The Shutdown Enters Its Third Week

Flights are delayed. Tax hotlines are quiet. Farmers can’t get their loans. The government shutdown, two weeks old, is beginning to reach Americans.

Congress has moved no closer to a deal to bring the government back to life. And in the meantime, President Trump is using the impasse to shrink the government and to punish political foes. His administration has frozen or canceled around $28 billion for projects primarily in places governed by Democrats. (The president posted a parody video last week that depicts his budget director as Democrats’ “reaper.”)

Today’s newsletter is a guide to what’s happening.

An opening

From the start, Trump has hailed the shutdown as an “unprecedented opportunity” to trim fat from the government. The administration has so far targeted two main buckets of federal funding, a Times analysis found.

Energy. The administration said it would terminate at least $7.6 billion in grants for energy projects in 16 states, 14 led by Democrats. The Energy Department said the projects were “not economically viable” or did not advance Trump’s agenda.

At the same time, the administration says it will fire more than 4,000 government workers. The White House insists the cuts are necessary to keep essential government services up and running. But budget experts say that’s a pretense, and the maneuver may be illegal.

Trump promised that he would soon publish a list of agencies and programs he plans to cut permanently. “We are closing up Democrat programs that we disagree with, and they’re never going to open again,” he said. The president has also threatened to deny furloughed workers back pay, which would violate a federal law he signed in 2019.

Carve-outs

Not everyone is feeling the pain.

The administration used money from customs duties to fund a federal nutrition aid program, and it worked to keep rural airports open. It also reversed layoffs for hundreds of C.D.C. scientists who it said were fired by mistake. My colleagues Tony Romm and Catie Edmondson explain:

Mr. Trump has behaved much differently with agencies and programs he supports, or those that present risk of political blowback. There, the administration has relied on creative accounting to keep some workers paid and programs functioning.

Now Trump says he has “identified funds” that would allow the government to pay military troops during the shutdown, even though Congress hasn’t allocated money for that purpose.

Usually, more than one million active-duty service members stop receiving paychecks while the government is closed. It’s politically unpopular to let the troops languish, so during previous shutdowns, their financial hardship brought lawmakers to the negotiating table.

But Trump is circumventing the problem, which means the shutdown may drag on longer this time.

More coverage

• More than a dozen airports refused to display a video of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, blaming Democrats for the shutdown and any travel disruptions it causes.

• Trump’s layoffs at the Education Department affected employees working on special education, funding for low-income students and civil rights enforcement.

THE LATEST NEWS

Supreme Court

• Alex Jones must pay $1.4 billion in damages to the families of the children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting, after the Supreme Court rejected his appeal.

• Recent Supreme Court decisions have weakened the Voting Rights Act. The justices will hear arguments today over one of the law’s remaining pillars, on race and voting districts.

U.S. Boat Strikes

• The U.S. killed six people when it struck another boat in international waters near Venezuela, Trump said. The military has now killed 27 people on boats like this, treating them like enemy soldiers in a war zone rather than criminal suspects.

• As with the other strikes, Trump declared without evidence that the victims were moving drugs.

• Look at a map of how drugs arrive in the U.S. by sea. Most enter via the Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean Sea.

More on Politics

• Some Chicago residents are openly fighting back against ICE. Others have formed volunteer groups to monitor their neighborhoods or are honking when they see agents.

• Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, to Charlie Kirk. Erika Kirk, his widow, accepted it on what would have been his 32nd birthday.

• The Democratic governor of Maine, Janet Mills, will run to challenge Susan Collins, a Republican, for her Senate seat next year.

Israel and Gaza

• Israel may limit aid to punish Hamas for not immediately returning the remains of some hostages. A Hamas official said Gaza’s devastation made the bodies difficult to retrieve.

• A lasting peace could bring a new wave of business investments in the Middle East, the DealBook newsletter explains.

More International News

• Madagascar’s military seized power after its Parliament voted to impeach the president, who went into hiding after weeks of bloody protests.

• France’s prime minister made a significant concession as he seeks to avoid having to resign for a second time: He offered to delay an unpopular pension overhaul until at least 2027.

• Thousands of Guatemalan police officers are searching for 20 escaped inmates, all accused of being members of the same major gang.

Other Big Stories

• Hundreds of Texas schools have adopted a Bible-infused curriculum for English classes. The lessons feature extensive content about Christianity, a New York Times analysis found.

• A Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to firebombing Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence. The charges he admitted include attempted murder: He faces 25 to 50 years in prison.

• California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, vetoed a bill that sought to ban so-called forever chemicals in nonstick cookware. He said it could have raised prices.

D’ANGELO, 1974-2025

The R&B star D’Angelo died yesterday at 51. His family said the cause was cancer. D’Angelo found fame in the 1990s and early 2000s with an innovative and sensuous take on the genre, but he spent much of the rest of his career removed from the public eye.

Jon Pareles, a pop music correspondent, writes:

He could be a one-man studio band in the mold of Prince and Stevie Wonder, overdubbing nearly all the instruments. He had a silken falsetto to rival Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Curtis Mayfield and Al Green. He could also multitrack himself to simulate the collective yowl and cackle of Funkadelic or Sly & the Family Stone. He had voices to convey richly seductive physical pleasures, unwavering devotion and gritty political resistance.

Americans were searching online for news about D’Angelo. For a sampling of his extraordinary musical scope, Jon put together a list of D’Angelo’s 14 essential songs. We also have an account of how he made his most acclaimed album, “Voodoo.”

THE MORNING QUIZ

This question comes from a recent edition of the newsletter. Click an answer to see if you’re right. (The link will be free.)

In 2021, the “Free Britney” movement helped get Britney Spears released from a conservatorship that had overseen her life and finances for over a decade. Now, the father of her children, Kevin Federline, is arguing that those fans should be concerned about Spears’s well-being in the wake of her emancipation.

In a memoir scheduled to publish next week, Federline, 47, recounts how his sons returned from Spears’s house in recent years and told him they woke up to her watching them sleep with a knife in her hand. “It’s become impossible to pretend everything’s OK,” he writes in the memoir, adding: “My biggest fear is that our sons will be left holding the pieces.”

A spokesman for Spears declined to comment. Spears has said that the custody battle with Federline was traumatizing and that he had “tried to convince everyone that I was completely out of control.”

More on culture

• Netflix is stepping into the world of podcasts: Starting next year, it will stream shows from Spotify about sports, culture, entertainment and true crime.

• Matcha, the green powder once mostly confined to formal tea ceremonies, is now everywhere — and counterfeiters are taking advantage. Can it survive its own popularity?

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