Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) decried Republican efforts to discredit medication abortion in an interview Wednesday with Mother Jones, saying that “the only reason they’re going after mifepristone is because it is the way most women get their abortive care.” Mifepristone is one of the pills used in medication abortion, which in 2023 accounted for 63 percent of all terminations in the United States.  On Wednesday morning, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing on “protecting women” from the “dangers of chemical abortion drugs.” Chaired by Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, the hearing centered on conservative demands for further regulation of abortion medication; two of its three witnesses were medication abortion opponents, including Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who on Tuesday pushed to extradite a California abortion provider on felony charges, accusing him of sending abortion pills into her state. Democrats taking part, including Sen. Murray, argued that the hearing wasn’t geared toward protecting women but discrediting settled science. In November, Murray led the Senate Democratic Caucus in sending a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Martin Makary expressing concern over the Trump administration’s review of mifepristone. “Republicans are holding this hearing to peddle debunked junk ‘studies’ by anti-abortion organizations which have no credibility and have been forcefully condemned by actual medical organizations,” Murray said in her opening statement. The hearing, she continued, was “really about the fact that Trump and his anti-abortion allies want to ban abortion nationwide.” According to a New York Times review of more than 100 studies spanning 30 years, abortion medication is safe and effective; mifepristone, used both in medication abortion and to treat miscarriage, has had FDA approval for more than 25 years. In October, the FDA approved another generic version of the pill. “You can see that they’re just pulling straws from absolutely everywhere, because they want to obscure the whole goal” to “ban abortion nationwide,” Murray said to me. Republican officials insisted that medication abortion is too easy to get. Yet in 13 states, abortion is banned in nearly all circumstances. Another seven states have enacted time restrictions earlier than what was outlined in Roe v. Wade. At the same time, maternity care deserts are expanding across the nation. According to a 2024 report by infant and maternal health nonprofit March of Dimes, more than a thousand US counties—together home to more than 2.3 million women of reproductive age—lack a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician. Since 2020, 117 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies, or announced that they would stop before the end of 2025, according to a December report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. A National Partnership for Women & Families analysis from June warned that 131 rural hospitals with labor and delivery units are at risk of closing altogether due to Republican-led cuts to Medicaid through President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” I asked Sen. Murray about requiring consultations for medication abortion—and why pregnant people aren’t going in person to seek out that route.  “It’s pretty stunning to watch these Republicans talk about this with a straight face,” she told me. “The reason many women don’t,” Murray continued, “is the abortion bans that in Republican states don’t give women the option to see a provider.” Murray expressed concern, “especially after we have a hearing like this, where we heard so much misinformation,” that an already confusing landscape for those seeking abortion could be further obscured. And a new study, published Monday in the leading medical journal JAMA, found that the FDA has repeatedly reviewed new evidence about mifepristone and reaffirmed its safety. Abortion medication, Murray pointed out, is less deadly than both penicillin and Viagra. “We didn’t have a hearing today on Viagra,” she told me. “We had a hearing on mifepristone, so their whole thing about safety and all this is just hogwash.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Friday morning, the US House of Representatives approved a bill that would get the Department of Energy (DOE) out of the business of energy standards for mobile homes, also known as manufactured homes, and could set the efficiency requirements back decades.  Advocates say the changes will streamline the regulatory process and keep the upfront costs of manufactured homes down. Critics argue that less efficient homes will cost people more money overall and mostly benefit builders.   “This is not about poor people. This is not about working people,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), who grew up in a manufactured home, on the House floor before the vote. “This is about doing the bidding of corporations.” The average income of a manufactured home resident is around $40,000, and they “already face disproportionately high energy costs and energy use,” said Johanna Neumann, senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy at Environment America. That, she said, is why more stringent energy codes are so important. But the Energy Department, which oversees national energy policy and production, didn’t always have a say over these standards.  Starting in 1974, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, became tasked with setting building codes for manufactured homes. But HUD last updated the relevant energy-efficiency standards in 1994, and they have long lagged behind modern insulation and weatherization practices. So in 2007, Congress assigned that task to the DOE. It still took 15 years and a lawsuit before President Joe Biden’s administration finalized new rules in 2022 that were projected to reduce utility bills in double-wide manufactured homes by an average of $475 a year. Even with higher upfront costs taken into account, the government predicted around $5 billion in avoided energy bills over 30-years. At the time, the manufactured housing industry argued that DOE’s calculations were wrong and that the upfront cost of the home should be the primary metric of affordability. Both the Biden and now Trump administrations have delayed implementation of the rule and compliance deadlines, which still aren’t in effect.  This House legislation would eliminate the DOE rule and return sole regulatory authority to HUD. Lesli Gooch, CEO of the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade organization, describes it as essentially a process bill aimed at removing bureaucracy that has stood in the way of action. “The paralysis is because you have two different agencies that have been tasked with creating energy standards,” Gooch said. “You can’t build a house to two different sets of blueprints.” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), agreed and called the move “commonsense regulatory reform” in a letter urging his colleagues to support the bill. Ultimately, 57 Democrats joined 206 Republicans in voting for the bill, and it now moves to the Senate, where its prospects are uncertain.  If the bill becomes law, however, the only operative benchmark would be HUD’s 1994 code and it could take years to make a new one. While more than half of the roughly 100,000 homes sold in the US each year already meet or exceed the DOE’s 2022 efficiency rules, the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy estimates that tens of thousands are still built to just the outdated standard. “Families are struggling,” said Mark Kresowik, senior policy director at the council, and he does not expect HUD under Trump to move particularly quickly on a fix. “I have not seen this administration lowering energy bills.” For now, though, it’s the Senate’s turn to weigh in.

On Thursday, in a rebuke to the GOP party line, the House of Representatives voted 230-196 to extend the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium subsidies for three more years. 17 Republicans defected to join all Democrats in voting for the legislation, after the end of the subsidies sparked the longest-ever federal government shutdown late last year. It remains to be seen whether the extension will pass the Senate, where a similar three-year extension vote failed in December—but cheers could be heard in the House chamber on C-SPAN after the vote. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the former House Speaker who played a key role in the 2010 passage of the ACA, posted on X that “today is a happy day” and that “the Senate must immediately take up this bill to ensure no American is pushed out of coverage.” > Today is a happy day. House Democrats have passed a bill to extend Affordable > Care Act tax credits so health care remains affordable and accessible for > America’s working families. > > The Senate must immediately take up this bill to ensure no American is pushed > out of coverage. > > — Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) January 8, 2026 At the end of last year, enhanced subsidies expired due to Republicans’ and Democrats’ inability to reach a deal on the Biden-era expansion, leaving many Americans facing record premium spikes. As I previously reported, Republican politicians have pushed for a health savings account model, which has shortcomings for people with high health care costs. It’s unclear how many fewer people signed up for ACA marketplace plans for 2026 by December 15, as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has not released data since December 5. ACA marketplace enrollment remains open through January 15. KFF estimates that the average cost of ACA marketplace plans has increased by 26 percent this year. Thursday’s vote involved sidestepping Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has shepherded GOP opposition to ACA benefits, with a vote yesterday for a discharge petition to bring the vote for a three-year extension to the floor. Nine relatively moderate Republican representatives defected from Johnson to join a party-line Democratic vote for the discharge petition. During the debate that preceded the vote, many Democrats shared stories of constituents who faced the prospect of unaffordable health care without the enhanced subsidies. Some Republicans lamented that ACA marketplace plans can include abortion coverage, and claimed that the ACA benefits insurers more than patients. If the extension passes the Senate and is signed into law by President Donald Trump, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that 6.2 million more people will be enrolled in ACA marketplace plans by 2029. Now, the ball is in the Senate’s court.

On Friday, the Trump-controlled Justice Department was mandated by a nearly unanimous act of Congress to release all government files related to Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes. > “What are they protecting?” But the government has made just a portion of its holdings publically available, and among the 13,000 documents released, some are extensively or virtually totally redacted. While the law permits withholding information to protect victims, obscured portions include the names and faces of numerous Epstein associates, despite the law’s dictate that nothing be withheld “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity…to any government official [or] public figure.” According to Rep. Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who broke with his party to champion the Epstein Files Transparency Act, what the government has so far provided “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.” Epstein’s victims have similar complaints. “They are proving everything we have been saying about corruption and delayed justice,” Jess Michaels told the New York Times. “What are they protecting? The coverup continues.”   The release is being overseen by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal defense attorney, who represented him in the criminal case related to Trump’s attempt to coverup his affair with Stormy Daniels, the adult film star. Blanche has said that the Justice Department remains at work preparing more files for disclosure in the “coming weeks,” in apparent violation of Friday’s deadline. The law requires the department to prepare a report to Congress justifying any documents or names it may withhold, and submit it with 15 days of the “completion of the release.” But Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna, the Silicon Valley Democrat who moved the bill forward with the help of a handful of GOP colleagues, aren’t waiting to begin discussing how to bring about legal consequences for Trump officials who have or may still be violating their law requiring disclosure.  “The Justice Department’s document dump,” Khanna said in an online video, “does not comply… Pam Bondi has obfuscated for months.” He suggested that Congress consider impeaching officials or holding them in inherent contempt. “Attorney General Pam Bondi is withholding specific documents that the law required her to release by today,” Massie posted, pointedly adding that prosecutors in a future administration could eventually “convict the current AG” for breaking their law. Friday’s release included many photos of Bill Clinton, a former president, but little new information on the current one. While Trump has variously claimed that he and Epstein “did not socialize together,” that “there was no relationship” between them, and that he “was not a fan of his,” this week a Times investigation found that “the two men forged a bond intense enough to leave others who knew them with the impression that they were each other’s closest friend.”

There may be hope for millions of Americans whose health insurance premiums are set to skyrocket in the new year, but not before Congress gets back from its two-week holiday vacation. Four moderate Republicans signed on to a Democratic petition to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for three years on Wednesday, effectively giving Democrats the numbers they needed to force a floor vote in Congress. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) led the petition, which allows a majority of House members (218 votes) to force a bill to a floor vote. The petition received support from all 214 Democrats and four Republicans who defied GOP leadership in signing —Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Mike Lawler (R-NY), Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.), and Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.). The subsidies date back to 2010, when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. The effort was a signature achievement of President Barack Obama’s first term, and became colloquially known as “Obamacare.” The law effectively created marketplaces where people could buy health insurance if they weren’t covered by their employers, Medicare, or Medicaid. Buyers were incentivized with tax credits, a type of subsidy. Those subsidies got a big boost in government funding under President Joe Biden in 2021 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and many more people became eligible for them. But the credit extended only through 2025. ACA marketplace enrollment was 24.3 million people in 2025, hitting a record-high for the fourth consecutive year. Now, unless Congress extends them again, many enrollees will experience dramatic spikes in their premium costs. According to Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan healthcare policy group, subsidized enrollees are estimated to pay more than double for premiums. They found that the average cost of $888 in 2025 would increase to $1,904 in 2026.  Even though House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) acknowledged at a Tuesday press conference that around a dozen Republicans were working to reduce health care costs for their constituents, “many of them did not want to vote on this ObamaCare COVID-era subsidy the Democrats created.”  Rep. Fitzpatrick said he voted with Democrats because GOP leadership rejected compromise after he spent months offering ideas and amendments.  “The only policy that is worse than a clean three-year extension without any reforms, is a policy of complete expiration without any bridge,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement on Wednesday. “Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.” Fitzpatrick is one of several Republicans who face competitive challenges in their electoral districts in 2026. But all of this may be too little, too late. The ACA funding bill is not expected to go to the floor before the end-of-the-year deadline unless Johnson decides to speed up the vote, which doesn’t seem likely. House rules state a bill can only go to a floor vote at least seven legislative days after a discharge petition. The House will only be in session until Friday before a two-week holiday. House members come back on January 6, so a floor vote will most likely take place in the second week of January.

On Thursday, in a 51-48 vote, the Senate rejected a Democratic plan to extend Affordable Care Act enhanced tax credits, as well as a Republican alternative that boosted a health savings account model. It is now all but certain that the credits, which began under the Biden administration, will expire at the end of the year. As I previously reported, that expiration will lead, for millions of Americans, to the greatest single rise in health care premiums ever. In a video recorded after the votes, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) expressed her anger towards Republican colleagues. “They voted to increase health care costs across the board, and now millions of Americans are left with the impossible decision of choosing between paying for health insurance or paying their rent,” Warren said. “They’ve all fallen in line behind Donald Trump and left American families in the dirt.” On New Year’s Day, the Urban Institute estimates, at least four million ACA marketplace users will become uninsured. People seeking ACA insurance will have until Monday to select a plan in order to be covered on January 1. Some of those people may now choose plans that are less comprehensive because it’s what they can afford, said University of Pittsburgh assistant professor Miranda Yaver, who focuses on health policy. That would leave an even greater number of Americans underinsured. “The average American cannot accommodate an unexpected $1,000 emergency medical expense,” Yaver said. “It is not exactly hard to run up a thousand-dollar tab in the American health care system, and having a good health insurance plan can insulate us from that cost.” American Public Health Association executive director Georges C. Benjamin said in a press release that Congress had failed its duty to safeguard the health of Americans. “Rather than addressing a serious issue that has been on our radar for years, Congress, earlier this year, rejected the opportunity to extend the enhanced tax credits,” Benjamin said, “and instead passed legislation to gut the Medicaid program and make additional changes to the ACA that will result in 16 million Americans losing their health coverage.” “We’re probably going to see more and more people forgoing coverage and care, which is only going to exacerbate existing health conditions,” said Marilyn Cabrera, the nonprofit Young Invincibles‘ health care policy and advocacy manager. Yaver is also skeptical of the health savings account model being pushed by Republicans as an alternative. They are not practical, she says, for the low and middle-income people that the Affordable Care Act is supposed to help. “You have to have the means to put a lot of money into your health savings account, and if you’re barely scraping by and living paycheck to paycheck, it’s just not going to happen,” Yaver said. Among some people whose health insurance is now in jeopardy, there is anger at Congress on both sides of the aisle. Some Democrats, Yaver said, are willing to “sort of allow a certain amount of harm in the next plan year, not wanting to bail Republicans out from their unwillingness to extend the marketplace subsidies,” ahead of elections. And for Republican politicians, Yaver said, “there is a real lack of connection to everyday Americans’ struggles with accessing health care, which is not a luxury item. It is basic survival for a lot of people.”

On Tuesday, California voters passed Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s congressional redistricting proposal in response to Texas Republicans’ gerrymandered map, by a sweeping 28-point margin. As I reported in October, high-profile Democratic politicians—including former President Barack Obama—were front and center in an advertising blitz to pass the measure, which would tilt five seats in the House of Representatives towards Democrats. But on the ground in California, often with less media coverage, were legions of campaigners with civil rights and racial justice organizations, many of which tirelessly championed Prop 50 in the final weeks before the election—and are now celebrating its passage as a small step in the long fight for Black political representation. > “We understood that it was critical to counter what Donald Trump was trying to > do in Texas.” “There has been a long and steady march to kind of erode our voting rights,” said Phaedra Jackson, NAACP’s vice president of unit advocacy and effectiveness, reflecting on the conservative Supreme Court’s continuing attacks on the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2013, the Court eliminated the formula for preclearance, the mechanism by which the VRA prevented certain states and localities from passing discriminatory election laws; six years later, another ruling enabled partisan gerrymandering on a hugely expanded scale. In the years since, the turnout gap between white voters and voters of color has grown—and it’s done so nearly twice as fast in counties that were previously subject to preclearance, according to the progressive nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice. “A lot of folks have framed this as a partisan issue,” Jackson said. “We see it [as] an attack on the ability for Black folks and folks of color to actually have representation.” “You see what’s happened in Missouri, in Texas,” she added, pointing to states where minority representatives, such as Missouri Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and Texas Reps. Marc Veasey, Jasmine Crockett, and Joaquin Castro, all Democrats, were drawn out of their districts, and where the voting power of Black and Latino communities is being diluted. While local chapters of the organization continue to challenge the constitutionality of those maps in court, its goal in California “is to be a counterbalance.” That’s what led the NAACP, in the weeks leading up to the election, to become one of the measure’s biggest direct supporters, including by door-knocking and deploying hundreds of poll monitors across the state. The California Black Power Network, a coalition of 46 grassroots organizations across 15 counties, entered the fray later in the cycle. “We understood that it was critical to counter what Donald Trump was trying to do in Texas,” said Kevin Cosney, the coalition’s chief program officer. But the group waited until it could review the proposed new map—and judge its impact on Black voter representation—before entering the campaign.  Although Proposition 50 would mean 48 of California’s 52 House seats would now likely go to Democrats, the geographic and racial representation of its map is similar to the previous one drawn by the state’s independent redistricting committee, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. When it was convinced that Black voter representation and seats historically held by Black representatives were secure, the coalition’s members reached a consensus to support the measure through phone banking, canvassing, community events and ads.  For Newsom, and many of the measure’s backers in Sacramento, Prop 50’s massive success means it’s time to chalk a win. For racial justice campaigners like Jackson, it’s just “triaging a hemorrhaging situation”—even now, the Supreme Court is considering a Louisiana case that’s likely to further erode voting rights—that needs “long-term systemic fixes” like the decade-old John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was reintroduced in Congress this summer. Cosney echoed the need for systemic change. While Prop 50 “sets the stage for what is potentially possible,” he said, “we still have to organize and do the work … to make sure that those districts that have been built out are filled by folks who have our best interest in mind.” “This was the kind of first opportunity that Californians really had to swing back,” said Cosney. “But it’s not the last.”

The Trump administration is thinking about your family. This may come as a surprise, given that dozens of states and a coalition of nonprofits, local governments, and religious groups had to sue to compel the Department of Agriculture to release funding Congress set aside to keep food assistance (SNAP benefits) flowing to America’s poorest during a crisis, like the ongoing shutdown. (The agency now says it will comply, if only partially.) Yes, this administration is thinking about your family—but in ways that are largely unhelpful and somewhat creepy. Republican administrations have long obsessed over the integrity of the conventional nuclear family. From Ronald Reagan to Bush 43, presidents have engaged in quixotic (and expensive) campaigns to boost the marriage rate. The Trumpists, with Vice President JD Vance taking the lead, have a slightly different focus: They want to convince us to make more babies. Never mind that they aren’t taking care of the children we already have. The pro-natalist movement is neither new nor restricted to conservatives, but the current iteration is a logical product of the Trumpian flirtation with blood-and-soil nationalism. The administration seeks to promote a culture of motherhood, educate women on how to get pregnant, and take one more shot at increasing the marriage rate—all in an attempt to counter leftist cultural changes that conservatives claim are responsible for smaller families and declining birthrates. It’s all red meat to the Great Replacement theorists in the GOP base. > Trump’s big bill will reduce the after-tax income of the bottom income > quintile—the poorest fifth of American households—by an estimated 3 percent. This push for natalism includes scattershot economic components. The administration has sought to prioritize funding for roads in places with higher birth rates, and to reserve a portion of federally funded scholarships such as the Fulbright for parents. More importantly, it intends to compensate mothers for giving birth. The wildly unpopular One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), which Trump signed into law in July, guarantees each newborn a $1,000 “Trump account” and encourages parents to contribute up to $5,000 a year until the “baby” turns 18—at which point it changes into something like an individual retirement account. The law also increases the child tax credit and indexes it to inflation. Such initiatives are broadly popular and have at least some bipartisan appeal. (Democrats pushed for an expanded child credit under President Joe Biden last year, but Senate Republicans, who aimed to portray their rivals as, to quote Vance, “anti-family and anti-child,” killed the bill to deny the Democrats a win. Subsidies for college and retirement savings have proved popular with both parties, even though the benefits flow overwhelmingly to the rich.) The average cost of raising a child in the United States is well over $15,000 a year, so every little bit helps. Still, as sociologists and coauthors of the recent book Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood Since 1980, we were underwhelmed by the giveaways in Trump’s big bill, which takes a lot more than it gives—a fact underscored by the administration’s eagerness to withhold those food stamp benefits. The baby bonds and child tax credit are weak sauce when held up against the bill’s drastic cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, which are to be accomplished largely through work requirements. Beneficiaries with children 14 or older are now required to work or volunteer at least 80 hours a month. And while that may sound reasonable, the real purpose, as Mother Jones has documented, is to impose new bureaucratic hurdles—think bewildering web portals and DOGE-decimated tech support conjoined by red tape—so onerous that tens of millions of otherwise eligible Americans will simply give up. When the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said as much in its analysis of the legislation, Trump and his congressional allies predictably responded by attacking the messenger. The Republicans’ justification of work requirements to ensure that only the “truly needy”—the deserving poor—get government support, harks back to the Reagan-era war on government support for families. During the 1980s, bloviation about “welfare queens” and “government dependency” helped shift the political rhetoric away from economic policies that actually improve the lives of families with children—who make up more than one-third of SNAP recipients. (Curiously, neither the OBBB nor the shutdown has imperiled WIC, a separate program that provides limited additional assistance to new mothers.) > While government assistance has become less important for single mothers > overall, it is a lifeline for those at the bottom. The GOP’s supposed pro-natalist policies, meanwhile, grievously fail to account for the broader needs of families with children. The Yale Budget Lab calculated that Trump’s big bill will cost the bottom income quintile—the poorest fifth of US households—about 3 percent of their after-tax income when you factor in lost Medicaid and SNAP benefits. Those families will owe a little less tax on earned income but lose a lot more thanks to the spending cuts. In addition, the Trump tariffs, which amount to a regressive sales tax, will fall hardest on families struggling to make ends meet, costing those bottom-quintile families about $1,000 more per year, according to the budget lab’s latest estimates. Contrary to the pro-natalist rhetoric, the administration’s policies will wreak particular havoc on the lives of single mothers, who raise almost a quarter of the nation’s children. In the book, we show that family structure has a deep and abiding relationship to poverty. Not all single-parent families are poor, of course, but incomes within the single-mother category have grown increasingly unequal. This isn’t because a new, large class of uber-rich single moms has emerged, but rather because our nation has created a new underclass of uber-poor ones. Federal policy has much to do with this. In the wake of Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform legislation, many women successfully transitioned from government aid into the booming job market of the late 1990s, abetted by an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which gives cash back to low- and middle-income workers. But wealth and income inequality, accelerated by decades of Republican “trickle-down” tax cuts, became even more pronounced as the bull economy petered out with the recessions of the 21st century. And although some single mothers thrived in the workforce, others didn’t earn enough to qualify for the EITC, and could no longer count on federal cash welfare. Now, with the passage of Trump’s signature legislation, many won’t qualify for Medicaid or food assistance either. Why would any politician who claims to care about families support this? Well, Congress has taken Trump’s side in an ideological war over how the US government approaches its obligation to America’s children. The administration’s position is that it’s the government’s job to encourage people to have more kids, preach the merits of marriage (between an actual man and an actual woman), and give couples a little cash to start a family. Pro-natalism will, they believe, lead to economic growth and prosperous families that are solely responsible for their children’s welfare—if families are struggling, it’s because the parents aren’t working hard enough. > When it comes to alleviating poverty, offering tax cuts to families who don’t > earn enough to benefit from them won’t cut it. This theory of prosperity supplants the older social democratic ideal: that the purpose of family policy is to guarantee all children a minimum quality of life, and to help ensure they can achieve their potential in a capitalist society that inevitably leaves some families behind. Hardly a leftist, Benjamin Disraeli, who served two stints as Britain’s prime minister during the 1800s, articulated this ideal when he wrote that “power has only one duty: to secure the social welfare of the People.” As we demonstrate in Thanks for Nothing, many single mothers do manage to make it in the labor market. Today mothers have more job experience and are more likely to work even when they have young children. They also have more education, and thus better jobs. Yet a subset of single mothers have fallen behind, especially the increasing proportion who have children out of wedlock. Surveys show that many would like to be married, but that’s just not always a viable option in communities of unemployed and under-employed men. The median income for never-married mothers has remained essentially stagnant over the past 40 years, while the bottom 10 percent of this group has seen shrinking incomes and today basically has zero work income. While government assistance has become less important for single mothers overall, it is a lifeline for those at the bottom. The level of support was never great, but it provided essential subsistence. The bill Congress passed in July will make the lives of these women and children even worse, and the administration has made clear that it will make no effort  to remedy that. Mitigating family poverty requires federal action, not just reliance on the labor market as it’s currently constituted. The conversation lawmakers should be having involves debating which policies might actually make a difference. A universal basic income? The wage subsidies proposed by conservative think tanker Oren Cass? Or perhaps the refundable child tax credits proposed by then-senator Mitt Romney in 2019? Reagan was not wrong when he praised the effectiveness of the EITC as an anti-poverty tool, but it’s clear that the labor market has failed many single mothers and their children. Offering tax cuts to families who don’t earn enough to benefit from them won’t cut it. Until the government can muster up real, honest discussions on how to support all American families, it’s hard to imagine the Trump administration’s policies moving anyone, except maybe MAGA trad wives, to procreate.

Pastor Oliver Carter is in a strange predicament. For the last few years, he’s run a food bank serving the needy through No Limits Outreach Ministries, his church in a Maryland suburb just outside of Washington, DC. Now, his family is among those struggling to make ends meet. His wife, Pamelia, works for the US Department of Agriculture. As a result of the government shutdown, she is one of more than 700,000 federal employees who have been furloughed—or forced to take a temporary, unpaid leave of absence—since October 1. Her last paycheck was about half of its usual amount, and her most recent one was $0. That’s what she will receive until the government reopens. “Thank God for the food bank,” Carter says, noting his family’s piling bills. “Because that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.” As we talk, hundreds of furloughed federal workers have lined up on a sidewalk outside the Hyattsville church. Even though food distribution won’t begin until noon, people began arriving in the brisk 40-degree weather with folding chairs and blankets as early as 7:30 AM. There’s only enough frozen meat—the most sought-after item—for the first 50 to 100 people of the nearly 500 who will likely appear. Everyone else will get shelf-stable items, like tuna pouches and peanut butter. Near the front, a woman who was furloughed from the Department of Health and Human Services tells me that she’s been applying for second jobs to pay her daughter’s tuition and provide for her aging mother. She says she’d also apply for food stamps, but as of Saturday, the program won’t have any funds. These struggles are replicated all over the country and embody the string of compounding food crises created by the government shutdown. While hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers are going without pay, food stamps (formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) are due to run out on Saturday. Normally, the federal government would use contingency money to keep SNAP going, but the Trump administration said last week it had no intention of doing so. (More than 20 states sued over the suspension of benefits on Tuesday, arguing that not making use of the available funds is illegal.) Virginia and New Mexico have announced plans to temporarily fund SNAP beneficiaries with electronic transfers, but the vast majority of the 42 million Americans who rely on the program—including 14 million children and 1.2 million veterans—will lose their modest grocery assistance by the end of the week. But there’s another wrinkle, too. As individuals look for help putting dinner on the table, the food banks themselves are also down resources because of previous budget cuts. “There’s absolutely more need, but less food,” Carter tells me in his cluttered church office, located in a small strip mall. “It’s bad.” A Federal Bureau of Investigation Police officer receives food as World Central Kitchen workers distribute free meals to federal employees and their families in Washington Canal Park in Washington, DC, on the 29th day of a government shutdown.Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP Coincidentally, while DC-area federal workers lined up at the food bank in Hyattsville and at pop-up tents organized by José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen at the Navy Yard in the Southeast corner of the city, dozens of nonprofit leaders, members of Congress, food industry experts, and other stakeholders were convening at George Washington University for a previously planned food and agriculture policy summit. There, keynote speakers and panels explored big-picture topics like food waste and sustainability. But in between sessions, attendees were also pondering more imminent problems. “There’s the stuff happening on the plenary floor, and then there’s [the conversations] happening in the hallway corridors, where you have a lot of people who are preparing for a very different, challenging landscape next week,” explains Alexander Moore, the chief development officer at DC Central Kitchen, a nonprofit that has prepared full meals for homeless shelters and other food-insecure groups since it was created in 1989. Moore says nonprofits like his are already operating at capacity. DC Central Kitchen, for example, serves 17,000 people daily and operates around the clock seven days a week. And that is when government programs were still functioning. Anticipating increased demand once SNAP funding runs dry on November 1 and about 137,500 DC residents lose their benefits, the nonprofit is preparing to serve up to 500 additional meals per day. > “It’s hard to fathom this severe a blow to food security.” “It’s hard to fathom this severe a blow to food security,” Moore says, adding that the last time things felt as dire was when the pandemic began. Food banks are still recovering from earlier crises, too. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration canceled $500 million worth of food shipments from the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). In DC, that resulted in 780,000 fewer meals, according to a spokesperson for Capital Area Food Bank, which distributes pallets of food to smaller food banks in the area, like Carter’s. In March, the Trump administration also ended the Local Food Purchase Agreement Program, a $1 billion outlay that enabled food banks and schools to purchase food from local farmers. Together, these two initiatives had been vital in helping food banks procure fresh produce and meat. USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins told Fox News that the latter program, which began during COVID, “was an effort by the left to continue spending taxpayer dollars that were not necessary.” Back in Hyattsville, Carter has started to plan for the near future should the government shutdown extend into the holidays. Without SNAP and other programs, he has decided to reach out to grocery stores and local farmers, asking for anything they might be able to give. Recently, he received six frozen turkeys from a donor. They are a drop in the bucket compared to the growing demand, but still cause for celebration. He leads me to the dual-purpose church worship room and food bank storage space to show them to me. A nearby freezer sits empty, ready to accommodate future donations, big or small. After all, Carter will have thousands more struggling people to feed over the next few weeks, especially as the holidays approach—including his own family.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Millions of Americans face having to ration heating this winter as the US federal government shutdown and mass layoffs by the Trump administration cause unprecedented delays in getting energy assistance aid to low-income households, a group that helps people pay energy bills has warned. Congress approved about $4 billion for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), after Trump’s proposal to cancel the life-saving heating and cooling scheme in this year’s budget was ultimately unsuccessful. But with winter fast approaching, lawmakers have failed to reach a funding deal and appropriations remain stalled, which threaten to leave the most vulnerable families without critical energy aid as electricity and gas bills surge. “No family should be forced to choose between heat and food because of a federal funding delay,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), which represents the state directors of LIHEAP. “If the money isn’t released soon, it will cause real harm and people will suffer.” LIHEAP is a chronically underfunded bipartisan program that helped almost 6 million households keep on top of energy bills last year, reaching only 17 percent of those eligible for assistance even before the current chaos. Due to the seasonal nature of the program, previous administrations have typically allowed 90 percent of the LIHEAP funds to be distributed by the end of October—even while lawmakers wrangled over the annual appropriations bill. This is year is different thanks to Trump’s “department of government efficiency” (DOGE). Even if the continuing resolution—or short-term spending fix—were to be agreed this week, states and tribes would probably not receive the funds until early December at the earliest due to unprecedented staff shortages. Earlier this year, the entire staff running the decades-old bipartisan program was fired—as part of the Trump administration’s so-called “efficiency” drive which was overseen by the billionaire Republican donor Elon Musk. This left no technical staff to apply the funding formula, which determines how much each state and tribe receives, and approve states’ plans on how the money will be allocated to households. The Guardian understands that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) led by Robert F Kennedy Jr. had been using external paid consultants and staff from other programs, some of whom were fired earlier this month. With no indication that the government shutdown will end any time soon, the NEADA is urging utilities to immediately suspend disconnections for overdue bills—until the federal chaos is resolved and LIHEAP funds are released. “Utilities must act in the public interest and pause shutoffs until federal aid is available again,” said Wolfe. In the first eight months of this year, New York’s monopoly energy provider alone disconnected 111,000 households. The national total is expected to hit 4 million shutoffs in 2025—up from 3 million in 2023, according to analysis of utility-reported data. Trump declared a national energy emergency on his first day back in office, pledging to ramp up fossil-fuel production and slash regulations to bring consumer energy bills down. In the past year, electricity bills have risen more than 15 percent in 10 states plus the District of Columbia, with the highest jumps in Illinois (28 percent), Indiana (25 percent) and JD Vance’s home state of Ohio (23 percent). The price hike is mostly down to the rising cost of fossil gas, utilities passing on the cost of investment in transmission and distribution systems to consumers, and the rapid unchecked growth of datacenters, which is increasing demand for electricity. According to NEADA research, the cost of home-heating this winter is expected to rise by an average of 7.6 percent, increasing from $907 last winter to an estimated $976 this year. About 21 million households—one in six—are currently behind on their energy bills. Household energy arrears rose by more than 30 percent, from $17.5 billion in December 2023 to $23 billion by June 2025. A health department spokesperson said in a statement: “The Democrat-led shutdown is preventing states from receiving new funds under the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). The Trump Administration is committed to reopening the government for the American people.”