Government Shutdown Prep, Student Loan Repayments Start, NYC Floods

he came in with the biggest grin on his face, and he's like jumping up and down, you know, he acts a little cool now,

but he was so excited.

Will they meet the deadline?

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And it's unclear the speaker can get the votes to pass anything.

Deidre, thanks for being with us.

But does it look like Congress can really avoid a shutdown or even wants to?

You know, both chambers are still on very different tracks.

Never say never.

But practically speaking, there's no bipartisan path to avert a shutdown.

The question right now is how long is it going to last?

House Republicans tried, as you noted, and failed to pass their own stopgap bill.

That was directly tailored to get support from hardline Republicans.

But 21 House Republicans defied Speaker McCarthy.

Today, the Senate has this procedural vote to advance their bipartisan bill that funds the government through mid-November.

Also includes $5 billion for disaster aid and $6 billion for Ukraine.

But McCarthy has rejected that.

So right now he's trying to get House Republicans to agree to pass some type of short-term bill later today,

potentially one that would keep agencies funded for several weeks.

Many Republican lawmakers, even beyond the 21 hardliners who opposed the bill yesterday, still have issues with other ideas.

Arkansas Republican Steve Womack said last night if they can't pass their own bill,

House Republicans may ultimately have to accept what the Senate does.

You know, there's college football games on later today.

And Womack used an analogy that shows that House Republicans just aren't playing as a team.

This is what we're supposed to do as a governing majority.

And it's kind of hard to lead when you've got a significant number of people that are on the wrong snap count when you call them to play.

Tedra, is the president getting personally involved in the talks?

But White House Budget Director Shalonda Young made it clear the negotiation that set the spending levels for the government already happened.

The Speaker agreed to those levels in the debt deal that passed Congress earlier this summer.

The reason we're in this situation right now is that McCarthy walked away from that deal

and gave in to conservatives who are demanding steeper cuts.

Young says this is on House Republicans.

But on Monday, millions of federal workers are going to be furloughed and won't be getting paid.

National parks and Smithsonian museums in Washington are going to close.

One program that provides nutritional assistance for roughly 7 million pregnant postpartum women, infants and children is expected to run out of money in a matter of days.

Active duty service members in the military will report to work but won't get a paycheck.

And other workers at the Border Security Agency and TSA for the same.

And hanging over his head is this threat from the far right to oust him if he ever cuts a deal with Democrats.

Right now, he's sticking with a plan that's going to help him keep his job over something that would avoid a shutdown.

And the government, including the Department of Education, is on its way to a shutdown.

Thank you for joining us.

What might that mean for borrowers who may be wondering, would a shutdown mean I don't have to pay my loans right now?

I put that very question.

I'm sorry I don't have better news for them.

I actually wanted to know the answer, too.

I put that question yesterday to U.S. Undersecretary of Education James Quall.

And he told me Congress mandated this return to repayment as part of the budget deal they struck over the summer.

So, even if House Republicans force a shutdown, the Ed Department is legally required to resume collecting on student loans now.

The White House press secretary told reporters earlier this week, in the event of a shutdown, key activities in the loan program would continue for a couple of weeks.

And that's when things get a little dicey.

If it lasts longer than that, she said, it could substantially disrupt the return to repayment effort.

The way I think about this, Aisha, is the disruption won't be like an on-off switch on a light.

It'll be more like a dimmer.

You know, payments will still be due.

Interest will keep accruing.

It's really stuff like customer service for borrowers that's likely to take a hit.

And we have to remember the context here.

The Education Department was already in a budget crunch before this.

So, it does not have a lot of money sitting around in reserve to keep everything going.

Has that customer service gotten any better?

This past Tuesday, for example, according to federal data I was just looking at, one loan servicer had borrowers waiting on the phone an average of just over an hour.

Another servicer averaged an hour and a half.

And for both servicers, it should come as no surprise that more than half of borrowers who called hung up before they got through.

Now, in the servicer's defense, everyone I talked to six months ago, even inside the Ed Department, said this would be messy.

The servicers are trying to hire more people even as their budgets have been cut.

And most importantly, Aisha, this transition is bigger than anything they've ever had to do before.

That said, obviously that's cold comfort for borrowers who have been setting social media on fire with stories of how long they've had to wait on hold.

On Friday, attorneys general from 18 states plus Washington, D.C. sent a long letter to President Biden saying, quote,

they wanted to express serious concerns about the challenges of this process and impending harm to federal loan borrowers in their states.

And, you know, it's pretty clear unless lawmakers take action, a shutdown would make those challenges much, much worse.

Like, what do they need to know?

they should go to the Ed Department's website, studentaid.gov, log in, and just see what they can see.

They can take care of a lot of stuff right there.

Update their contact information.

They can see who their servicer is.

Lots of borrowers have a new servicer.

They should also update their contact information at their servicer's website.

One more really important bit of advice, though, for new borrowers who have never before chosen a repayment plan,

they need to do that because if they don't choose a repayment plan, the system is going to choose one for them.

It's going to put them into what is arguably the toughest plan with the highest monthly payments.

Bahar, thanks so much for being with us.

But New Yorkers were really caught off guard yesterday.

You know, no one expected when they left the house in the morning that parts of the city would see two to three feet of standing water.

There were kids stuck at school. Almost every train line was down or limited by midday yesterday.

You know, commuters were stuck inside trains or in the subway stations for two to three hours.

My colleague caught up with Marquis Hicks.

He was stranded in a Brooklyn subway station just trying to pick up his paycheck from work.

The mayor sent a news release via email late that night asking people to use public transportation.

But really, the severity of the situation wasn't clear.

And it wasn't until noon yesterday that Mayor Eric Adams made his first public appearance, issuing a state of emergency and asking New Yorkers to shelter in place.

But obviously, you know, this was hours after people had already gone to work, to school.

A terminal at LaGuardia Airport was shut down.

So he received a lot of criticism. And as he's been in the past, he became defensive.

By the end of the day yesterday, he went on several local news outlets saying, you know, if people were caught off guard, they'd had to have been living under a rock.

But by the end of the day, 150 schools had actually flooded.

There were toilets overflowing, cafeterias overflowing.

And in at least one school, students were evacuated and moved to another school several blocks away.

By the afternoon, parents were really panicking about how to pick up their kids.

My colleague caught up with Johanna Sauer, who was coordinating pickup for the kids with other parents in a WhatsApp group.

But the main issue yesterday was that the city's drainage system can only take one point seven five inches of rain per hour.

We got up to two and a half inches an hour yesterday.

So transit workers were pumping thousands of gallons of water out of the subway tunnels.

The city also is housing thousands of migrants in temporary shelters here, sometimes tents.

So some of them had to leave facilities yesterday.

But do we have an idea of, for example, how many basements were flooded?

They also made around 15 rescues from cars flooded around the city.

But we don't have an idea yet of the extent of basements that were flooded.

I'm Scott Simon.

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