Republicans are barreling toward the upcoming Obamacare enrollment period without a unified plan to address the sticker shock that millions of Americans are likely to experience due to the expiration of key federal subsidies.

The lack of direction comes from the top, with President Donald Trump not providing clear guidance to his party on how he wants to deal with the expiring subsidies that could result in dramatic out-of-pocket price hikes for enrollees.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.) said he spoke to the president on the phone about a week ago to talk about a yearlong extension of the enhanced subsidies. He said Trump asked him: “Can’t we do something better?” But Van Drew said he replied, “Mr. President, we don’t have the time.”

Trump’s lack of urgency in extending the subsidies and his interest in a major health care overhaul — as he has now mentioned in a private meeting with Democratic leaders as well as with Republicans — is complicating GOP leaders’ efforts to address expiring health insurance subsidies that affect 20 million Americans without fully repealing Obamacare, according to four Republicans granted anonymity to disclose private deliberations. Hill Republicans will need Trump’s sign off to do anything with the Affordable Care Act subsidies, and they’re starting to run short on time.

On Nov. 1, most consumers can start shopping for next year’s ACA plans. But without legislation to extend the enhanced subsidies beyond this calendar year, those plans will appear on enrollment websites as substantially more expensive than this year’s out-of-pocket costs.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt was noncommittal Thursday about what the president would do to address the potential spike and demanded Democrats first vote to reopen the government.

“I’ll just point out the irony in Democrats holding the government and the American public hostage over a health care system that they created,” Leavitt said. “Republicans have always said it’s a broken system, yes, but [Democrats] caused it, and now they want to shut down the government to fix it.”

Hers is a view shared by some in the president’s orbit. Many don’t believe Trump needs to embark on a rescue mission to save former President Barack Obama’s health law.

“I don’t think the president cares to save Obama’s legacy legislation that has proved to be a failure and an ongoing headache for everyone involved,” said a person familiar with the administration’s thinking, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues. “I do see a scenario where the president sees a pathway for a health care policy bill that could receive some bipartisan support.”

The expiration is largely not a swing state issue, but more of an issue in lower-income, deep-red districts where Trump has a loyal base of supporters, the person said.

“This isn’t a [Rep.] Mike Lawler problem, funny enough, it’s a [Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene issue. They have room to weather the storm,” the person said, adding a note of caution: “But if constituents are being hurt because they are less fortunate on health care, there needs to be an answer to that.”

Republicans in the White House and Capitol Hill have no plans to change that strategy, confident that Democrats will blink and face blame for the funding lapse. Republicans also feel they’re making headway with the message that Obamacare is in need of rescue, because, as they argue, it’s grown too expensive and is failing Americans.

A person close to the White House, granted anonymity to describe administration officials’ thinking, said the GOP message will be focused on exposing Obamacare’s expense — and placing blame on Democrats for sunsetting the subsidies in a 2022 law they passed on party lines, the Inflation Reduction Act.

“Democrats have to be really careful, because they’re going to get exposed on one, how expensive Obamacare is,” the person said. “And two, they were the ones that put that in the Inflation Reduction Act, where the subsidies sunset.”

GOP leaders are trying to keep in pace with the White House and ensure Trump doesn’t give in to Democrats’ demands to negotiate a way out of the shutdown. The president this week, after a call with Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson, reinforced their message that he would meet with Democratic leaders but only after they reopen the government.

Still, Republican leaders and White House officials are ramping up behind-the-scenes talks on a potential subsidies extension with conservative reforms paired with other health care policies, which would need bipartisan support to pass in Congress.

While congressional Republicans aren’t feeling pressure from Trump, some argue they also aren’t feeling pressure from constituents at home yet about the expiring subsidies.

“Right now my sense is that the vast majority of Republicans feel very little political pressure on the enhanced subsidy issue,” said a senior GOP staffer who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Our phones are mostly quiet, which is a clear sign Democrats’ claims aren’t convincing.”

But a swath of Republicans are getting an earful from constituents — and are getting antsy about an ACA extension deal, albeit with new restrictions on the subsidies.

“If it’s not too late, it’s damn close,” Van Drew said about finding a solution without disruptions during ACA open enrollment, which begins Nov. 1. Van Drew said that he argued to the president to extend the tax credits for a year to buy time for a better solution.

“For one year, let’s really work hard on this and come up with something innovative,” he said. The president told him he understood and that he would look into it, Van Drew said.

Some Republicans are also privately discussing the need for Congress, or Trump, to act to extend the window for open enrollment — especially to protect some of their most vulnerable Republicans up for reelection.

Johnson didn’t rule out that possibility in a brief interview Wednesday, simply saying he would not forecast any outcome at this point.

He indicated, though, it was on Republicans’ radar.

“If we can get the government reopened, we have lots of thoughtful discussion to have on that and other issues,” Johnson added.

Other Republicans who are in touch with health insurance companies suggest insurers could recalibrate premiums based on a deal that happens after Nov. 1.

“I don’t think it’s too late. I mean, I think the beautiful thing about modern technology is you can make adjustments,” Rep. Mike Haridopolos (R-Fla.) told reporters this week. “And these insurance companies are very sophisticated, and they’ll be able to run these numbers off the bill very quickly.”

Missed paychecks, canceled infrastructure projects and mass firings haven’t yet convinced congressional Democrats to change their government shutdown stance. But they are now facing down another pressure point threatening a program they’ve long championed benefiting millions of Americans.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps feed more than 40 million people, will start to run out of funds Nov. 1, President Donald Trump’s USDA is warning. At least 25 states plan to cut off benefits starting on that date — including California, the overwhelmingly Democratic state with 4.5 million SNAP recipients.

The food-aid cliff has largely flown under the radar as Democrats focus on another Nov. 1 development: the launch of open enrollment for Affordable Care Act insurance plans in most states. They believe massive premium hikes prompted by the expiration of key federal subsidies will compel Republicans to relent and negotiate an extension at that time.

So far, despite the possible food assistance fallout in just over a week, top Democrats are pushing ahead and refusing to shore up the votes to reopen the government.

Asked Tuesday if the cliff would change his party’s calculus, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it would not: “It should change Republicans’ calculus, that they should sit down and negotiate — negotiate a way to address this crisis.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), asked if it was worth pushing the shutdown beyond Nov. 1 given the risk of food aid lapsing, replied, “Worth it to whom? To people who will lose their health care or to people who will lose their food?”

“We’re people who want Americans to have health care and food,” she added. “The Republicans, evidently, don’t care whether they have either.”

Trump and members of his administration have acted selectively to ease shutdown impacts on agencies and programs they perceive as benefiting their political allies — shifting funds to pay active duty troops, for instance, while letting civilian workers go unpaid.

That approach appears to be playing out at USDA, where there is no firm indication the Trump administration will act to patch the impending SNAP lapse. A separate initiative delivering baby formula and other nutrition aid under the Women, Infants and Children program is also at risk next month after the White House moved to use some tariff revenue as a backfill early in the shutdown.

At the same time, the administration is planning to partially reopen key farm loans and shuttered local USDA offices beginning Thursday — addressing a key GOP shutdown pain point that Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other farm state Republican lawmakers have pressed the White House on since the shutdown started four weeks ago.

For now, Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers are eager to blame Democrats for risking hunger among millions of low-income Americans right before the holiday season.

“The shutdown is Democrat performance art — the audience starves while the elitist critics applaud,” said one White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) added, “What’s it gonna take … for the Democrats to say, ‘Gee, huh, maybe — maybe people should be able to eat.”

But it’s not just blue states like California and New York that will suffer. Red states are also at high risk, as well as large pockets of rural America that voted for Trump. For instance, Louisiana — home to Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise — has one of the highest SNAP participation rates in the country, and Scalise noted Wednesday more than 800,000 Louisianans rely on the program.

White House officials are keenly aware of the consequences for their own voters, even as they continue to needle Democrats on the topic. Several Republican governors have already reached out to the administration to understand what the consequences will be.

The Trump administration has options, which officials are weighing, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss the private deliberations: Democrats want USDA to deploy a SNAP contingency fund that currently holds about $5 billion to offset the roughly $9 billion in funding needed to cover costs for November. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a New Mexico Democrat, is among senators also pushing the administration to use tariff revenue as they’ve done with WIC.

“I would argue that the same authorizations exist for [SNAP] as well,” Luján said.

But some Trump officials say finding a SNAP patch won’t be so simple. Tapping the contingency fund wouldn’t leave money for other emergencies that are known to pop up with the program, and if the full $9 billion can’t be covered, it could take weeks to mete out a smaller percentage of money to each state’s program — meaning families would miss their Nov. 1 food benefits anyway. Meanwhile, the legality of using tariff revenue for SNAP is unclear and would also pull money from child nutrition programs — which the Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to replenish.

Republicans privately believe the food aid cliff could motivate some more moderate Democratic senators to relent and vote for a GOP-led stopgap bill that would reopen the government. With five additional votes needed to pass that measure, they are eyeing Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Kristen Gillibrand of New York and Gary Peters of Michigan, among others.

Peters, who is retiring, said in an interview he has “a lot of concerns” about the possible loss of food aid but that it was up to Republicans to come to the table.

“It’s just so curious that Republicans are not willing to come together on health care — when the ACA tax credits go away, it hits primarily Republican congressional districts and Republican states,” Peters said. “So Republicans don’t care about their own people.”

That rhetoric was echoed by a host of Democrats this week, including California Sen. Alex Padilla, who said “the best way to address that is for Republicans to come to the table, work with Democrats to reopen the government and address the spike in health care costs.”

Others are frustrated that Republicans appear to be using food aid as leverage after moving to cut more than $200 billion in spending from the SNAP program as part of their sweeping domestic policy bill passed this summer along party lines.

“They’re the ones that made the cuts to SNAP to begin with, and they should be funding SNAP,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee. “So it’s very rich if they’re saying they’re going to cut SNAP when they made all the cuts to begin with.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) estimated 361,000 people in his district — nearly half his constituency — could be affected by the SNAP cliff. But he also noted the high number of families who relied on ACA health insurance subsidies and said he did not see a reason for Democrats to relent right now — pointing to some perceived cracks on the GOP side, such as Thune’s offer to Senate Democrats of a vote to extend the Obamacare tax credits.

Asked how many days Democrats could hold out, Cuellar referenced the record-long shutdown during Trump’s first term. ”Last time,” he said, “we did 35.”

Grace Yarrow contributed to this report.

Senate Republicans spent months quietly raising the alarm with the White House about Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel before he withdrew from consideration this week.

Members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which was vetting President Donald Trump’s pick, were initially on edge this summer about his comments on social media and perceived lack of qualifications, according to interviews with GOP members of the panel.

Even close Trump allies, including Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, said they dug into his background and were uneasy with what they found. Ingrassia professed to have little memory of inflammatory social media posts and writings when he sat for a meeting with bipartisan committee staff in July, according to three Democratic aides who were present and granted anonymity to discuss the conversation.

Senators reached a breaking point this week after POLITICO reported on texts that showed Ingrassia making racist and antisemitic remarks to fellow Republicans, as he was set to testify before the Senate Homeland committee on Thursday. Ingrassia announced Tuesday evening that he was withdrawing, citing a lack of GOP votes for his confirmation.

“It’s been ongoing for a while,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in an interview Wednesday. “The members on the committee who have met with him and some of the stuff they had come up with during the vetting process, I think, created some — he had challenges.”

The derailment of Ingrassia’s nomination shows that even some of Trump’s most loyal defenders have limits when it comes to rubber-stamping his administration personnel. In the case of Ingrassia, Republican senators succeeded in blocking the nominee through limited public statements and months of privately putting the White House on notice.

The GOP pushback accelerated in July when he was first scheduled to testify before Senate Homeland Security — a hearing that was ultimately delayed.

In a July 21 meeting with Senate staffers, Ingrassia was asked about a December 2023 social media post where he said “exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage,” according to the three aides in the room. Ingrassia responded by pointing to Leonardo da Vinci as an example of a great artist but then trailed off, the aides said.

“His most typical response was that he’s posted so many things he couldn’t recall,” said one of the aides.

Just before he was set to testify on July 24, his appearance was postponed.

Ingrassia and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Sen. Rand Paul, the chair of Senate Homeland Security, declined to comment.

As Senate staff continued to vet Ingrassia, Republican offices backchanneled with the White House about the nominee’s dimming chances of confirmation.

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican on Senate Homeland Security, said in an interview this week his office privately signaled to the White House “at a staff level” that he would not support Ingrassia’s confirmation.

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican on the panel, said in an interview he had “rolling conversations” with the White House about “what do I think about the nomination.” Hawley said that from the beginning his concerns were focused on a perceived lack of qualifications to lead the office, which investigates federal employee whistleblower complaints and discrimination claims. Ingrassia, a conservative lawyer and activist, would have been two decades younger and less experienced than recent leaders at the Office of Special Counsel.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Scott, whose home state of Florida has a large Jewish population, said in an interview this week that digging from Hill staff had turned up a litany of remarks that troubled him.

“We just reviewed things he had said in the past,” Scott said. “It was just a lot of antisemitic tropes.”

Scrutiny of the nomination ramped up earlier this month, after POLITICO reported that Ingrassia, who has been serving as White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, was investigated for harassment involving a lower-ranking colleague. The colleague filed a complaint against him before retracting it. Ingrassia’s attorney denied the allegations.

On Monday, POLITICO reported on a text chain that showed Ingrassia making a number of offensive remarks, including that he had a “Nazi streak” and that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday “should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs.” A lawyer for Ingrassia did not confirm the authenticity of the texts and said they “could be manipulated or are being provided with material context omitted.”

Hours before Ingrassia withdrew from consideration Tuesday, Paul in a POLITICO interview vented about Trump’s handling of the nomination and said Republicans should “man up” and bring their concerns about Ingrassia to the president.

“I’m waiting to see a little courage,” Paul said.

But Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), another member of the Homeland Security panel, denied that lawmakers had been reluctant to voice their concerns.

“Several of us … had direct conversations with the White House for a couple of months, actually,” he said.