The Shutdown Chaos Donald Wants

And why Democrats have to stand their ground

[Photo Credit: Saul Loeb, Getty Images]

The government shutdown that’s been engineered by the Republican Party at the behest of Donald is wreaking havoc across federal agencies. I think that is exactly as intended, and the damage being done could be long lasting and possibly permanent. That, also, is exactly as intended.

According to a recent CNN article, air-traffic-controller staff shortages have surged in the shutdown’s fourth week, causing thousands of flight delays amid increasing safety concerns. More than 50 personnel shortages were reported between Friday, October 24th and Monday, October 27th, temporarily stopping flights at major airports, including LAX and DC’s Reagan National. Controllers, deemed essential workers, are obligated to stay on the job through the shutdown without pay which has led to the exhaustion and an uptick in sick days amid the aforementioned staff shortages

Staffing issues since October 1st have quadrupled since the same period last year. None of this is sustainable and it leads me to ask two questions:

First, why are Republicans okay with continuing to put Americans at risk?

Second, why is this country so disorganized and so dysfunctional that it cannot prepare contingencies in the event of government shutdowns which, thanks to the intensifying polarization in Congress, have become increasingly common over the years.

Being an air traffic controller is one of the most stressful jobs imaginable, especially at massive international airports like Atlanta and JFK. Imagine thinking it’s acceptable to increase the stress levels of people who are tasked with making sure planes land safely by making it more difficult for them to pay their bills or feed their families.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy should be fighting to get his employees paid. Instead, he’s blaming everything on Democrats; this, of course, even though Republicans control every single branch of government.

And then there’s SNAP. As I mentioned yesterday, a USDA memo that leaked Friday shows that the Trump regime rejected using $5 billion in contingency funds to extend food aid during the shutdown. Now, funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is set to expire on November 1. Republicans have made the calculation that allowing children to go hungry will put enough pressure on Democrats to force them to capitulate to Republicans’ plans to end the shutdown.

It’s important to remember the reason for Democrats’ refusal to help the Republicans pass their budget bill: in crafting it, Republicans made zero concessions to Democrats and have proven themselves willing to allow the COVID-era Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire.

This would make health insurance much more expensive for approximately 7.3 million Americans, and as many as 4.8 million are at risk of becoming uninsured. That’s what Democrats are fighting for. Republicans could make a spending bill that Democrats can get behind because it doesn’t harm the American people, but Republicans are all about harming the American people—blaming Democrats is just a bonus.

It’s important to understand how all of this fits together—why using the government shutdown to force long-term improvements is necessary to ensure the physical and financial well-being of all Americans. For example, Oklahoma jobs consultant Sammy Jones explicitly lays out why cutting SNAP will be bad for all of us:

If you are naive enough to think that the pause to SNAP benefits on November 1st isn’t going to affect you because you don’t receive food stamps, I want you to hear this: about one in eight Americans receive SNAP benefits. In fact, in Oklahoma, that’s one in six people. So about 600,000 people in Oklahoma alone receive SNAP benefits; about one in four children in the US receive SNAP benefits.

But you’re not one of those people so you don’t care. But hang with me. When those benefits go away, just about $9 billion in grocery spending vanishes. So, you’ve got to be thinking about not just the grocery stores being able to stay open and pay their employees--you have to think about the entire supply-chain: trucks on the road, people who provide food to these grocery stores—nine billion dollars. Every dollar spent in SNAP benefits adds about $1.50 to $1.80 to the economy.

Cutting those benefits isn’t saving that dollar, it’s taking away that $1.50 to your local economy. But you don’t receive SNAP benefits. You don’t work for a grocery store; you don’t drive a truck; you don’t give a shit. But when all of those things happen, the only way to combat that is to drastically increase the price of groceries. Grocery prices are already up over 3% in 2025 alone, which is almost an entire percentage higher than the average increase in grocery prices over the last 20 years. I thought they were supposed to go down on day one, though. So even if SNAP benefits only pause for one month—which by the way would be detrimental to all the people I mentioned before that you don’t give a shit about—it will cost the economy roughly 13 to $14 billion in profit and you can expect your grocery prices in just that one month to go up at least 1%. And states will stand to lose about $300 to $500 million in sales tax revenue. So, even if you do not receive SNAP benefits—you never have; you never will—you do not want these to be paused on November 1^st.

As millions of children are on the brink of going hungry, and at least 670,000 federal employees are furloughed and over 730,000 federal employees are continuing to work without pay, ICE has suspended its Office of Detention Oversight, the division responsible for inspecting detention centers and ensuring humane treatment of detainees. This is despite the fact that conditions in ICE detention centers have drawn accusations of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and lack of medical care. Nobody in the Trump regime cares about any of that.

ICE, on the other hand, stands to receive a massive funding increase under Donald’s big abominable bill—as much as $75 billion over the next four years.

They are perfectly comfortable allowing our children to go hungry and punish undocumented workers as long as the gestapo thugs at ICE keep getting funded. These are the priorities of the Republican Party. Let’s not pretend both sides are the same.