The Daily - The Fight at the Center of the Government Shutdown

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

As the U.S. government shutdown enters its second day, Democrats are trying to underline that the growing political fight is all about the rising cost of health care.The New York Times journalists Margot Sanger-Katz and Shane Goldmacher explain why the Democrats are betting on this strategy and who is to blame for the impasse.Guest:Margot Sanger-Katz, a reporter for The New York Times who covers health care policy and government spending.Shane Goldmacher, a national political correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: The Trump administration forged ahead with plans to conduct mass layoffs as the fiscal standoff appeared to intensify.President Trump has made lowering health care costs a key priority, even as Democrats warn that those costs will skyrocket.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.  Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

Hey everyone. It's Rachel. I'm here with a quick announcement. Part of what we do at the show, as you know, is take you, our listeners, into the world of an important story and behind the journalism in the newsroom here at the New York Times. But we were thinking that there are certain stories that are hard to do in a busy newsweek and so many brilliant people doing incredible things at the Times that might not end up on a regular program. So we decided we wanted to try something new and fun. We're going to bring you some other kinds of conversations and stories. To begin with, we'll sit down for a conversation with our colleagues over in games. And we're also going to show you how our composers work in the audio department. We have other ideas of fun things, but these are the first two.

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you can go to NYTimes.com slash podcasts or subscribe directly on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Okay, announcement over. Here's today's show. From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is the Daily. As the government shutdown enters its second day, Democrats are determined to make this growing political fight, all about the rising costs of health care. Today, I speak to my colleagues Margo Sanger Katz and Shane Goldmacher about why the Democrats are betting on this particular strategy.

It's Thursday, October 2nd. Margo, we are talking to you on the first full day of the government shutdown. And Senate Democrats, in explaining why the government is shut down, have said that this is above all about surging health care costs. And Democrats are basically saying that in some cases, premiums for Americans, some Americans are going to be doubling. And I want to start there. Is that accurate? On average, that is accurate. So this applies to people who buy their own insurance.

So people, if you don't get insurance through work and you're not in a government program like Medicaid or Medicare, you might go to the Obamacare marketplace and buy your own insurance. And the government has set up subsidies that help make that insurance affordable for people. And some of these subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year. And when that happens, it means the amount that people are going to have to pay for their health insurance is going to go up. by a lot. On average, KFF, health research group has estimated it's like a hundred and fourteen percent increase, but there's actually a lot of variation under the hood. For some really low income people who have been paying zero for their health insurance, they're going to have to pay somewhere between like $35 and $60 a month. But then as you go like up the income scale, if you imagine

someone who's making like around $65,000 a year, that's someone who might have to pay like $20,000 more a year in some markets. Wow. So you see these really, big effects. They're uneven and they do depend on how much you make, where you live, and how old you are, because nothing about Obamacare is simple. But a lot of people and particularly people in red states that did not expand Medicaid are going to be looking at some very large sticker shock if these subsidies expire. To hear the Democrats tell it, the reason that they're shutting down the government is because they say Republicans are to blame for these rising health care costs. And the Democrats will not agree to fund the government until Republicans

back a spending bill that lowers those health care costs. That's the overall message, right? So I guess I'm wondering, how do we actually get to this position that we're in in the first place? Well, I think, as is the case with many political questions, the answer to that is a little bit tricky. I think you have to go back to the politics of the Democratic majorities in the Biden era. So as you may remember, the Democrats had both the White House, the Senate, and the House. So during the pandemic, when Democrats felt like they could spend a lot of money to help prop up the economy, they extended the subsidies into this current system where the help is just much more generous.

And there was a debate inside the Democratic Party about how long the subsidies should get extended. A lot of Democrats, including the White House and the Democratic leadership, really wanted to make this a permanent program. They felt like this was an improvement on the original Obamacare program. It was making insurance more affordable. It was bringing in lots of people who were previously uninsured. But they had kind of a small majority, and they had some members in their caucus in the Senate who were pretty conservative. And one of them was Joe Manchin of West Virginia, sort of the most conservative member of the Democratic caucus. He was concerned that the Democrats shouldn't spend too much money.

And it turns out that subsidizing the health insurance of, you know, millions of Americans is actually pretty expensive. And they absolutely needed his vote to extend these subsidies. Because Republicans were never going to vote for these extensions. Yeah. And so the compromise that the Democratic leadership reached with Senator Mansion was they would extend these subsidies, but only for a few years, not forever. So there was an expiration date on them originally. And there was also, I think, a calculation. They specifically chose to have them expire now because they knew that Congress was going to have to revisit another set of expiring laws. The Trump tax cuts also were set to expire at the end of this year. And the Democrats were basically taking a gamble that probably they would have enough control in Washington that they would be able to make some kind of deal with Republicans. where in exchange for extending the Trump tax cuts, which Republicans all wanted, that Democrats

would be able to get them to also extend these Obamacare subsidies. Of course, what happened is that Republicans swept to power and had full control of the government. So they passed their major tax and domestic policy bill without needing any help from Democrats at all. Not only were Democrats unsuccessful in getting Republicans to include these subsidies in their bill, but they also were unsuccessful in fighting off almost a trillion dollars in other cuts to health care, mostly in the Medicaid program. So clearly the bet that the Democrats made when all of this went into effect did not pan out. I think that's true, but it's also the kind of bet that Congress makes all the time. It is not just Democrats who pass bills with these expiring provisions, hoping that a future

Congress is going to make their temporary program permanent. And I think if you look at what's happened since these subsidies were expanded in the last few years, enrollment in Obamacare has more than doubled, and most of the increase has been in Republican states. Georgia, Florida, and Texas have had absolutely enormous increases in the number of people who are enrolled in this program, and those are people who are really at risk of losing their insurance if they suddenly have to pay a lot more. And the states that are going to see the biggest increase in prices for kind of middle income people who earn a little bit more than $60,000 are also going to be in Republican states, like Wyoming, Alaska, and West Virginia.

So I think Democrats feel like they have some leverage over Republicans. Meaning that there might be some Republicans who are willing to extend the cuts now because of the benefits to their constituents, even if they didn't vote to extend the same subsidies the first time around. Yeah. Democrats think that maybe Republicans would actually be willing to support this program because so many of their constituents benefit from it. But this is actually a pretty big gamble because the reality right now, know is that the government is shut down and Americans don't know when the shutdown is going

to end. And Republicans who control all three branches of government, they are out there saying this is the fault of the Democrats. Anytime you're shutting down the government, you're taking a pretty big risk. And the reality is that Democrats do not have a lot of political control. But I think that they feel like health care is a really good issue for them. It's one that they have run and one on in the past. It's one that they feel voters trust them on more than Republicans, which is not true for a lot of other issues. And so I think they feel like if they're going to have a fight, a big, prominent messy

fight that's going to get a lot of attention, they want to have it on this ground. After the break, Shane Goldmacher, on the last time Democrats used health care to win the political moment against President Trump. Shane, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on. So what's happening now, this fight around health care echoes another fight from the not too distant past, and that's what we want to talk to you about. So just to start, can you tell us the last time Democrats used the issue of health care to try to gain the upper hand against President Trump? Yeah, I mean, it was the first year of his first term.

You think back to 2017 and the Democratic Party was feeling a bit overwhelmed as Trump did so many different things at once and was involved in what they felt were so many scandals and the Mueller investigation and the FBI directors getting fired and all these things. And ultimately, those were not the issues that the Democratic Party ran on in the 2018 midterms, the first midterm election of Trump's first term. What they ended up running on almost overwhelmingly. This is the issue that is on the ballot. This election is about health care. Was health care? How do we preserve the Affordable Care Act from the assault we know it will receive? And this was a strategy that Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats came.

upon as Trump and the Republicans tried to repeal the Obamacare measure. One thing we have to do, repeal and replace. They had a big repeal and replace measure. Repeal and replace, repeal and replace. Repealing and replacing the disaster known as Obamacare. It didn't become law, but that didn't matter. Democrats still use this issue and said, Republicans want to take away your health care.

your health care. Now that Donald Trump is trying to sabotage Obamacare, I'm running for Congress to protect and improve it. And for all of the controversies of those first couple of Trump years, this is the one that actually broke through on television. A year ago today, my own representative, Congressman Tom McArthur, introduced a legislation that tried to take away health care from millions of Americans. When I saw Congressman Bishop smiling at the White House after voting to gut protections for

pre-existing conditions, something inside me broke. This is the one that Democratic candidates in every corner of the country ran ads on. Half the political ads, according to a study after the election, in 2018, that Democrats ran. Half of the ads talked about health care. And just remind us, how well did it work for Democrats in 2018? I mean, it worked pretty well in the House. They won 40 seats and flipped the chamber, and were able to be a check. in the second half of that first term.

They impeached Donald Trump. They took power. And so now you have Democrats, again, a little overwhelmed by a sea of issues that the president is stirring up and settling now into this shutdown fight. What is the thing they want to stop Trump on? What is the thing they want to fight with Trump about? Is it about his overreach in one place? Is it about firings of U.S. attorneys?

Is it about investigations? It's back to that same issue. It's health care. And unlike in 2017 and 2018, where the Republicans had tried to act on this issue and failed, the current Republican Congress and President Trump have actually made changes to health care policy. And so the Democratic Party isn't just running on the theoretical threats of Republican changes to health care. They're running on the reality of changes that are set to go into effect. But just to point out one obvious difference, right now, this is not technically. an election year, unlike 2018.

But the next election, of course, is a midterm election next November. So with that in mind, how much does this Democratic strategy that we're talking about resemble the 2018 playbook? Well, we don't know for sure, right? They have yet to run ads in a lot of these districts. The campaign hasn't been fully formed yet. But what you see in this shutdown is the Democrats basically trying to settle on an issue where they know they're on the winning side of public opinion. And they're trying to basically lay the

groundwork for voters to know one year from now where the two parties are on this. And look, Ted Cruz and the Republicans pushed a major shutdown that was a really big deal in 2013. And guess what? Republicans won a bunch of seats in the Congress the next year, right? So the issue isn't just, do you win the temporary argument around the shutdown? It can also be, do you win the long-term argument of what your party is seen fighting for. And that's very much what the Democratic Party is hoping for, that they can be seen fighting for health care, an issue that they've won before on and when they think that they can win again on. In other words, they're betting that health care is going to be a bigger deal than shutting down the government. Absolutely. So how are Republicans

responding to that strategy? I think they're chiefly so far responding to the shutdown part of it, which is to say, first off, it's the Democrats who have shut down this government for this issue of health care. And second, to pivot to areas where the Republican Party is more trusted. And that so far has been immigration. They've been talking about how the Democrats want to fight for health care for illegal immigrants, although the Obamacare subsidies that are at issue here that the Democrats are demanding be extended, do not apply. to people who are here illegally. But that's the focus, right?

And they're doing it to try to send a signal that this is actually not about health care, but about spending money for people who are here illegally, which polls unpopularly, right? The Democrats are staking ground on a place that is popular, and the Republicans are trying to change the ground into a place that is unpopular. Basically, each side is retreating to issues that are winning for them in their own way. Their own safe spaces, so to speak. It strikes me that for the strategy to work that you are describing, Democrats need to focus on health care basically for as long as possible, right?

Like, basically, is it actually to their benefit to have Republicans refuse to meet them halfway so they can keep kind of pounding on about these rising health care costs and blame it on the other side? Look, I think that if the Democratic Party could snap their fingers and have Republicans actually negotiate over health care and strike a deal on this, they would take that in a heartbeat on a policy that they care about that the Democratic-based care. is about that impacts voters, they would absolutely take that. And look, some Republicans are even open to negotiations on this exact policy, on whether there should be some subsidies extended for Obamacare, because this does impact voters. But the Republicans are pretty universal on. We all understand that Democrats and Republicans have policy disagreements.

And what you heard from J.D. Vance. You don't have policy disagreements that serve as the basis for a government shutdown. was that as long as the government is shut down, you're getting absolutely nothing. Do the right thing, open up the people's government, and then let's fix health care policy for the American people. Questions? Shane, do you have any sense about which side has the upper hand right now?

I think it's really hard to say, right? Like, the Democratic Party is fighting on an issue that they think they have the high ground that is popular in polling, which is health care and making health care cheaper for Americans. But there's a tricky thing here, which is in order to show that you're fighting for health care, you kind of have to own that you're shutting down the government to do it. And voters don't want to see the government shut down for political demands.

And so each day that the government stays shut down and more and more Americans are impacted by the government shut down, that people start missing paychecks, that parks start closing, services stop being offered, it becomes a bigger and bigger gamble for the Democratic Party. Shane, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. On Wednesday evening, the Trump administration halted billions of dollars in funds for Democratic-led states, while it ready to lay off scores of government workers, a plan seemingly intended to maximize pain from the shutdown. In a series of social media posts, Russell T. Vote, the White House budget director, said that the administration had paused or moved to cancel the

delivery of about $26 billion in previously approved funds across a range of programs, describing the money as wasteful or in need of further review. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked President Trump's efforts to remove Lisa Cook from the Board of the Federal Reserve, at least temporarily stymieing his efforts. to reshape the agency as he pushes it to lower interest rates. The court said it would review the administration's efforts to oust Ms. Cook at oral arguments in January.

Top former Fed and Treasury officials had warned the court that allowing the president to fire Ms. Cook while litigation was underway would royal the markets and undermine public confidence in the Fed. And, scientist and conservationist Jane Goodall, who made groundbreaking discoveries about how chimpanzees behave and communicate, has died at the age of 91. When I arrived in Gombe, I had no idea what I was going to do, except that I was going to try and get the chimpanzees used to me so that I could really learn about what they were doing.

Goodall observed chimps by living alongside them, on a reserve in what is now Tanzania beginning in 1960. I've seen a mother laugh when she hears her older child who hasn't paid attention and he hasn't noticed which way she's gone and that the older child is going through the forest, whimpering, crying, you know. After months of working to gain their trust, she documented the chimps engaging in behaviors previously thought to be exclusive to people, including making and using tools. Bringing the chimpanzees into people's lives as individuals, as personalities, as creatures with whom we can relate so individually.

And that in turn has led to a gradual blurring of the line that we used to see is so sharp between us on the one hand and all the other amazing animals on the other. Now that line is very blurry, thanks to the chimp. Goodall eventually came to advocate for them, and other wildlife, by founding the Jane Goodall Institute, one of the world's largest conservation groups. Today's episode was produced by Olivia Natt, Nina Feldman, and Stella Tan, with help from Alex Stern.

It was edited by Mark George and Mike Benoit. Contains music by Dan Powell, Marion Lazzano, and Alicia B. Itoop, and was engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.