unpaid during the shutdown. About 730,000 of them are continuing to work; the other 670,000 are furloughed.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, is set to start running out of funding on Saturday. Almost 42 million Americans rely on SNAP, receiving an average of $187.20 per month to pay for groceries.
More than 100 Head Start early childhood education programs are supposed to receive their next federal grant on Saturday. Without the money, some will have to close. There are more than 1,700 Head Start programs across the country, serving 800,000 preschool-age children; the programs receive their federal dollars at different times.
Essential Air Service (EAS), a Transportation Department program that subsidizes commercial flights to small airports, only has funding assured through Sunday. Without EAS, flights are likely to stop running in and out of many rural communities.
The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps about 6.7 million American households stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infant, and Children (WIC), which provides food assistance to nearly 7 million low-income mothers and children, are also both running out of money as the funding gap continues.
To sum it up: tens of millions of Americans are expected to soon be hungrier, colder, and unpaid because of the government shutdowns.
The follow-on effects will be widespread. For example, as government employees start missing their paychecks, we could start seeing a repeat of the 2018-19 shutdown, when some air traffic controllers decided to stay home rather than work unpaid. (This dynamic is thought to have played a role in that shutdown ending after 35 days.)
Per CNN, there have been at least 264 instances of staffing shortages at FAA facilities since October 1, compared to 60 over the same time period last year. There have been more than 50 staffing shortages reported since Friday alone, causing numerous flight delays. On some days during the shutdown, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said, up to 53% of flight delays have been due to staffing shortages; the normal level is 5%.
Several air traffic controllers are taking second jobs in order to get by, Duffy said. “I have to do what I have to do in order to provide for my child,” one air traffic controller who is now also driving for DoorDash told MSNBC.
Number two: the Trump administration is continuing to pick and choose where federal dollars go, moving money around to sustain its priorities while other programs go unfunded.
Trump tapped $8 billion, potentially illegally, in order to pay the troops (in addition to a $130 million donation from a top ally), but is refusing to tap into a $6 billion contingency fund for SNAP benefits. ICE agents are being paid, but air traffic controllers are not.
In a recent op-ed piece, Donald Kettl and Philip Joyce described Trump’s shutdown-era funding maneuvers as “the single biggest expansion of presidential power in American history.”
Number three: will Democrats use November 1 as their climb-down date?
Democrats are planning a lawsuit over SNAP, hoping to force Trump to tap into the contingency fund. They may have a strong enough legal case — the fund is supposed to be made available “at such times as may be necessary to carry out program operations” — but the lawsuit raises an obvious question for Democrats: Why sue to extend SNAP benefits when they could simply vote to fund them (and the rest of the government) at any time, something the party has so far refused to do without added policy demands attached.
If tens of millions of Americans start to go without grocery benefits on Saturday, it could raise pressure on Democrats to back down. Already, there are some signs of cracks within the party’s coalition: the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the nation’s largest union of federal workers, which had previously supported the Democratic stand, called on the party Monday to vote for the “clean” funding bill offered by Republicans.
Per Punchbowl News, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) is also leaning against holding one-off votes on bills to pay air traffic controllers, replenish SNAP, and fund other parts of the government piecemeal, instead opting to keep the pressure on Democrats to either fund everything or nothing.
Democrats insist they will not fold until President Trump agrees to negotiate with them on health care — something he has shown no interest in doing. Trump is currently in Asia, meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping on Thursday, and potentially with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un later in the week.
In addition to being a key date for SNAP and Head Start, this Saturday, November 1, is also a critical deadline in the health care fight: it’s when open enrollment starts for the health insurance marketplace set up by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare.
If the enhanced subsidies Democrats have been trying to extend aren’t re-upped by then, Americans shopping for insurance on the marketplace will see markedly higher premium costs — an average increase of about $1,000, according to KFF.
There has been some speculation that Democrats could use this date as their shutdown escape hatch. Pushing for the subsidies to be extended was always complicated for Democrats politically: winning the fight would mean taking an issue off the table for the midterm elections, and potentially handing Republicans an opportunity to boast about health care costs being lowered on their watch.
With that in mind, they could use November 1 as their pivot date to say: Hey, we tried to lower health care costs, but Republicans wouldn’t negotiate. Now it’s too late to extend the subsidies, so we’re reopening the government, but know if you see high premiums, it’s on the GOP. Republicans would surely crow about Democrats surrendering, but it might be the best-case scenario for Democrats politically — since the subsidies remain a live issue heading into next week’s elections and the midterms — and it offers them a simple narrative about why they folded when they did.
If the shutdown does blow past November 1, however, there’s no obvious stop date after that — unless you count the threat of snarled Thanksgiving travel. If public opinion continues to be roughly split about who to blame for the shutdown, a senior Democratic aide told CNN, the party has no plans to fold unless there are “planes falling out of the sky.”
The Dems can't cave until enough people see the huge increases in their healthcare premiums for 2026. Then they need to be on TV (all day and every day) saying "See? This is what we were fighting about." Until people see how something affects them directly, they generally don't care.
Why should Democrats cave? It makes no sense.