(Zero Hedge)—With the government shutdown firmly in its fourth week and SNAP beneficiaries threatening cannibalism (see below), Senate Republicans and Democrats are working behind the scenes on a proposal to reopen the government next week – with centrist Democrats arguing behind the scenes that their party has successfully highlighted soaring healthcare costs.
Democrats say the higher costs are now set in stone due to Republicans’ refusal to negotiate a deal to extend Biden-era subsidies that are set to expire – in yet another example of anything that’s supposed to be ‘temporary’ becoming a new goalpost (*cough gerrymandering cough*).
“My assessment is that we’ve won anything that we can possibly win and the costs of continuing the shutdown are going to be felt by people who are going to food banks and federal employees,” one Democratic senator told The Hill, who argued that any political benefit to extending the shutdown is about to be outweighed by the chaos that’s about to be unleashed if SNAP benefits end for 42 million Americans.
Some Democratic senators are privately speculating that if their party does well in the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia scheduled for Tuesday, they can declare a political victory and begin to finalize the endgame for reopening government.
Virginia, which will be a Senate battleground in 2026, is home to approximately 140,000 federal employees.
And of course, the largest federal employee union, the American Federation of Government Employees – which represents 820,000 federal and DC government workers – sided with the Republican plan to pass a clean (pork-free) resolution to kick the can and reopen the government – with union president Everett Kelley saying in a Monday statement that “both parties have made their point,” and that it’s time to “end this shutdown today.”
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (D-SD) told reporters that moderate Democrats are looking for an “off-ramp” for the shutdown, and he’s willing to talk about extending the ACA subsidies after the government has reopened – and has even offered them a vote on their own proposal to extend the tax credits beyond December.
That said, he won’t negotiate specific ACA concessions with Democrats while the government remains closed.
“It’s just a question of whether or not they are at some point willing to take ‘yes’ for an answer,” Thune said of moderate Democrats – however he’s only going to offer them existing Republican proposals – such as getting the appropriations back on track, voting on the expiring subsidies, and committing to further the discussion on healthcare once the federal government is back up and running.
“The stakes are getting higher, which we knew they would. As the shutdown drags on, it becomes more painful for more people,” said Thune.
“What I’ve told them all along is as soon as they’re ready to open up the government that we will ensure that they have a process whereby they can have their chance to get their legislation voted on, their policies voted on,” he said of his discussions with Senate Democratic colleagues. “They’ve become more interested and I hope that continues.”
“They’re looking for an off-ramp,” he continued, noting that the expiration of SNAP benefits is creating a sense of urgency.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) – pictured below getting badgered by Dianne Feinstein a few years ago…
…said that bipartisan talks to end the shutdown have picked up steam given the approaching SNAP-mageddon.
“There is a good group of folks who realize we are well past time to have this behind us. This is not good. This is not good from a governance perspective. This doesn’t reflect well on anybody and it is hurting real people [in] real time so let’s figure out a way to end it,” she said, noting that the disagreements that need to be solved have been discussed at length.
“There have been enough of these pieces that have been talked through that if somebody can just diagram out how it all comes together and present, yes, I do think it’s possible” to end the shutdown next week, she told reporters.
“There’s no great magic in how we get out of this. It’s the same stuff we’ve been talking about for months,” she continued.
And if they don’t fix this, they’re gonna be eating more than the dogs and cats…
NEW: Woman says she will start eating white people if EBT is taken away, says EBT recipients will build their own nation & grow their own food.
“We are going to eat regardless, even if we have to hunt you animals down & roast & eat you, the delectable crackers & cheese.”
“We… pic.twitter.com/Jqat3wgM9o
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 29, 2025
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.