WSJ What’s News - Government Shutdown Threatens Food Stamps for Millions of Americans

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

A.M. Edition for Oct. 31. SNAP benefits, or food stamps, are set to end this weekend, if the U.S. government shutdown persists. WSJ’s Sabrina Siddiqui explains what that would mean for millions of Americans. Plus, after a busy earnings week WSJ’s Quentin Webb discusses how giant tech companies are continuing to bet big on artificial intelligence. And, WSJ’s Mark Maremont breaks down why the number of justifiable homicides by civilians in the U.S. is rising. Kate Bullivant hosts.Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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In the stand-your-ground states, there was a 59% increase in justifiable homicides over the six years versus a 16% increase in overall homicides. So there were some very interesting findings of the FBI data. that nobody's ever really looked at before. It's Friday, October 31st. I'm Kate Bullivant for the Wall Street Journal. And here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

President Trump has urged Senate Republicans to get rid of the filibuster to reopen the government, the long-standing rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation. Posting on social media, Trump said it was time. for Republicans to go for the, quote, nuclear option of eliminating the filibuster. Government funding lapsed on October 1st after a stopgap spending bill passed by the Republican-led

House fell five votes short of the 60 needed in the Senate. Since then, Democrats have blocked the bill more than a dozen times, saying they won't provide the votes to reopen until Republicans negotiate a deal to extend enhanced Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies. The mounting pressure to end the shutdown comes as a series of funding cliffs are starting to pinch more Americans with one looming deadline concerning SNAP benefits which are due to end on Saturday. Snap, once known as food stamps,

is a federal program that provides assistance to people who can't afford to buy their own, helping around 42 million poor and disabled Americans to buy food each month. Journal reporter Sabrina Siddiqui explains what the cutoff to these vital benefits would look like. What we've been hearing when we've talked to SNAP beneficiaries or recipients this week is they already have received notifications from state authorities

that funding will be paused for November because of the shutdown. A lot of them are going to end up showing up at food banks and food pantries across the country who have also said that they anticipate a sharp increase in people that they're going to need to feed. And they're really going to have to turn people away because they're just not going to have enough supply. There are some states that are looking at moving their own budgets around and if they have any room in their budget to try and have those benefits continue, more than a dozen states have actually filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration saying that they cannot actually freeze the SNAP benefits as part of the shutdown because they could use federal

government emergency funds to fund SNAP for the time being. States may be able to step in in some cases, but that's just not going to be the case everywhere. Sabrina says that Democrats and Republicans are considering ways that could ensure the continuation of SNAP benefits, even with the government shutdown in place. This cliff where these SNAP benefits are going to run out has put a lot more pressure on both Democrats and Republicans to come to some kind of compromise, even if it means just a standalone bill to ensure that people are able to use their food assistance benefits, and especially because this is coinciding with the holiday season. So the fact that the benefits won't be paid out in November when families are going to be gathering for Thanksgiving,

and then you have Christmas holidays coming soon after that, there's so much. much more anger and frustration that they can't come to some kind of resolution in Washington and people are going to go hungry at such a crucial time. It's been a busy week for tech earnings with meta, alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple, all reporting positive quarterly results. And as you might expect, the focus of many earnings calls has been the spending on artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley's biggest companies are planning to pour $400 billion into AI efforts this year, and still, they say it's nowhere near enough. The journal's Quinton Webb joins me now. Quentin, with this commitment

to increase spending on AI and the recent earnings results, how are investors feeling? Investors on the whole are on board with this. If you look at the fact that stock markets have risen to record highs and the proportion of market value. that has gone to the magnificent seven as higher than ever before. People are broadly supportive of the idea that AI is going to be a game changer. You need to spend heavily to ensure you're in the vanguard. But the question is, are you doing that at the expense of earnings? Are you doing that beyond your own financial capacity? We have seen a bit of a disparity this week where broadly, results from big tech have been welcomed, with a notable exception of meta, where

their pledges to keep aggressively spending on AI were actually met with a kind of more than 10% drop in the stock. And to a lesser extent with Microsoft where there was a bit of a sell-off after the results. But overall, I would say that it's been a very positive earnings season so far, a larger than usual proportion of stocks or companies have beaten forecast earnings. And for most of the tech sector, that has been true too. On Microsoft's earnings call, one analyst asked the question just straight out, are we in a bubble? With that in mind, and what you were talking about, how investors are feeling, how are tech companies looking to navigate this environment? For most of them, it is a question of kind of making sure they don't fall behind.

They are spending very, very heavily to kind of ensure they are in the race. I guess the question is whether at some point investors, begin to grow wary and switch to a kind of show me the money mode, in which case you might see some discipline exerted on these companies because they might need to recalibrate their plans. But remember that in some cases, these companies are quite tightly controlled by founders who have special voting rights or other power over the company. And so it might be the case that they can continue to push ahead even if you see some signs of investor weariness creeping in. That was the journal's Deputy Finance Editor for Europe, Quinton Webb.

SpaceX is set to receive $2 billion to develop satellites that can track missiles and aircraft under President Trump's Golden Dome project. That's according to people familiar with the matter. The funding was included in the tax and spending bill that Trump signed in July, but wasn't publicly linked to a contractor. According to people familiar with the situation, SpaceX is also expected to have a major role in two other penthouse. satellite networks. One would relay sensitive information and the other would track vehicles on the ground. This development shows the growing influence of Elon Musk's company in US National Security. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment on SpaceX's involvement in the planned satellite systems. SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment. Disney's channels,

including ESPN, ABC and FX, have disappeared from Google's YouTube TV. platform, after the two sides failed to reach a new distribution agreement. Shortly before midnight eastern time, the channels went dark in roughly 10 million homes. At the heart of the dispute, at the fees Disney is seeking from YouTube TV to continue offering its channels, particularly ESPN, one of the most expensive networks due to its premium sports content. In a statement, YouTube said that the proposals Disney has submitted harm YouTube TV and preserve of preferential terms for their own services. Disney said YouTube TV, which is owned by Alphabet's Google,

balked at paying what other similarly-sized distributors fork over for its content. Coming up, we take a look at why the number of justifiable homicides by civilians in the US is rising. That's after the break. This advertisement is brought to you by Tellis. TALUS's industry-leading platforms protect critical applications, data and identities, anywhere at scale with the highest ROI. That's why the most trusted companies in the world rely on TALIS to protect what matters most. Learn more at TALIS Group.com slash cyber. In the US, the number of legally sanctioned homicides has grown significantly.

in states that have expanded self-defense rights under so-called stand-your-ground laws. While Americans have long been free to use deadly force to defend themselves at home, in 30 states these laws extend legal protections for US citizens using deadly force and self-defense in public places. The journal's senior editor Mark Mermount and his colleagues have been combing through the Federal Bureau of Investigation data on these stand-your-ground laws and he joins me now. Mark, tell us about what you found when carrying out this research. So we looked through six years of data from the FBI about homicides and so-called justifiable homicides which are homicides of which people killed somebody else but were ruled essentially self-defense. And we found that there was, in the stand-your-ground states,

there was a 59% increase in justifiable homicides over the six years. versus a 16% increase in overall homicides, which basically suggested that these are becoming much more common in standard ground states. In addition, the share of justifiable, of overall homicides that are ruled justifiable in the standard ground states was significantly higher than in the other states in the U.S. So there were some very interesting findings in the FBI data that nobody has ever really looked at before. And so why are we seeing?

an increase in the number of legally sanctioned homicides by civilians in these 30 stand-your-ground states? There's a bunch of factors of play here, one of which is that a lot of these same states have passed what they call permitless carry. So you as a gun earner allowed to carry your gun anywhere you want, whereas before you had to have a special license to carry it in public. There's also a particularly large increase in the number of people who are, own guns. So more people owning guns, more people carrying them in public leads to a greater potential for disputes, you know, road rage, various other things that go on in public or maybe in their homes. And that's leading to more of these cases that are ruled as justifiable or

stand-your-ground self-defense type killings. Mark, what do critics of Stand Your Ground laws make of this increase, and at the same time, those who support them? The critics of stand-your-ground laws have long said that these laws are going to lead to more homicides, more people shooting each other. These supporters of stand-your-ground laws say that when criminals know that another citizen might have a gun, that they're going to be deterred, but there's mixed evidence on that at best. People who backed these laws said this was mostly to defend yourselves against strangers. But the FBI data show that about 60% of justifiable homicides slash self-defense

shootings in the U.S. involve people who are relatives, acquaintances of the person who ended up shooting them or killing them. That's the journal's senior editor, Mark Mermount. Mark, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. The Trump administration has identified targets in Venezuela that include military facilities used to smuggle drugs. According to US officials familiar with the matter, while the president hasn't made a final decision on ordering land strikes, a potential air campaign would focus on targets that sit at the nexus of the drug gangs and the Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro's regime. Air attacks on targets inside Venezuela would mark a significant escalation of the campaign,

which has, until now, been limited to air strikes on alleged drug boats and would send a clear message to Maduro that it is time to step down. And finally, as trick-or-treaters ready themselves for another year of candy collecting, an unusual suspect has become a prize, that's the humble potato. Somehow, this unassuming vegetable has emerged not as a Halloween trick, but as a coveted treat. Journal columnist Charles Passy says that what started as one man's joke about 20 years ago has gained in popularity over the last few years as it turned into a viral trend on social media.

The buzz phrase, forget about 6'7, the buzz phrase seems to be, I got a potato. And you look at these videos from recent Halloween of kids getting potatoes, and they're going nuts over it. What's important to remember, as one person who's planning on doing it this year told me, the kids are going to get candy anyhow, but now they have a potato to go along with the candy.

And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer. Our supervising producer was Michael Cosmetas. And I'm Kate Bullivant for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back tonight with a new show. Until then, have a great weekend. And thanks for listening. DC politicians want to enact harmful credit card mandates

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