Tonight on PBS News Weekend, as the government shutdown begins on new month, uncertainty for the tens of millions of low-income Americans who rely on government food assistance.

Then a new book looks at China's dazzling infrastructure and how modern China has been shaped by engineers.

And a remote island in the Indian Ocean where climate change is driving an ancient, distinctively shaped tree to the brink of extinction.

It just looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.

It has this umbrella-shaped canopy,

and if we lose these trees,

it would be devastating, not just symbolically,

but for the tens of millions of low-income Americans who rely on the government's biggest nutrition program. Two federal judges have told the Trump administration it must use available

emergency funds to provide at least partial benefits for the supplemental nutrition assistance

program or SNAP, what used to be called food stamps. This afternoon, one of the judges said

full SNAP benefit payments must be made by Monday. But even if the administration complies,

there will likely still be at least a temporary lapse in benefits. Chris Yarrow is Politico's

Food and Agriculture Policy Reporter. Grace, why is that? Why would there still be a lapse

even if the administration starts putting out this money? Absolutely. So USDA, which controls SNAP, told state agencies and state administrators of the program,

starting October 10th, they put out a memo to states, instructing them to delay preparing November benefits.

So at this point, we're weeks behind where state agencies and administrators typically are in the process of preparing those

benefits for SNAP participants and putting those benefits on EBT cards. So even if the Trump

administration complies with this court order, which is still TBD, we could be seeing days to weeks

of delays in SNAP benefits for November.

Are there states that are going to use their own money to fund this while this is going on?

Yeah.

Part of the difficult thing is that the federal government pays over $9 billion for SNAP benefits each month. So a lot of state budgets just don't have the money to make up for that.

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