Tony Romm

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.

I think there have been times where people have blamed the administration for the cuts across government and the ways that that's affected their daily lives.

But there's also been times where I think people just blame what's happening on just the general mess of Washington.

And the result isn't that they see it as the work of one party or another, but just another chip away at their confidence in the work of government.

And so I think that's in many ways one of the lasting repercussions here.

It's just another instance where people look at Washington and think, this place isn't doing anything for me and I can't count on it for help when I'm in my greatest need.

And so in many ways, it really just distills how bad things have gotten here in the nation's capital and the real people who might be hurt in the process when the two parties can't talk to each other.