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Good morning, everyone. It's playbook co-author Eugene Daniels. It is Tuesday, December 10th. Here is what's driving the day. First, the government shutdown deadline is drawing closer. Lawmakers have only nine working days left to figure out government funding before the December 20th deadline.

And House Speaker Mike Johnson will almost certainly need Democratic votes to pass it.

And he's in luck because most Republicans and Democrats don't want a shutdown.

And really, Democrats only have one main demand for the stop Gap spending bill, a robust supplemental package to address disaster aid, though they also want to ensure that there are no cuts or partisan writers included.

One thing to watch out for our colleague Daniela Diaz reports that Republican appropriators have hinted that the supplemental funding total could be much

less than the nearly $100 billion that the White House requested in disaster aid.

When asked for details on where negotiators stood on Monday, appropriators on both sides of the aisle

said they weren't willing to share the top line number, a signal for some of potential trouble ahead.

And on the other side of the hill, Tulsi Gabbard, President-elect Trump's pick for Director of National Intelligence,

is ramping up her meetings with Republican senators.

Yesterday, she started by wooing GOP defense hawks meeting with senators, Jenny Ernst, Mike Rounds, James Langford, and Lindsey Graham.

And though Republicans are broadly supportive of Trump's nominees, questions do linger for Gabbard

around her 2017 visit with then Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whose brutal regime was overthrown this weekend.

You can expect the drumbeat of those questions about that trip to continue today.

Speaking of Syria, we're getting quite the look at how President Donald Trump will approach relations with foreign adversaries, and he hasn't even assumed office yet.

Here to talk to me about all of that is National Security Reporter and author of NatSek Daily.

Robbie Grammer. Good morning, Robbie. Great to be here. Quite the busy time on your beat,

so I appreciate you making the time for us. Yeah, happy to. So over the weekend, Syrian rebels

toppled the Assad regime. It raises all sorts of questions. It seems big. It feels big. And I think it is big.

You tell me if I'm wrong.

But let's start with the kind of U.S. angle of this, though.

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