SNAP funding brings urgency to government shutdown; Trump returns to U.S. after Asia trip, meeting with Xi

The Trump administration plans to pay military members tomorrow by using a mix of legislative and Defense Department funds, according to an official with the White House Office of Management and Budget.

It would be the second time the White House has been able to avoid missing a pay period for troops during the government shutdown, now in its 30th day. Service members are considered essential federal employees and are required to work during funding lapses, but essential workers typically aren’t paid during shutdowns.

That would bring the total to about $5.3 billion, which is still less than the $6.5 billion that was drawn upon to pay for troops’ paychecks earlier this month. It’s unclear why there’s a difference in the amounts, and the OMB official didn’t respond to a request for comment on that particular point.

Axios first reported on the administration’s paycheck plan for tomorrow.

Read the full story here.

The Trump administration dramatically slashed the refugee admissions cap for the new fiscal year starting this month at 7,500, the lowest on record, according to a Federal Register memo posted today.

The memo, dated Sept. 30, said the admissions numbers “shall primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa,” a white ethnic minority group that controlled South Africa during apartheid, as well as “other victims of illegal or unjust discrimination in their respective homelands.”

The admissions allocation focus on white Afrikaners expands on Trump’s commitment in an executive order this year to resettle what he described as “Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation,” even as he paused refugee admissions.

Read the full story here.

Watch highlights of Trump and first lady Melania Trump hosting the annual White House Halloween celebration for trick-or-treaters.

On the precipice of winning next week’s New York mayoral contest, Zohran Mamdani cast himself in an interview with NBC News as the city’s bulwark against Trump, even as Trump has threatened his hometown over the prospect of a Mamdani victory.

In the interview, Mamdani, a state assemblyman, laid out his strategy for handling Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in New York City and projected confidence about running the city at age 34.

Asked what scares him most about the job now that he is on the verge of leading the nation’s biggest city, Mamdani — who was once seen as a long-shot candidate — instead took aim at his chief rival, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running against him as a third-party candidate.

“I think what scares me in this moment is the prospect of Donald Trump’s puppet becoming the one who would hold it,” he said. “And that’s what we find in Andrew Cuomo, a man who knows he has a narrow path to City Hall and has taken that to mean that he should fund it and pave it with the money from Donald Trump’s billionaire donors.”

Read the full story here.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem today flatly rejected a request by Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to suspend immigration enforcement in the Chicago area until after Halloween.

Pritzker cited children’s safety and an incident Saturday in which Customs and Border Protection agents deployed tear gas in a neighborhood where kids were preparing for a Halloween parade.

Former FBI Director James Comey filed a new motion today to dismiss the case against him, claiming one of the counts seeks to punish him for responding to Sen. Ted Cruz's “fundamentally ambiguous questions with literally true answers.”

“Neither those questions nor those answers can serve as the basis for" one of the counts in the indictment, Comey’s his attorney said. "Thus, under longstanding principles of criminal law, Count One must be dismissed. If Count Two rests on the same allegedly false statements, it should be dismissed for the same reasons.”

The indictment includes two counts: making a false statement and obstruction of a congressional proceeding. The charges relate to testimony Comey gave at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 2020, when Cruz, R-Texas, asked him about testimony he gave in 2017 asserting that he did not authorize the leak of information to the media about an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Comey, who has pleaded not guilty, told Cruz that he stands by his 2017 testimony.

“Mr. Comey firmly maintains that his prior testimony was truthful," his lawyers said today. "But for purposes of the literal truth defense, the truthfulness of the prior testimony is irrelevant. Mr. Comey can truthfully 'stand by' prior testimony — even if the government were correct (and it is not) that the prior testimony was false. Accordingly, the statement that Mr. Comey 'stand[s] by' his prior testimony cannot serve as the basis for a false statement charge.”

A Maryland state senator has been indicted on federal charges including extortion related to her 2022 campaign for a state House seat, accused of conspiring to threaten the release of an explicit video of a former consultant’s affair.

State Sen. Dalya Attar, D-Baltimore, was charged in a federal indictment unsealed today that involves her brother, Joseph Attar, and Kalman Finkelstein, a Baltimore police officer who worked on her campaign. The group conspired to silence a former consultant by making public a video of her in bed with a married man, the indictment said.

Read the full story here.

More than 8,800 federal workers filed for initial jobless claims for the week ended Saturday, according to Labor Department data reviewed by NBC News. 

Since the shutdown, initial claims in the government’s Unemployment Compensation for Federal Employees program per week started around 3,300, rose to about 7,200, then 10,000, before they dropped slightly in the most recent batch of data.

However, some data for three states and the U.S. Virgin Islands was not included, so it could be an incomplete picture. 

In addition, so-called continuing claims from federal workers were more than 20,500, but that data could also be slightly incomplete. 

While the government shutdown drags on, the Labor Department has not been releasing key economic reports and data, but claims numbers are sent in from the states and released on a national basis weekly. 

On Sunday night in Queens, New York, the vibrations from thousands of cheering Zohran Mamdani supporters reverberated throughout Forest Hills Stadium, as the audience burst into the same chant as speaker after speaker took the stage: “DSA, DSA.”

Mamdani’s surge past former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in June’s Democratic primary for New York mayor didn’t just put Mamdani, 34, a state assemblyman, on the political map. It also highlighted the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA — a spotlight that’s growing brighter as Mamdani enters next week’s general election as the front-runner.