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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast for Friday, January 16th, 2026. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Sam Greenglass. I cover Congress. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House. And we are taping this podcast at 1239 p.m. It is Friday, so we are going to try to make some sense of another crazy week in Washington. Sam, I want to start with you.
Congress has a deadline, another deadline at the end of the month. to get some various spending bills passed. I feel like the government shutdown was just yesterday. So how in the world are we back here again?
OK, so to end the shutdown, what Congress did is they passed three spending packages and they need to do 12. The rest were just basically extended at current funding levels until this other deadline, which is coming up on January 30th. And now at this point, Congress has passed half of those appropriations packages and two more of them are really close.
But the four that are left are really tricky, including Health and Human Services, Defense and Homeland Security.
Chapter 2: What are the spending bills Congress needs to pass before the deadline?
Sounds a little bit like me in college waiting till the end to do the hardest stuff. Yeah, you procrastinate. What are the sticking points?
Okay, so these buckets that are still on the to-do list, they actually make up a majority of discretionary spending. So the stakes are really high. And appropriators say that they are on track except for the Homeland Security package. And this one is proving to be pretty thorny because some Democrats are calling for it to include provisions that would rein in immigration and customs enforcement.
amid all these really forceful ice crackdowns that we're seeing around the country. But I got to say, there is not a lot of appetite even for a partial government shutdown right now after all that we lived through back in the fall. So what's more likely is that this DHS funding just gets extended without changes, another continuing resolution, and would kick that debate until after the midterms.
All right. Well, let's also talk about health care, because You know, when the shutdown did end, it ended without a deal on the Affordable Care Act subsidies. Millions of Americans are now heading into 2026, staring down big increases in their premiums if they do get health care through the Affordable Care Act. There's still no deal, though. So where do things stand there?
Yeah. So the other week, a handful of Republicans joined Democrats to force a vote on an extension in the House. And, you know, that particular measure was never going to become law. But what it did do was recharge bipartisan negotiations over in the Senate. And last week, you know, I was talking to all these lawmakers who were involved in these talks and they were so optimistic.
They were saying things like we're getting really close or, you know, another even said they were in the red zone. This week, though, it was a totally different story. You heard people saying that the talks were paused. They're basically floundering. And then you had President Trump, who released a health plan of his own that seemed to spiral things even further.
I just want to listen for a minute to how one of these bipartisan negotiators described the current environment. Here is Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
We've all known that to be able to advance something, we're going to have to have buy-in from the White House. Does this set things back if he signals that he does not support extending? I mean, that's the basis of our plan here. I've told Alaskans I'm not backing down off the engagement. I don't think it is too late to salvage something.
You know, others said the talks could still continue basically in tandem with what Trump wants. But you also heard some of them starting to shift the blame for possible failure to colleagues across the aisle, you know, if all this goes south.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges facing Congress regarding health care funding?
And I want to bring in two of my favorite reporters here at NPR, Jude Jaffe Block and Stephen Fowler. How do you both? Hey there. Hey. So you guys have some great reporting out today about the Trump administration's use of social media, particularly Facebook.
with regards to the surge of immigration enforcement in Minnesota that's going on right now and how social media is basically influencing policy in the White House. Jude, just start there. Explain for people who aren't terminally online exactly what this content looks like.
Well, I'll give you one example. Our story opens with this video that the Department of Homeland Security posted this week. And it shows these helmeted, heavily armed border agents in a helicopter rappelling down, breaking down doors. And, you know, it's this very militaristic, combative imagery. It's captioned with a Bible verse.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. You know, it's this juxtaposition, you know, religious overtones. And it's coming in this week where there's this push, this really heavy handed push to control the narrative of immigration policy in Minnesota. And especially after this fatal ice shooting last week.
And that in itself has been very emblematic of this effort to control the narrative. You know, within hours of reports of this shooting of 37-year-old Renee Macklin Good by an ICE agent, we saw President Trump taking to Truth Social, immediately posting this was, you know, willful and vicious in an attempt to run the agent over.
The Department of Homeland Security posted and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted said in a press conference, you know, this was an act of domestic terrorism, this effort to frame it, get out ahead and frame this issue right away before there's facts and investigation done.
And this whole episode of why we're even talking about Minnesota right now, you could argue, goes back three weeks ago to another viral social media post. You know, this is Nick Shirley, a right-wing influencer who's close with the Trump administration, who posted about allegations of fraud in these Minnesota daycares, which in a way kicked this all off.
It was in the aftermath of that that the Trump administration sent thousands of federal agents into Minnesota, has attempted to freeze federal funding. Some of that's been blocked by the courts. And now we're seeing... aligned influencers on the ground recording clashes between protesters and ICE agents and using that to call on the president to evoke the Insurrection Act and send in military.
And, you know, Trump has indicated that that he is considering that. And we're seeing those calls and that pressure on social media continue today.
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