Congress, content creators, and Can't Let It Go
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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.
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. But I should say that there were sticking points between the parties in these negotiations even before this Trump plan rolled out, namely that some Republicans want stricter language ensuring that federal money is not used for abortion.
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