What the Shutdown Is Really About

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There’s a serious high-stakes policy fight at the heart of this. The Democrats didn’t pick a fight over authoritarianism or tariffs or masked immigration agents in the streets. They picked one over health care. And the issue here is very real. Huge health insurance subsidies passed under President Joe Biden are set to expire at the end of this year, threatening to make health care premiums skyrocket and kick millions off their insurance. Neera Tanden was one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act and has worked in Democratic policymaking for decades. She is the president of the Center for American Progress and was a director of Biden’s Domestic Policy Council. I asked her on the show to lay out the policy stakes of the shutdown and what a deal might look like. Mentioned: KFF Health Tracking Poll The Time Tax by Annie Lowrey One Big Beautiful Bill Act Book Recommendations: Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes End Times by Peter Turchin Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The So we are officially in a government shutdown.
0:35.0	Democrats and Republicans have not been able to come to agreement are nowhere near,
0:39.3	as I say this, coming to an agreement about how to fund the government. The nature of this shutdown,
0:45.0	people had lots of ideas over what, if it happened, it should be about, should Democrats demand
0:49.3	concessions on tariffs, should it be about authoritarianism? What it is about in the reality we're living in
0:55.8	is health care. The Affordable Care Act for the last few years have been supported by tax
1:01.7	credits that have made the premiums much lower and have expanded coverage under it enormously.
1:07.9	Those credits expire at the end of this year. If nothing is done to keep them from
1:12.9	expiring, there will be a huge, what's called premium shock, and millions of people will lose
1:19.0	health insurance. And so I wanted to have an episode diving into the actual policy debates and
1:24.2	stakes of this shutdown, the spending fights that led to it, the unusual ways in which
1:29.5	Republicans have been breaking Democratic trust that helps set the stage for it, the Affordable
1:34.8	Care Act and Medicaid debates that are now at the center of it, and then the way the Trump administration
1:39.9	is trying to bring very particular forms of pressure to bear on the Democrats, trying to break them, make them capitulate.
1:48.0	But they're doing so in ways it might actually be uniting them. The person I want to talk about all this with is near a Tandon.
1:54.0	Tandon is the president of the Center for American Progress, one of the largest progressive think tanks.
1:59.2	She worked in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations.
2:03.6	Under Obama, she was central in helping to craft and pass the Affordable Care Act.
2:08.0	Under Joe Biden, she was a director of the domestic policy council.
2:11.6	So she knows all the policy here inside and out.
2:15.3	As always, my email, EzraK show at nyatimes.com.
	...

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