The Headlines - What a Shutdown Could Look Like, and a ‘Healthy’ Food Fight

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Plus, real estate’s trendiest mash-up: the “barndo.”   On Today’s Episode:Here’s What Could Happen in a Government Shutdown, by Noah WeilandGovernment Lurches Toward Shutdown After House Tanks Trump’s Spending Plan, by Catie EdmondsonAppeals Court Disqualifies Fani Willis From Prosecuting Georgia Trump Case, by Danny Hakim and Richard FaussetWhat Are ‘Healthy’ Foods? The F.D.A. Updates the Labeling Terms, by Christina JewettHow Your Car Might Be Making Roads Safer, by Kashmir HillThe Design Trend Taking Over Rural America, by Colette Coleman Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, December 20th. Here's what we're covering. Unless Congress comes up with a plan today to keep the government funded, the country is in for a shutdown starting at midnight. And how much Americans will feel that shutdown will depend on how long it lasts. In the immediate term, holiday travel and holiday mail delivery will

continue, but it could get bumpy. Postal workers and TSA agents could be forced to work without pay. Hundreds of thousands of other federal workers, though, from NASA to the Justice Department could be sent home. Many national parks could close. The longer the shutdown goes on, the more programs could be suspended, like the SNAP and WIC programs that provide food to low-income Americans. With the clock ticking, Congress had a bit of a meltdown last night trying to come up with a solution. This is a 15-minute vote. House Republicans tried to rush through a funding extension that Donald Trump had endorsed. He torpedoed a sprawling bipartisan deal the day before.

But Trump's backing was not enough. On this vote, the ayes are 174, the nays are 235, the rules are not suspended, and the bill is not passed. The vote failed. The sticking point? The bill would have also temporarily suspended the limit on how much money the U.S. can borrow, essentially allowing the government to rack up more debt. That was a red line for some right-wing Republicans.

It's embarrassing. It's shameful. Republican Representative Chip Roy of Texas railed against it on the House floor. To take this bill and congratulate yourself because it's shorter in pages but increases the debt by $5 trillion is asinine. Roy and other conservative lawmakers have long balked at the idea of raising the debt ceiling without a bigger plan to rein in government spending. In the end, nearly 40 Republicans, including Roy, defied Trump and voted against the bill.

They were joined by nearly 200 Democrats who've criticized the GOP for bowing to Trump and letting him blow up the first deal. My colleague Katie Edmondson says it's not clear what kind of compromise is possible before the midnight deadline. It does become a question of, is there a block of those ultra conservative Republicans who are willing to walk the plank because it is what President-elect Trump has demanded.

And I think it's also an open question, is there a small group of Democrats, maybe particularly those in tough districts who just went through a bruising re-election, who maybe want to show off their bipartisan bona fides by saying, you know, I will work with Republicans to avert a shutdown before the holidays. I don't know what the answer is yet. We still have to figure that out. Katie, along with Maggie Haberman and Andrew Ross Sorkin, talk through the funding scramble and more of this week's big political news on today's episode of The Daily.

In Georgia, the last active criminal prosecution of Donald Trump may be effectively over without ever going to trial. Trump and more than a dozen of his allies were charged with conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the state. But Georgia's Court of Appeals just disqualified the prosecutor who brought those charges, Fonny Willis. Willis' personal life is at the center of the decision. She had a romantic relationship with a lawyer she hired to manage the case. The defendant's legal teams claimed that created a conflict of interest, taking the issue up the chain to the appeals court.

Willis's office has already said it will appeal her disqualification and try to keep control of the case. But if the removal stands, that's likely it for the charges. In Georgia, when a case is taken away from prosecutors, its fate gets decided by a state panel. The panel in Georgia is Republican-controlled and considered unlikely to continue the prosecution of the president-elect. The Food and Drug Administration has announced new rules for what foods can be labeled healthy. The guidelines put stricter limits on how much sugar, salt, and saturated fat can be in a product

if it's gonna be marketed that way. That means foods like some fruit cups, sweetened yogurts, and whole wheat bread that manufacturers can currently call healthy will have to drop the word from the packaging. The change has faced intense pushback from lobbyists for the food industry. They've called it overly restrictive.

But the FDA says it's a crucial step towards fighting diseases like diabetes and heart disease that are some of the leading causes of death in the U.S. The new rule won't officially kick in until 2028. Until then, the FDA says it's working on designing new labeling for food packaging that will help people quickly recognize healthy options at the store. What millions of drivers might not realize is while they're driving around, data from their car is being collected. It's your speed, it's how hard you're hitting the brakes,

it's your rapid acceleration, it's how hard you're hitting the brakes, it's your rapid acceleration, it's whether your windshield wipers are on or whether the seatbelts are buckled in the car, your precise GPS location. My colleague Kashmir Hill has been covering how modern cars collect data and who has access to it. In an investigation earlier this year, she found that data collected by automakers like General Motors was being shared with insurance companies. Basically, your car could spill the beans on your driving behavior, and you could see your rates go up. A lot

of drivers had no idea that they'd opted in to that kind of sharing, deep in the fine print. General Motors was then sued over the practice and has since stopped selling drivers' data to the companies that packaged it up for insurers. But they are still sharing anonymized driving data. And Cashmere says that information has become a valuable tool for making roads safer. So this data is now being kind of aggregated and used anonymously by researchers, and they're using it to track congestion, you know, to see where cars are stopped. used anonymously by researchers. The criticism of this collection of data is that drivers may not know what's happening.

And I talked to one privacy expert who said they should have an easy way to turn it on and off because this is sensitive information. This is information about how people are driving and where they are driving. And she thinks that this shouldn't be done without people's knowledge and without their consent, even if it is for the public good. And finally, in rural America, the hottest architectural trend is now the Barndominium. Barndo, for short. They're homes with a distinctly oversized shed aesthetic, like an airplane hanger almost, but with a fireplace and granite countertops. They're usually all open floor plan with super high ceilings, exposed metal sheeting, and huge garages.

The barn dominium name was coined back in the 1980s, but the current style didn't really catch on until the pandemic. People rushed from the cities to rural areas, and when lumber prices surged, building metal homes with metal roofs became a way to get more house for less money. The upside? You can play basketball in your living room, and you have plenty of space to park your ATVs. The downside, as one Barndo owner told the Times, is that from the outside, her house

does look a little bit like a Walmart. Those are the headlines. The show will be off next week and back on Monday, December 30th. The headlines is made by Robert Jemison, Jessica Metzger, Jan Stewart, and me, Tracy Mumford, with help from Isabella Anderson. Original theme by Dan Powell, special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Jake Lucas, and me, Tracy Mumford, with help from Isabella Anderson. Original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Jake Lucas, Zoe Murphy, Chris Stanford, and Paula Schuman.