Struggling Americans need government to work

While the longest federal shutdown in history has ended, that doesn’t guarantee the government will start working again to the benefit of struggling Americans. It must.

Nationwide, the 2025 election put affordability at the top of the country’s concerns — and the shutdown confirmed that the spiraling cost of health care was central to that anxiety.

The deal Congress made to return to work is temporary. While some spending bills for the 2026 fiscal year will get approved, there could be another shutdown in less than 80 days if more compromises aren’t made. Some of the toughest fights ahead are over funding the Trump administration’s most controversial policies that are overseen by the departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, Defense and Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, the shutdown did nothing to erase the reality that the Affordable Care Act’s tax credits expire at year’s end. That leaves little time for the House of Representatives to pass their long-promised health care reform bill — the outlines of which have yet to be revealed. At the very least, Congress can find some way to send money directly to households to ease health care costs.

Too many vulnerable Americans are still on the edge, food assistance benefits are still tangled up in the bureaucracy, and the shutdown delayed funding for the Home Energy Assistance Program, one that many Long Islanders rely on to defray heating costs. Our House delegation needs to make sure both assistance programs quickly get back on track.

At least some at the White House are getting the message from the electoral outcomes last week. While President Donald Trump hasn’t yet landed on a message that resonates on affordability, he seems to have realized that calling Americans’ economic anxiety “fake” didn’t fly. Whether his pronouncements are about probing meat packing processors to reduce the cost of hamburger meat, sending $2,000 tariff rebate checks or creating 50-year mortgages to put buying a home in reach, the thought process appears to be heading in the right direction.

The risk here is that when Congress finally does get down to work, both parties will be pulled further apart and polarized by their extremes. But the most effective governing will evolve from finding the center. Voters looking for an ease to inflation and the tools to make their lives better are very impatient and want results now, not posturing for the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential race.

But first Congress will have to overcome one more divisive issue: whether to make public the Justice Department files about notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. On Wednesday, a House committee released emails suggesting that Trump knows more about Epstein’s exploits. Trump responded by again calling it a “hoax” and adding “only a very bad or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap” of voting to release the full files. That vote is expected in December.

Your government back at work.