Government shutdown live updates as Trump calls on Senate Republicans to end filibuster

Rollins said the “silver lining” of the upcoming SNAP freeze is that the attention on the program has shown how “bloated” it is. 

A reporter asked Rollins if there are plans to ensure SNAP benefits only go to U.S. citizens. SNAP benefits have long only been limited to U.S. citizens and immigrants in the U.S. lawfully. Refugees will lose access to SNAP benefits soon under Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Rollins said the administration is working with states to get “illegal aliens” off SNAP. 

“I guess the silver lining in all this is that we’re having a national conversation on our SNAP program,” Rollins said. “That this has sort of shined a light on a program that, especially under the last administration, has just become so bloated, so broken, so dysfunctional, so corrupt, that it is astonishing when you dig in.”

Asked about the president’s call to scrap the filibuster in the Senate, Johnson declined to weigh in, saying the matter is up to the Senate to decide.

Johnson said he hadn’t spoken to the president since he returned from his trip to Asia on Thursday, but offered an interpretation of the president’s comments.

“What you’re seeing is an expression of the president’s anger at the situation. He is as angry as I am and the American people are about this madness, and he just desperately wants the government to be reopened so that all these resources can flow to the people who need it so much,” the speaker said.

“I’ll just say this in general, as I’ve said many times about the filibuster, it’s not my call. I don’t have a say in this. It’s a Senate chamber issue. We don’t have that in the House, as you know,” he added. “But the filibuster has traditionally been viewed as a very important safeguard. If the shoe is on the other foot, I don’t think our team would like it.” 

Johnson said his opinion on the filibuster “is not relevant.”

At Johnson’s press conference, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins blamed Democrats for the upcoming SNAP funding shortage, and reiterated her position that the department cannot use a contingency fund of $5 billion to cover benefits.

“Millions of Americans as of tomorrow will no longer receive SNAP and potential WIC or even a paycheck. Democrats have instigated a disgusting dereliction of duty unlike anything I have seen in all my years doing this work,” Rollins said.

The secretary said Americans who rely on SNAP are being used as “pawns in a political game.” She said the assertion that the contingency fund could be used to cover benefits is “absolutely false and it is a lie.” She noted that $9.2 billion would be required to fully cover SNAP payments for November.

Rollins said the law prevents the use of the contingency fund without underlying appropriations.

“By law, the contingency fund can only flow when the underlying fund is flowing,” the secretary said. “Even if it could flow, it doesn’t even cover half of the month of November. So here we are again, in two weeks, having the exact same conversation.”

At his daily press conference at the Capitol, House Speaker Mike Johnson said President Trump and his administration “have done everything in their power” to “mitigate and reduce the harm to the American people.”

“He’s gone out of his way to find creative solutions to ensure our service members don’t miss a paycheck, for example,” Johnson said alongside Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. “To ensure that the WIC program, that the nutrition assistance to women, infants and children, is still flowing. President Trump has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that if there is any way to fund these programs that are drying up now that he will do it. If there was any way to fund SNAP during the Democrat shutdown, you can be assured that your commander-in-chief would do it.”

“But we are now reaching a breaking point,” Johnson continued. “Thanks to Democrats voting no on government funding, now 14 different times, SNAP benefits for millions of American families are drying up. … You’re going to have real people, real families, you’re going to have children who will go hungry beginning this weekend when those resources dry up.”

The White House says U.S. military forces will be paid today as scheduled. 

The Office of Management and Budget tells CBS News the money is coming from the following areas:

• $2.5 billion from a military housing fund.
• $1.4 billion from a research and development fund, which normally funds military research and was heavily relied upon two weeks ago to cover military paychecks.
• $1.4 billion from a Pentagon procurement account for building U.S. Navy ships.

Axios first reported the White House’s plan to pay the military today.

The prospect of invoking the nuclear option to end the shutdown has come up over the course of the past month. Most recently, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said Senate Republicans should do away with the 60-vote threshold to pass the House’s continuing resolution with a simple majority.

But most Senate Republicans have rejected those calls over the years, arguing that the filibuster upholds the upper chamber’s unique role in ensuring major legislation attracts bipartisan support. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has been one of those Republicans pushing back against nuking the filibuster, telling reporters on Oct. 10 that the 60-vote threshold “has protected this country.”

“There are folks out there who think that is the way we ought to do things around here, simple majority. But I can tell you that the filibuster through the years has been something that’s been a bulwark against a lot of really bad things happening to the country,” he said at the time.

While most legislation requires 60 votes to advance, certain types of tax and spending bills can be passed through a process known as reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority. Republicans used reconciliation to pass their One Big Beautiful Bill Act over the summer. 

The filibuster has also been curtailed in recent years. In 2013, Democrats first invoked the nuclear option to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for most executive branch appointments and lower-level judicial nominations. Republicans extended that to include Supreme Court nominees in 2017.

Stefan Becket and Grace Kazarian

In a series of Truth Social posts late Thursday night, the president called on Republican lawmakers to do away with the filibuster.

“It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option — Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Mr. Trump wrote. “Just a short while ago, the Democrats, while in power, fought for three years to do this, but were unable to pull it off because of Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.”

The president was referring to an attempt by Senate Democrats in January 2022, when they tried to push through voting rights legislation by changing the chamber’s filibuster rule. The effort failed due to objections from then-Democratic Sens. Manchin and Sinema. Both have since left the Senate and registered as independents. 

While Senate legislation only needs 51 votes to pass, under the Senate’s filibuster rule, it takes 60 votes to end debate on a bill and bring it to the floor for such a passage vote, a procedure known as cloture. A filibuster occurs when the Senate does not have the 60 votes needed, as has been the case during the shutdown with the House-passed short-term government funding bill. 

“If the Democrats ever came back into power, which would be made easier for them if the Republicans are not using the Great Strength and Policies made available to us by ending the Filibuster, the Democrats will exercise their rights, and it will be done in the first day they take office, regardless of whether or not we do it,” Mr. Trump wrote Thursday. 

A month into the shutdown, food banks across the country are already straining to meet rising demand from hundreds of thousands of federal workers who are furloughed or working without pay.

Now, they are bracing for an even bigger surge.

Carlos Gomez, a federal employee based in San Antonio, Texas, has been relying on a local food bank to feed his family during the government shutdown.

“I have a very large family, so it’s getting kind of hard. Whether the government is shut down or not, bills need to get paid,” Gomez said.

Read more here.

Omar Villafranca and Allie Weintraub

The head of a group that represents charitable organizations said Thursday that food banks will be “pushed past the breaking point” if federal food aid is cut off this weekend.

“Nonprofits can’t possibly meet the tremendous new need that’ll be created when 42 million people lose access to basic food security,” National Council of Nonprofits CEO Diane Yentel said on CBS News’ “The Daily Report.”

Payments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, are set to come to a halt on Saturday due to the government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.

The National Council of Nonprofits and several other groups filed a lawsuit against the federal government Thursday, arguing the Trump administration doesn’t have the legal authority to suspend SNAP benefits and must tap into a USDA contingency fund to keep the program going. USDA argues it doesn’t have the legal authority to use that $5 billion fund, which the lawsuit pushed back on.

Yentel told CBS News that if SNAP benefits are cut off, food banks and food pantries will shoulder the burden of helping the approximately one in eight Americans who use SNAP to get groceries.

She said that, even prior to the end of SNAP, food banks have been under pressure due to high grocery prices and a government shutdown that has left thousands of federal workers without pay.

“It’s more than most food banks can handle,” she said. “They’re having to turn people away or they’re having to ration assistance so that everybody gets something.”