Up First from NPR - Government Shutdown Prep, Student Loan Repayments Start, NYC Floods

Episode Date: September 30, 2023

The US government is set to shutdown Sunday after a group of GOP hardliners opposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's stop gap proposal. Tens of millions of borrowers will start paying back federal loans on Sunday after a three-and-a-half year suspension, amid a possible government shutdown. New York City tries to get its head above water after a state of emergency is declared because of severe rainfall.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

It's my son's birthday. He's 10. And he came in early this morning, before, as soon as I was getting up for this. Oh, God bless. He came in with the biggest grin on his face. And he's, like, jumping up and down. You know, he acts a little cool now. But he was so excited. That is wonderful.

Tell him I said, we all said happy birthday, okay? Time is ticking away. And the federal government is still headed toward a shutdown. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says lawmakers will work around the clock to keep the government open. Will they meet the deadline? I'm Scott Simon. I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is Up First from NPR News. It's payback time as borrowers have to resume paying federal loans tomorrow. They had a break for three and a half years because of the pandemic. But with the government preparing for a shutdown, what will that mean for them? Flooded basements, road closures, a suspended subway system. New York is trying to keep its head above water. Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of

emergency yesterday because of flash floods. And New Yorkers are scrambling to cope. So please stay with us. We've got the news you need to start your weekend. Now Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. The U.S. federal government is set to shut down at midnight tonight.

A group of GOP hardliners defeated House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's plan to fund agencies for a month and add border security. And it's unclear the Speaker can get the votes to pass anything. NPR's congressional correspondent Deidre Walsh joins us. Deidre, thanks for being with us. Good morning, Scott. The Senate will work on its own bipartisan bill this afternoon, but does it look like Congress can really avoid a shutdown or even wants to? It doesn't look that way. You know, both chambers are still on very different tracks. Never say never, but practically speaking, there's no bipartisan path to avert a shutdown. The question right now is how long is it going to last? House Republicans tried,

as you noted, and failed to pass their own stopgap bill that was directly tailored to get support from hardline Republicans. But 21 House Republicans defied Speaker McCarthy. Today, the Senate has this procedural vote to advance their bipartisan bill that funds the government through mid-November, also includes $5 billion for disaster aid and $6 billion for Ukraine. But McCarthy has rejected that. So right now, he's trying to get House Republicans to agree to pass some type of short-term bill later today, potentially one that would keep agencies funded for several weeks. But can House Republicans agree on next steps after the failed vote yesterday?

You know, the Speaker's really still struggling. Many Republican lawmakers, even beyond the 21 hardliners who opposed the bill yesterday, still have issues with other ideas. Arkansas Republican Steve Womack said last night if they can't pass their own bill, House Republicans may ultimately have to accept what the Senate does. You know, there's college football games on later today, and Womack used an analogy that shows that House Republicans just aren't playing as a team. We're the governing majority. This is what we're supposed to do as a governing majority. We're supposed to lead. And it's kind of hard to lead when you've got a significant number of people that are on the wrong snap count when you call them in.

Deidre, is the president getting personally involved in the talks? He's not. White House Budget Director Shalonda Young made it clear the negotiation that set the spending levels for the government already happened. The speaker agreed to those levels in the debt deal that passed Congress earlier this summer. The reason we're in this situation right now is that McCarthy walked away from that deal and gave in to conservatives who are demanding steeper cuts. Young says this is on House Republicans. This is not an exercise in reopening negotiations. We negotiated at the Speaker's request three months ago. Deidre, how quickly will American people begin to feel the impact and effect of government shutdown?

Well, since the shutdown is going to start on a Sunday, the impacts won't be felt right away. But on Monday, millions of federal workers are going to be furloughed and won't be getting paid. National parks and Smithsonian museums in Washington are going to close. One program that provides nutritional assistance for roughly 7 million pregnant, postpartum women, infants, and children is expected to run out of money in a matter of days. Active duty service members in the military will report to work but won't get a paycheck, and other workers at the Border Security agency and TSA for the same. And the speaker isn't working with Democrats?

He's not. And hanging over his head is this threat from the far right to oust him if he ever cuts a deal with Democrats. Right now, he's sticking with a plan that's going to help him keep his job over something that would avoid a shutdown. And Pierce Deidre Walsh, thanks so much for being with us. Thanks, Scott. Tens of millions of borrowers have to start paying back federal loans tomorrow.

The payments were on pause for three and a half years because of the pandemic, and the government, including the Department of Education, is on its way to a shutdown. NPR's education correspondent Corey Turner is here with more. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me, Aisha. So first, the specter of a shutdown, what might that mean for borrowers who may be wondering, would a shutdown mean I don't have to pay my loans right now? No, it does not. I put that very question. I'm sorry, I don't have better news for them. But I actually wanted to know the answer to I put that question yesterday to US Undersecretary of Education James Qual, and he told me, Congress mandated this return to repayment as part of the budget deal they struck over the summer. So even if House Republicans force a shutdown, the Ed Department is legally required to resume collecting on student loans now. The White House press secretary told reporters earlier this week, in the event of a shutdown, key activities in the loan program would continue for a couple of weeks. And that's when things get a little dicey. If it lasts longer than that, she said, it could substantially disrupt the return to repayment effort. The way I think about

this, Aisha, is the disruption won't be like an on-off switch on a light. It'll be more like a dimmer. You know, payments will still be due. Interest will keep accruing. It's really stuff like customer service for borrowers that's likely to take a hit. And we have to remember the context here. The education department was already in a budget crunch before this. So it does not have a lot of money sitting around in reserve to keep everything going. Corey, you've done a bunch of reporting about that budget crunch and how already loan servicers are struggling to handle all the calls they're getting, has that customer service gotten any better? Not really, Aisha. This past Tuesday,

for example, according to federal data I was just looking at, one loan servicer had borrowers waiting on the phone an average of just over an hour. Another servicer averaged an hour and a half. And for both servicers, it should come as no surprise that more than half of borrowers who called hung up before they got through. Now, in the servicer's defense, everyone I talked to six months ago, even inside the Ed Department, said this would be messy. The servicers are trying to hire more people even as their budgets have been cut. And most importantly, Aisha, this transition is bigger than anything they've ever had to do before. That said, obviously, that's cold comfort for borrowers who have been

setting social media on fire with stories of how long they've had to wait on hold. On Friday, attorneys general from 18 states plus Washington, D.C. sent a long letter to President Biden saying, quote, they wanted to express serious concerns about the challenges of this process and impending harm to federal loan borrowers in their states. And, you know, it's pretty clear unless lawmakers take action, a shutdown would make those challenges much, much worse. Corey, do you have any advice for borrowers out there who haven't yet scheduled that first payment? What do they need to know? I mean, given what we've been talking about, Aisha, I think the first most important thing borrowers can do is instead of picking up the phone to call their servicer, they should go to the Ed Department's website,

studentaid.gov, log in, and just see what they can see. They can take care of a lot of stuff right there. Update their contact information. They can see who their servicer is. Lots of borrowers have a new servicer. They should also update their contact information at their servicer's website. One more really important bit of advice, though, for new borrowers who have never before chosen a repayment plan, they need to do that because if they don't choose a repayment plan, the system is going to choose one for them. It's going to put them into what is arguably the toughest plan with the highest monthly payments. NPR's education correspondent, Corey Turner, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome, Aisha. Also, you can find all of

Corey's latest student loan reporting, including lots of helpful tips for the return to repayment at npr.org slash student loans. It was water. Water everywhere, so it seemed, Friday in New York City. Flooded streets, water swirling down, storm drains pouring down into the subways. Both New York and New Jersey declared states of emergency as the area got several inches of rain in just a few hours. By nightfall, JFK Airport had more than eight inches. Fortunately, there were no deaths attributed to the storm. Bahar Astadhan of member station WNYC has been covering this and joins us now from Brooklyn. Bahar, thanks so much for being with us. Thanks for having me. How's the city look today? So the city's pretty much up and running this morning with a few exceptions, but New Yorkers were really caught off guard yesterday. You know, no one expected when they

left the house in the morning that parts of the city would see two to three feet of standing water. There were kids stuck at school. Almost every train line was down or limited by midday yesterday. You know, commuters were stuck inside trains or in the subway stations for two to three hours. My colleague caught up with Marquise Hicks. He was stranded in a Brooklyn subway station just trying to pick up his paycheck from work. I can't take the F train.

Why? I don't know. I'm confused. I'm going to have to walk, man. It's not raining. I got to pick up my check, man. Bahar, how did city officials manage the crisis? Well, weather experts started warning about the floods Thursday morning.

The mayor sent a news release via email late that night asking people to use public transportation. But really, the severity of the situation wasn't clear. And it wasn't until noon yesterday that Mayor Eric Adams made his first public appearance, issuing a state of emergency and asking New Yorkers to shelter in place. But obviously, you know, this was hours after people had already gone to work, to school, a terminal at LaGuardia Airport was shut down. So he received a lot of criticism. And as he's been in the past, he became defensive. By the end of the day yesterday, he went on several local news outlets saying, you know, if people were caught off guard, they'd had to have been living under a rock. Bahar, it must have been a nightmare for families

trying to get their children from school. Definitely. So schools were open. Families did their regular drop-off in the morning. But by the end of the day, 150 schools had actually flooded. There were toilets overflowing, cafeterias overflowing. And in at least one school, students were evacuated and moved to another school several blocks away. By the afternoon, parents were really panicking about how to pick up their kids. My colleague caught up with Johanna Sauer, who was coordinating pickup for the kids with other parents in a WhatsApp group. People are saying, I'm headed here. You know, does your child need to go anywhere close to here? And so there's a real sort of community

group effort going on to make sure that kids get home. Bahar, what's the feeling today? Was the city prepared? Since Hurricane Ida in 2021, the city's made some improvements to the infrastructure, but the main issue yesterday was that the city's drainage system can only take 1.75 inches of rain per hour. We got up to two and a half inches an hour yesterday. So transit workers were pumping thousands of gallons of water out of the subway tunnels. The city also is housing thousands of migrants in temporary shelters here, sometimes tents. So some of them, you know, had to leave facilities yesterday.

Very fortunately, we haven't had to report any deaths from yesterday's storm. But do we have an idea of, for example, how many basements were flooded? We don't know that yet. The fire department said yesterday that they had rescued an unknown number of people from six basement apartments. They also made around 15 rescues from cars flooded around the city, but we don't have an idea yet of the extent of basements that were flooded. Bahar Astadon of Member Station WNYC, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you. And that's Up First for Saturday, September 30th, 2023.

I'm Scott Simon. And I'm Aisha Roscoe. Tomorrow on the Sunday Story, a report from Colorado Public Radio about the death of Elijah McClain, a Black man who was stopped by police in Aurora and how his death has made an impact on policing in that state. The Saturday version of the podcast was produced by Andrew Craig and Martin Patience. Our editors are Dee Parvaz, Andrea DeLeon, Kelsey Snell, Jim Kane, Hadil Al-Shauchi, and Melissa Gray.

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