U.S. flights and energy payment assistance for low-income households are expected to be the latest casualties of the impasse between Republicans and Democrats on federal spending.
Speaking from the Senate floor, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that Trump and Republicans should heed the “political torpedo” of Tuesday’s election results and launch talks with Democrats on reopening government.
“We want to have negotiations. It’s been long enough,” Schumer said. “Look, if Republicans were smart, they would get the message after Tuesday that their do-nothing strategy isn’t working.”
NBC reported earlier this week that a small bipartisan group of senators continues to hold talks on how to end the shutdown. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told reporters that she feels like “some progress” is being made towards reopening the government.
“Over the weekend, the staff has worked very hard. Members have worked very hard,” Collins said earlier this week. “I personally have talked to both House and Senate members about a path forward.”
Collins made clear, however, that Republicans and Democrats have not gotten close to a deal yet.
“Democrats are bringing their specific language forward for the first time, and it just feels better this week,” Collins said. “Now, who knows? It could all fall apart again, and I don’t mean to imply there’s an agreement.”
So far in his second term, Trump has visited the same number of foreign countries as he has states for policy events.
The president visited 14 states for policy events or emergency-related travel, and also 14 countries, including Italy, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Japan and South Korea — this despite his strong criticism of globalism in the past.
His domestic trips include travel to North Carolina related to Hurricane Helene, Nevada for an economic policy speech, Alabama, for a commencement speech, and New York for the United Nations General Assembly. He also traveled to Alaska for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine.
Trump has visited 15 states this term if the count includes trips for sporting events: Louisiana for the Super Bowl. He has attended 10 sporting events as president, including UFC fights, the Daytona 500 and the LIV golf tournament.
The statistics mark a drop in domestic travel compared to his first term, when Trump visited 27 states at this point in his presidency, suggesting such travel for administrative purposes is less of a priority for him right now than it was in the first year of his first term.
This term, Trump has also spent 22 of the total 41 weekends of his administration in either Mar-a-Lago or at his Bedminster, N.Y., golf club:
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., implored Democrats this morning to provide the votes to reopen the government, citing impending flight delays announced by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy yesterday.
“That means widespread flight cancellations, supply chain issues, hundreds of thousands of passengers dealing with disruption to travel every day,” Thune said in remarks on the Senate floor.
“The impact this will have will be immense,” Thune said. He blamed Senate Democrats for refusing to back a House-passed short-term spending bill favored by Republicans that would extend current funding levels until later this month.
Democrats have been pushing to include an extension of expiring Obamacare subsidies in any short-term funding measure, but Republicans have refused to discuss health care provisions until the government reopens.
Trump said today that Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s announcement that she plans to retire from Congress at the end of her term “is a great thing for America,” Fox News reported.
Fox News’ Peter Doocy shared the quote on air from Trump and then a White House X account posted it.
“The retirement of Nancy Pelosi is a great thing for America,” Trump said, calling her “evil, corrupt, and only focused on bad things for our country.”
“She was rapidly losing control of her party and she was never coming back,” Trump said, according to Doocy. “I’m very honored she impeached me twice and failed miserably twice. Nancy Pelosi is a highly overrated politician.”
Pelosi’s office declined to comment.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to open a call center that would have a dedicated unit to track down unaccompanied migrant children with the help of state and local police, an agency contracting document said, part of a wider Trump administration effort to find and potentially deport the minors.
The center would aim to feed information from state and local police to federal authorities, including the locations of unaccompanied children, according to the document, which was posted to a government contracting website Tuesday. ICE wants to create a round-the-clock facility that could handle 6,000-7,000 calls per day related to immigration enforcement, it said.
Read the full story here.
During his meeting last week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Trump raised the case of Jimmy Lai, a Hong Kong media tycoon and pro-democracy activist who is facing life imprisonment on national security charges, a White House official told NBC News.
Trump had said he would talk to Xi about Lai, 77, who according to his family and rights groups has spent more than 1,700 days in solitary confinement amid a lengthy trial that ended in August. Lai, the founder of the now-defunct pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily, has pleaded not guilty to two charges of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces, and one charge of conspiracy to publish seditious material. A date for the verdict has yet to be announced.
Trump has said he hopes to “save” Lai, and said last year that “100%, I’ll get him out” of China and that it would be “so easy,” drawing a warning from Hong Kong’s top leader not to interfere.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Lai was the “principal mastermind and perpetrator” behind anti-government protests that roiled the Chinese territory for months in 2019.
“The central government firmly supports Hong Kong’s judicial authorities in performing their duties in accordance with the law,” she told reporters in Beijing today. “Hong Kong affairs are China’s internal affairs and brook no external interference.”
Reuters also reported that Trump and Xi had discussed Lai, citing three people briefed on the talks and a U.S. administration official.
In a final love letter to San Francisco, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who made history as the nation’s first female speaker of the House and twice served in that top job, announced in a video message today that she will not seek re-election in 2026.
“I will not be seeking re-election to Congress. With a grateful heart, I look forward to my final year of service as your proud representative,” Pelosi, 85, said in her video message to San Francisco voters, interlaced with sweeping imagery of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Coit Tower and other landmarks, as well as photos that captured her storied political career.
The powerful California Democrat led her party in the House for two decades — from 2002 to 2022 — serving as a crucial ally for Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and orchestrating the opposition to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Read the full story here.
Following a string of Democratic wins on election night, Trump and Republicans are pointing to the ongoing government shutdown and a lack of focus on affordability issues for the losses. It comes as the Supreme Court is questioning the legality of Trump’s sweeping tariffs. NBC’s Garrett Haake reports for “TODAY.”
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz presented the 10 elected members of the Security Council yesterday with a draft resolution on the Gaza peace plan, a U.S. official tells NBC News.
The resolution backs the proposed Board of Peace, an international body to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, and authorizes the peacekeeping forces outlined in Trump’s 20-point peace plan, said a spokesperson for the U.S. mission to the U.N.
Waltz was joined by representatives of Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates in what the U.S. official described as “showing clear regional support.”
The elected members of the Security Council include Algeria, Denmark, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, South Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia and Somalia. It wasn’t immediately clear if the U.S. had shared the draft with permanent members Russia and China, who would be able to veto the resolution’s passage.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said the U.S. was working on a possible United Nations resolution to support the proposed international peacekeeping force as part of the U.S. brokered peace agreement, which some countries have said is a requirement for their participation.
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September that his country was ready to deploy peacekeeping forces to the territory.
“If and when the Security Council and this assembly decide, we are ready to deploy 20,000 or even more of our sons and daughters to help secure peace in Gaza or elsewhere in Palestine as part of a united multilateral force so that the two-state solution, so that peace in both Palestine and Israel, can become real, not just envisioned,” Subianto said.
The Federal Aviation Administration will begin cutting the number of flights in the “high-traffic” parts of the country as the government shutdown grinds on and local airports have reported staffing shortages, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said yesterday.
“There is going to be a 10% reduction in capacity at 40 of our locations,” Duffy said. “This is about where’s the pressure and how do we alleviate the pressure.”
He said the reduction in capacity would start tomorrow.
The development comes as the shutdown has entered its second month and in the wake of a weekend during which dozens of American airports reported hundreds of delays.
Read the full story here.
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., warned in a statement yesterday that a federal program aimed at assisting low-income households with paying their energy bills could run dry “by the end of this week” if the government shutdown persists.
“This is a life-or-death issue, and it is unconscionable not to fund it,” Burchett said. “I am calling on Senate Democrats to reopen the government and stop elderly Americans from being left out in the cold this winter.”
The $4.1 billion Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program helps pay heating costs during colder months. The program, known by its acronym LIHEAP, serves 5.9 million households, according to the Office of the Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services.
NBC News reported in April that the Trump administration terminated the entire staff that was responsible for providing oversight and technical assistance for the program at HHS.
Trump again encouraged Republicans to do away with the filibuster during a Fox New interview that aired last night.
“I think that if we got rid of the filibuster, we would approve so many good things, common sense things, wonderful things, that it would be hard to beat us. If we don’t, it’s always going to be a slog,” Trump told Fox News host Bret Baier.
“I would say absolutely without question, I have no doubt in my mind, get rid of it, and the Republicans should do it,” he added.
Trump’s effort to terminate the filibuster, in an effort to reopen the government without support from Democrats, hit a roadblock with some Republican lawmakers, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who said that he would work to ensure the legislative filibuster was kept intact during his leadership.
Trump made a similar plea in a video statement posted on Truth Social tonight.
“It’s now time for the Republicans to play their trump card and go for what’s called the nuclear option. Get rid of the filibuster and get rid of it now,” Trump said.
An official with the Agriculture Department told a federal court last night that allotments to SNAP beneficiaries for November will be 65% of their normal rate instead of the 50% previously estimated by the Trump administration.
The administration had told a federal judge Monday that it would use more than $4 billion in contingency funds to distribute half of the monthly benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, during the ongoing government shutdown.
The revised figures mean a family of four in the lower 48 states will receive about $646 for the month.
Read the full story here.
NBC News