Tony Romm
speaker
148 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 8 May
Tony Romm’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
But what we have seen since the president made that threat is a very deliberate effort across the administration to cut funding streams that they associate with members of the political opposition.
And even President Trump sort of acknowledged this just a few days ago when he said that the SNAP program was one that largely benefited Democrats, that most of the people on the program were Democratic voters.
We know that that is not indeed the case.
But throughout all of this has just been this very clear effort to go after areas that Democrats like in a bid to pressure them into coming to the negotiating table.
Yeah, in many ways, this fight, this crisis around SNAP is just a microcosm of everything that President Trump has been trying to do with federal spending since he returned to office.
You know, on one hand, this is about rethinking the size and the reach and the role of government in Americans' lives.
And you can see that in the programs that the president has looked to cut.
That's cuts to federal health and education and science and research and other programs.
And the reality that his budget for the 2026 fiscal year, if Congress were to adopt it, would set domestic spending at its lowest level in modern history.
But beyond that, the other really dynamic facet of all of this is that President Trump and his top budget advisor, Russell Vogt, have gone to great lengths to recalibrate the budget without the approval of Congress, which has that power of the purse under the Constitution.
They have closed entire agencies and laid off droves of workers and halted billions of dollars in federal spending enacted by Congress without getting lawmakers' support.
And so the SNAP program just really sits in the middle of all that because it shows the ways in which the president wants to rethink those federal safety net programs and the cuts that he aspires to make, but also the ways he's willing to use presidential power to achieve them.
Yeah, that's the big question.
And in short, we just don't know yet.
Because the Trump administration previously told the court that by providing partial payments, it could take potentially weeks or maybe in some cases months before the federal government and the states could get these benefits out to the millions of people who depend on them.
This could have been avoided potentially if the government had chosen to provide full payments and had tapped other sources of money to backfill that shortfall.
But the Trump administration opted not to do that.
And as a result, millions of people still find themselves facing the same uncertainty today that they did a few days ago about when that next snap payment is going to arrive.
Yeah, I think they bet that, A, it will be the kind of thing that pressures Democrats into negotiating, and B, that absent that, the president can accomplish what he proposed to do as part of his 2026 budget, even without having Congress vote on it.
Whether that translates into a victory in the eyes of the American people remains to be seen.
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