Two Huge Fights Still Facing Congress

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Sipa USA
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey

Happy Thursday! Big news today! No, we don't mean the government reopening. We mean that an aged Swiss Gruyère has been crowned as the best cheese in the world for 2025.

Here's what else we're watching as the political world moves past the government shutdown.

Two Huge Fights Still Facing Congress

The record-breaking government shutdown is over, but the 43-day-long impasse has left Congress with lots still to do to ensure that all federal agencies can stay open past the end of January and to address the healthcare affordability issue that Democrats put in the national spotlight.

Here's a quick guide to two key policy items on lawmakers' agenda now.

Appropriations

The bill that President Trump signed into law last night included three of the 12 annual appropriations bills Congress needs to pass. Those three - covering the Department of Veterans Affairs, military construction, the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the legislative branch - were relatively uncontroversial and had bipartisan support after months of negotiations between House and Senate appropriators.

The rest of the federal government - the vast majority of it - was only funded through January at levels set under the Biden administration, meaning that the toughest appropriations battles lie ahead and the nation could even face another shutdown early in 2026. "It doesn't help that House and Senate leaders still haven't agreed on an overall total for fiscal 2026 spending, amid GOP divisions over how deeply to cut," Politico's Jennifer Scholtes, Katherine Tully-McManus and Jordain Carney wrote Thursday.

The Senate is set to take up a second funding package next week that could include as many as five of the annual spending bills. The final four bills will be the most difficult for lawmakers to agree on, given the contentious areas they cover: Energy, Homeland Security, State and Treasury, including the IRS. Republicans and Democrats agree that those most quarrelsome areas "will eventually be funded through a stopgap that spans through next September," Politico notes.

Democrats have clear incentive to pass as many bipartisan annual appropriations bills as they can as they push back on efforts by the Trump administration and White House budget director Russell Vought to exert more control over federal spending.

"Passing full-year funding bills ensures that Congress-not Trump or Russ Vought-decides how taxpayer dollars are spent," Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democratic appropriator in the Senate, said this week. "We should not turn the keys over to Trump and his Cabinet secretaries, allowing them to make unilateral cuts and to shift funding around however they please. Every day, they prove in some new way how critical it is that Congress assert its authority, and rein in their chaos."

Healthcare

The more generous Affordable Care Act subsidies at the heart of the shutdown fight are still set to expire at the end of the year and lawmakers have little time to figure out how, or whether, they will prevent millions of American families from being hit with out-of-pocket premium payments that could more than double on average. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has promised Democrats a vote on a healthcare bill next month, though House Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to do the same.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, is pushing a discharge petition that would require a vote on a three-year extension of the expiring tax credits.

Republicans oppose that plan. While some Republicans back the idea of extending the subsidies for a year, in some cases with new income caps or restrictions on abortion funding, many in the party remain adamantly against any steps to support the Obamacare program they fought for years to repeal and replace.

Still, the shutdown has forced the GOP to once again scramble to come up with a healthcare "fix" they can coalesce around and to engage in a policy debate that has burned them repeatedly in the past. Those discussions are only now getting serious, while time is running short.

"I haven't prejudged that or put any dates on it, but I mean, we worked on it today. We've been working on it every day. We got more members joining the discussion," Johnson told NBC News on Wednesday evening. "This is how it works. It's a deliberative process, where you build out the consensus, and we'll be working on that in earnest in the days ahead."

For his part, Trump has embraced the vague idea of providing money directly to Americans for use in purchasing healthcare instead of subsidies for insurance plans.

"The president's idea is sort of a poorly fleshed out idea," Leighton Ku, a professor and director of the Center for Health Policy Research at Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, told ABC News. "Frankly, I think he was just stumbling around to say he has something to offer."

Experts also warn that some of the Republican proposals being discussed could collapse the Affordable Care Act marketplace and leave vulnerable many of the people who were able to get coverage because of it.

"If people could use these Trump health care dollars to buy insurance not regulated by the ACA, it would likely cause the ACA to collapse and upend protections for pre-existing conditions," Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a nonpartisan research group, told NBC News.

Republicans could still decide to try to pull together a more fleshed-out alternative to Obamacare and pass it via the budget reconciliation process that would require only a majority vote in the Senate. But there likely isn't time for such a large-scale undertaking, and history has shown Republicans struggle to unify around Obamacare replacements.

In the end, time pressure and political considerations could still force Republicans to accept a temporary extension of the ACA subsidies rather than face voter fury in next year's midterms. "We need to do the right thing policy-wise but also the smart thing politically," an unnamed White House official told NBC.

SNAP Funding to Be Restored by Monday, Agriculture Secretary Says

Funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will be restored in full by Monday, November 17, at the latest, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Thursday.

Rollins warned that there may still be some bumps in the process of getting aid to beneficiaries. "Keep in mind, the SNAP program is funded by the federal government, but it is the 50 states and 50 different infrastructures that move that money out, which is what made it so complicated, the patchwork," she told CNN.

States took different approaches to delivering food aid during the shutdown, which halted full payments earlier this month for the first time in the program's history. Stewart Fried, an attorney who specializes in nutritional aid issues, told The Hill that 19 states have issued or are in the process of issuing full benefits. Another 18 states provided partial benefits, reflecting the SNAP system's remaining balance, and it's not clear how long it will take those states to calculate and deliver the rest of the aid. The remaining 13 states made no payments at all in November, and Fried estimated that it could take them more than a week to pay out benefits.

Moot point: The payment of SNAP benefits was the subject of numerous legal orders and challenges over the last few weeks, with the Trump administration deciding that it would not pay out full benefits in order to maintain reserves for an emergency.

The end of the shutdown means that an appeal filed by the Trump administration at the Supreme Court seeking to avoid paying full SNAP benefits - as ordered by a judge who said the administration should tap other nutrition-related reserves to do so - is no longer pertinent, and the appeal was withdrawn on Thursday.

Still, the administration is sticking to its guns on the issue, with officials saying it was defending the executive from judicial overreach when it moved to halt payments. And the administration continues to blame Democrats for any problems that people who receive SNAP benefits may have experienced during the shutdown.

"Fifteen different times the Democrats voted not to fund SNAP, 15, and this effort to put the blame on President Trump or on [the Department of Agriculture] is, from my perspective, comical," Rollins said on CNN.

Rollins also raised questions about the program itself, saying the government found dead people on the benefit rolls in some states. "SNAP is a broken program," she said. "SNAP is full of corruption."

Roughly 42 million people receive nutritional aid through SNAP, which is now funded through the rest of the fiscal year. The program was targeted for cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that became law this past summer, with Republicans pushing through an estimated $186 billion reduction in spending over the next 10 years. Work requirements for the program have been tightened, and states will begin to start paying a higher percentage of administrative costs for the program starting in 2027, as well as a penalty for errors that occur in their aid systems.

Medicaid Enrollment Fell 7.6% in 2025: Survey

State Medicaid programs continue to shrink as they complete the unwinding process from pandemic-era enrollment levels, and in fiscal year 2025 total enrollment in Medicaid fell by 7.6%, according to a new survey by the non-partisan, nonprofit healthcare foundation KFF. Enrollment is expected to stabilize the following year.

At the same time, spending continues to grow, with total Medicaid expenditures rising by 8.6% during the fiscal year. Federal spending on the program is projected to grow at a rate of 7.9% in fiscal year 2026.

Faced with rising costs and federal funding cuts imposed by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, almost two-thirds of states reported that they face at least a 50-50 chance of experiencing budget shortfalls in their Medicaid programs in fiscal year 2026.

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