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Marjorie Taylor Greene breaks with GOP on Obamacare

admin - Latest News - October 7, 2025
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Marjorie Taylor Greene breaks with GOP on Obamacare



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Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleOct. 7, 2025, 3:21 PM EDTBy Maya Rosenberg and Jay BlackmanWASHINGTON — Federal funding for air travel in rural areas will run out Sunday if the government shutdown continues, threatening to isolate remote communities across the country.The Essential Air Service (EAS), established in 1978, provides funds to airline carriers to operate out of rural airports for routes that would otherwise be unprofitable. The program is a lifeline for remote communities because it connects them to cities with larger airports, ensuring access to medical treatments, work opportunities and commercial goods that would otherwise be a lengthy travel away. “Money runs out this Sunday. So there’s many small communities across the country that will now no longer have the resources to make sure they have air service in their community,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a press conference Monday. “Every state across the country will be impacted by the inability to provide the subsidies to airlines to service these communities.”The EAS gives money to regional air carriers in 177 communities across all 50 states, as well as Puerto Rico, according to DOT. The Regional Airline Association, an advocacy group for regional airlines that receive EAS funds, said that “commercial air service at EAS airports had an economic impact of $2.3 billion and supported more than 17,000 U.S. jobs” before the pandemic. FAA announces possible staffing issues potentially caused by government shutdown 02:10“This program is an essential economic lifeline for over 500 rural communities who are often hit the hardest whenever there is disruption in the National Airspace System,” the association said in a statement. “[We] continue to urge Congress to come together and reopen the government for the good of the American public. The current government shutdown only adds stressors to an air transportation system that is already plagued with delays, disruptions, and cancellations.”As the shutdown continues with no end in sight, the Federal Aviation Administration is already confronting staffing shortages and slight increases in sick calls as air traffic controllers work without pay. NBC News reported Monday that no air traffic controllers were expected at Hollywood Burbank Airport in the Los Angeles area for hours, and that the main airports in New Jersey and Denver also experienced staffing issues.We’d like to hear from you about how you’re experiencing the government shutdown, whether you’re a federal employee who can’t work right now or someone who is feeling the effects of shuttered services in your everyday life. Please contact us at tips@nbcuni.com or reach out to us here.Congress appropriated nearly $500 million to the EAS in 2024; The expenditure is typically bipartisan, serving rural communities in states across the country. However, earlier this year, President Donald Trump looked to slash the program’s budget by $308 million in his discretionary budget. He had recommended eliminating the program in its entirety in a budget blueprint during his first term. The federal funding is particularly important for Alaska, where the state’s hundreds of islands and vast swaths of tundra make traveling by air a necessity. According to an October 2024 Transportation Department report, Alaska received more than $41 million in EAS subsidies. Duffy told reporters that the “number one user” of rural airspace is Alaska, and that the state “will be impacted” if funding runs out. “This is almost breathtaking, when you think about the implications for these communities, because there is no road for any of these places,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told NBC News on Monday. “This is a big stressor right now.”Murkowski said that Alaska Airlines would maintain service at a handful of airports regardless of EAS funding but that she was worried for smaller carriers. She added that she was trying to get in touch with Duffy. Alaska Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Meanwhile, Murkowski’s fellow Alaska senator, Republican Dan Sullivan, said he was already in talks with the transportation secretary about the issue. “We’re working through it to make it have as little impact as possible. These are EAS subsidies, but this just goes to the whole damn Schumer shutdown,” Sullivan said, referring to the GOP nickname for the shutdown, which Republicans say was caused by Democrats. “But right now, what I’m trying to do is work with the secretary of transportation, who I was exchanging text messages and voice messages with, to try and limit that kind of damage.”Ryan Huotari, the manager of the Sidney-Richland Airport in Sidney, Montana, said the airport and his community depend on EAS funding.“If the EAS didn’t exist, I don’t think it would be able to function,” Huotari said of the airport. “Our winters out here are 20-below, they’re pretty treacherous. It’s pretty scary driving from here to Billings. I’d rather be in an airplane than a car.” Sidney is only an hour flight away from Billings, Montana’s largest city, but it’s about a four-hour drive each way. Huotari says that the airport is crucial for people who can’t make the eight-hour round trip, like the elderly who need medical care in Billings, or the oil workers who commute between the two areas. Huotari, who helmed the airport during the last shutdown in 2018, said he’s used to the EAS being on the budgetary chopping block but, with no solution in Congress in sight, this time he’s worried.“My biggest concern is getting people paid. There are a lot of federal grants out there that I’ve got right now,” he said. “There’s a lot of money hanging out there, like in the millions.”Maya RosenbergMaya Rosenberg is a Desk Assistant based in Washington, D.C.Jay BlackmanJay Blackman is an NBC News producer covering such areas as transportation, space, medical and consumer issues.Brennan Leach and Frank Thorp V contributed.
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Oct. 2, 2025, 12:48 PM EDTBy Shannon PettypieceJenna Norton drove out of the parking lot of the National Institutes of Health office in Maryland on Wednesday morning with a lump in her throat, leaving behind her research on kidney disease patients and not knowing when she’d see her colleagues or a paycheck again.“I feel really sad,” said Norton, who is among the roughly 750,000 federal employees furloughed this week as part of a government shutdown. “It was weird walking out the door and saying goodbye to everyone and not knowing when I’ll see them again.” We’d like to hear from you about how you’re experiencing the government shutdown, whether you’re a federal employee who can’t work right now or someone who is feeling the effects of shuttered services in your everyday life. Please contact us at tips@nbcuni.com or reach out to us here.Those furloughed employees won’t be paid until Congress passes legislation to fund the government, with neither side showing signs of budging as the shutdown entered its second day. While most of the furloughed employees won’t be allowed to work during the shutdown, others who are deemed essential — such as members of the military and airport security screeners — will have to continue working without pay. Federal workers typically receive back pay once the government reopens, but that requires congressional approval.On top of the uncertainty around when workers will see a paycheck again, the Trump administration has threatened to use the shutdown as a pretext to carry out more mass firings. “They’re really scared,” said Lauren Leib, a land law examiner at the Bureau of Land Management in New Mexico and president of the National Treasury Employees Union Local 340. “We’ve got people who are the primary income earners with very young children, and they’re going to be going without a paycheck and they don’t know what this is going to mean for them going forward.” That’s left federal workers, already drained and demoralized by months of layoffs and funding cuts, scrambling to figure out how to cope with the possibility of weeks without pay and a new round of layoffs, according to nearly two dozen federal workers who reached out to NBC News to share how the shutdown was impacting them.One State Department employee in his 20s said he was planning to deliver food for DoorDash and drive for Uber to pay his bills. The wife of a Department of Homeland Security worker in Ohio said she had to borrow $600 from a colleague to cover her co-pay on a set of leg braces she needed to pick up this week for her disabled child. “We run the risk, if this goes on longer than a week or two, of not being able to pay our mortgage and the possibility of losing our house,” she said, adding that her bank rejected her request for a deferment on her $1,700 a month mortgage. She said her oldest daughter has already asked if the shutdown will mean they will lose their home and have to move in with relatives and change schools. “Everybody thinks that federal workers get paid this really good money. But what my husband does, people who are in the military, who work for TSA, they struggle just like everybody else,” she said. “They are going to work without being paid, they’re wondering, without this paycheck, how am I going to pay this bill, where’s my next meal going to come from?”Like nearly all federal employees whom NBC News spoke with, she asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, which has publicly fired federal workers it has deemed as being against its agenda.“I was never afraid to speak my mind before, I never felt afraid to talk. Now, people are afraid,” an Arizona TSA worker said, explaining her concerns over speaking publicly about how the shutdown is impacting her. The TSA worker, who will have to continue working without pay during the shutdown, said she has enough in savings to get by for two to three weeks because she’d borrowed some extra money over the summer while refinancing her home in anticipation of a shutdown. But if the shutdown goes beyond a few weeks, she’s worried about being able to even afford the $88 a week at the gas pump she needs to get to work. “I’m working as a civil servant for the citizens of America to make their traveling safe,” she said. “Do you want me worrying about your safety or do you want me worrying about how am I going to feed my kid? How am I going to be able to afford her medication? How are we going to survive? Am I going to lose my house?”Still, the TSA employee and several others with whom NBC News spoke said they were in support of the shutdown despite the near-term hardship, if it meant pushing back against cuts the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress have been making to health insurance programs and other federal services. “This is not something that any federal worker wants, but at the same time, enough is enough,” said M.T. Snyder, who works for the National Labor Relations Board, a federal agency that ensures employers follow laws protecting workers’ rights to organize. “We really need to stand up for our services that we provide and the agencies that enforce laws because, since Trump has been in office, his main goal has been destroying these agencies.”The Trump administration has said the federal workforce would shrink by around 300,000 workers this year to a total of 2.1 million people as a result of voluntary resignations and firings led by the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative started in the early days of the Trump administration by billionaire Elon Musk. At the NIH, Norton said she feels like the government has already been slowly shutting down since the Trump administration began sweeping funding cuts and new barriers were put in place limiting medical research, including the work she does trying to develop real-world interventions to reduce health disparities among kidney disease patients. Despite the cutbacks she will have to make without her paycheck, she said she is glad to see Democrats in Congress doing something to stand up to the attacks by the Trump administration on federal workers and the services they provide. Democratic leaders in Congress have said they want to see an extension of Obamacare subsidies that expire at the end of the year included in a bill to keep the government open, something Republicans have refused to agree to. People who get health insurance through Obamacare will begin getting notices in the coming days warning that their premiums will soon go up unless Congress extends the funds.“I am thinking about the suffering that always happens in a shutdown, the harm that happens when people don’t get the services that they need, and as a federal worker, I won’t be paid during the shutdown,” Norton said. “But I’m also looking at this bigger picture and continuing the status quo just seems so much worse. So I think somebody in Congress needs to do something to rein in the lawlessness and this just seems to be one of the few opportunities they have for doing that.”Shannon PettypieceShannon Pettypiece is senior policy reporter for NBC News.
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