The Federal Government Shut Down Overnight

Last night, without much fanfare, the federal government closed. Neither side showed urgency in averting the shutdown. In back-to-back Senate votes, each party blocked the other’s stopgap spending proposal.

The Republicans’ bill did not restore Medicaid funding or extend Obamacare subsidies, so Democrats didn’t sign on. The Democratic version added more than $1 trillion in spending, so Republicans said no.

President Trump suggested he could use the shutdown to enact measures that would be “bad” for Democrats, “like cutting vast numbers of people out, cutting things that they like, cutting programs that they like.” He later added, “a lot of good can come down from shutdowns.”

What you need to know:

• Hundreds of thousands of federal workers will be furloughed. This chart gives a breakdown.

• Others, including active-duty troops and law enforcement officers, will keep working. Many workers will stop receiving paychecks.

• Airports will stay open. Air traffic controllers and T.S.A. agents will be asked to continue working. (If you’re traveling soon, prepare for longer lines.)

• Social Security and Medicare benefits will continue uninterrupted. The same goes for Medicaid benefits, at least through the end of the year.

Government shutdowns don’t follow a script — many agencies didn’t set their plans until late yesterday — so things will change if the shutdown drags on. Some programs will strain or shutter as their funding runs out. Workers who aren’t getting paychecks may stop showing up. And Trump could reshape the government in a more permanent way if he follows through on his threats of mass layoffs.

Warrior ethos

Yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told America’s military leaders to get serious about killing people. In the name of “woke garbage,” he said, they had relaxed their standards and left the country vulnerable.

In particular, Hegseth lamented “stupid rules of engagement.” It’s a complaint he brought into the administration from his years on Fox News, where he made a cause célèbre out of soldiers who’d been investigated, and in some cases convicted, as war criminals for what they’d done in Iraq and Afghanistan. These soldiers were not villains, he insisted. They were heroes who got the job — killing terrorists — done, even when it meant fighting ugly.

That style of combat is the subject of a multi-part investigation The Times Magazine has just published. Its author, Matthieu Aikins, spent four years reporting on elite special forces, many of whom “came to embrace the idea that rule-breaking could be justified by the higher good of getting the mission done,” he writes. I spoke to him for today’s newsletter.

What are examples of transgressions that occurred in the counterinsurgency wars that followed the Sept. 11 attacks?

I spoke with two dozen current and former members of Army Special Operations to understand how, faced with a brutal, unconventional war in Afghanistan, the Green Berets often decided the ends justified the means. I focused on two cases involving soldiers who were accused of killing detainees in Afghanistan. The first, that of Mathew Golsteyn, became infamous after Trump pardoned him in 2019. The second, which took place in a district called Nerkh, is barely remembered today, but the accusations were even worse: Locals claimed the Special Forces killed nine people whose remains were found buried outside.

Is there something new about this pattern of rule-breaking among what is, I assume, a small fraction of soldiers?

The operator — the special operations warrior — is different from previous war-hero tropes like the fighter-jet ace and the Everyman G.I. What distinguishes him is the legal and moral lines the operators had to approach, or even cross, in their battle with the terrorists. “We do bad things to bad people,” went the motto of one Special Forces battalion. That put them at odds with the military’s traditional insistence on discipline and the rule of law.

Is there anything to Hegseth’s claim that the Pentagon has focused on distractions at the expense of “lethality”?

There’s a reasonable argument that the military became too top-heavy and that its bureaucracy needs to be streamlined. The business of the military is killing, which our political leaders are often uncomfortable talking about. But we didn’t fail in Iraq and Afghanistan because of an overemphasis on “diversity.” And Hegseth is purging lawyers, which loosens safeguards on our armed forces, both abroad and at home.

You’re drawing a line from the combat style of the war on terror to an increasingly lawless moment today.

I think this is an example of what historians call “blowback”: the way that lawlessness overseas returned to the homeland. That’s the subject of this story. Trump and Hegseth apply the rhetoric and tactics of the war on terror in the domestic sphere to target migrants, cartels and leftist groups. That’s why it’s important to have this reckoning with a secret side of the war: It allows us to understand not only history, but our present moment.

Matthieu explains his investigation in five takeaways here.

Analysis

• Trump also spoke to the generals, and he said that U.S. cities should serve as “training grounds” for troops. This was a passing statement tucked into his speech — but one that is wildly revealing about where he’s taking the country, Shawn McCreesh writes.

• To some, Hegseth’s speech, which focused on the kinds of issues he would have dealt with as a young platoon leader, was poorly matched to his audience of senior officers, writes our reporter covering the military.

• The meeting was fodder for the late night hosts.

THE LATEST NEWS

Trump Administration

• Trump is unpopular, a Times/Siena College poll shows, but that disapproval doesn’t neatly translate into support for Democrats. Voters still support Trump’s core objectives, if not his execution, our polling expert explains.

• Florida officials donated a prime parcel of state-owned real estate in Miami to become Trump’s presidential library.

• The White House defunded an office that oversees dozens of federal watchdogs, drawing condemnation from some Senate Republicans.

• The Trump administration said it had dug up hundreds of immigration fraud cases during an enforcement operation in Minnesota. It says it will do the same across the country.

Military

• The governor of Louisiana, embracing Trump’s push to use troops to fight crime, asked the administration to deploy the National Guard in his state.

• The Democrat in the New Jersey governor’s race, Mikie Sherrill, is a Navy veteran. She’s locked in a bitter battle over her service records, some of which the Trump administration released.

Courts

• The Trump administration unlawfully targeted and deported noncitizens for protesting in support of Palestinians on college campuses, a federal judge ruled.

• A federal judge barred Nevada’s top federal prosecutor from handling cases. The administration had circumvented the usual procedures to appoint her.

Health

• Trump and Pfizer announced a deal to lower Medicaid drug prices.

• More young people are getting cancer. It may be linked to lifestyle changes.

• People are diagnosing themselves with home tests and chatbots, The Wall Street Journal reports.

War in Ukraine

• Russia’s military budget is set to fall for the first time since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

• European investors are pouring money into military start-ups, which is not how countries have traditionally built their arsenals.

More International News

• Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are fleeing Israel’s expanded ground offensive in Gaza City. The exodus is overwhelming relief efforts, aid agencies say.

• A strong earthquake collapsed buildings in the central Philippines, killing at least 69 people and injuring more than 150 others, the authorities said.

• A car bomb exploded outside the headquarters of a government paramilitary force in Pakistan, killing at least 10 people.

Technology

• China showed off boxing robots and self-driving yachts at a tech expo, where products filled an area bigger than 21 football fields. That raises a question: Who will buy all this stuff?

• An A.I. start-up focused on scientific discovery, Periodic Labs, has drawn top researchers away from Meta, OpenAI and Google.

• Road trips in electric vehicles have gone from impossible to easy very quickly. In the video below, we explain how charging stations spread across the country.

OPINIONS

Democrats will come to regret the government shutdown, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, writes.

Yours for $2,700: A soon-to-close theme park in New Jersey has a life-size T. rex to sell you.

Ask Well: Does using your phone on the toilet cause hemorrhoids?

Your pick: One of most-clicked stories in The Morning yesterday was about a 102-year-old yoga teacher.

Barrier breaker: Bobby Cain, the first Black student to graduate from a public high school in the South under court-mandated desegregation, died at 85. He braved white mobs to attend a school in Tennessee.

SPORTS

W.N.B.A.: The Las Vegas Aces are going to the finals for the third time in four seasons after an overtime thriller against the Indiana Fever.

Trending: People online are searching for Cathy Engelbert, the W.N.B.A. commissioner, during the league’s negotiations with the players’ union. A Minnesota Lynx player denounced her yesterday, saying that the league had the “worst leadership in the world.”

M.L.B.: As the playoffs got underway, the Red Sox rallied to stun the Yankees. The Dodgers, Cubs and Tigers also opened their series with victories.

Gambling: Sports betting apps now let players wager on nearly any moment of a game, live. These in-game bets are one of the fastest-growing areas of the industry.

Have you eaten at one of Stephen Starr’s restaurants? He runs 43 of them in six cities. They draw presidents and celebrities, but also Florida tourists and N.F.L. pregamers. And they bring in a lot of money — last year, Parc in Philadelphia and Pastis in New York alone grossed nearly $100 million.

Starr got his start in the music business, Christine Speer Lejeune writes in a new profile, and he still speaks in music analogies: A restaurant is like an album. A menu needs a few hits. A dish that isn’t working is like Paul and John, toward the end.

Read about his rise to restaurant stardom.

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