INTERVIEW: Rep. Zach Nunn on the harms of the "catastrophic" Schumer Shutdown and how Trump's Asia trip is helping the Midwest
Rep. Zach Nunn explained that the devastation of the Schumer Shutdown reaches kids, law enforcement officers, fire departments, farmers, and more.
While the Schumer Shutdown has devastated Americans across the country, Rep. Zach Nunn (R., Iowa) has spent the past few weeks meeting with constituents who have been devastated by what he categorized as the Democrats’ “partisan, extreme primary politics” that have ground America to a halt.
The Washington Reporter previously covered Nunn’s latest tour of Iowa’s 3rd District; now Nunn, in his latest interview with the Reporter, shared his thoughts on how Democrats are abandoning their roots in states like Iowa and how President Donald Trump scored a major win for farmers, manufacturers, and rural Americans during his most recent trip to Asia.
Nunn, a self-described “common sense conservative” who represents one of the most competitive districts in America, painted a bleak picture of how the Schumer Shutdown has devastated districts like his.
The “harvest is ongoing. The Department of Agriculture’s offices are closed. We’ve got guys who are having their hardest farm year ever, and it’s coming on the back of the fact that the president has gone above and beyond to try and open up new markets, particularly in Asia, for things like soybeans, corn, and beef. All good news.”
“But,” Nunn noted, “this also come off the heels of four years of the Biden administration being a complete failure on moving forward with domestic production as well. That’s things like biofuels, including E15, 45Z tax credits, really looking at the sustainable aviation fuel. These are two things that farmers are looking for now, and until we can win just five holdouts the Democratic caucus, Democrats have decided to hold the entire country hostage, hold the Midwest hostage on this issue.”
The other issue that Nunn focused on was cuts to SNAP and WIC. Nunn, who was “at both the food bank that collects all this and the food pantry that distributes all this,” has seen the consequences firsthand.
“We have seen record requests coming in from Iowa families who don’t know whether they should save their money to fill up the minivan, save their money to fill up the refrigerator, or save their money because they have no idea when they’re going to get paid again,” he explained. “I just talked to TSA guys on this and a number of them are on SNAP. They’re barely making it by in their front line position that protects us all, but now they’re also in the third missed pay period. This is putting a real stress on men and women who are being asked to show up on shift to protect all of us.”
Nunn explained that the consequences extend to Head Start programs as well, even though several in Iowa had not suffered from the shutdown.
“We’ve got a Head Start program that does phenomenal work, particularly for little kiddos and young families,” Nunn said, discussing a facility that he recently visited. “We’re talking about two, three, and four year olds that I spent time with, hearing it directly from both the staff at Head Start, the educators, as well as the parents who, if Head Start, runs out, not only do they not have WIC, they do not have SNAP, but now they can’t even go to work because they don’t have the opportunity for child care. It’s a triple strike for these families, and they’re going to be out big time if these programs aren’t able to be funded.”
But there are also unintended consequences that policymakers had clearly been ignoring, and he saw that firsthand when he met with law enforcement officers.
“When it comes to our sheriffs and our county law enforcement here, these guys are seeing an uptick in the number of challenges that are coming from domestic situations related to not getting the assistance that families need, and it puts a lot of stress on the community, particularly a rural community, when it doesn’t have a food bank up the street, but it depends on things like SNAP and WIC to take care of kiddos, to take care of senior citizens, so these are the unintended consequence of a shutdown, but it’s the totally foreseeable result of bad policy management in D.C,” Nunn explained.
“When Washington doesn’t pay its bills with taxpayer dollars that we sent from Iowa, Iowans end up getting hurt by this,” he added.
While a deal seems imminent that could end parts of the shutdown, Nunn stressed that “the longest shutdown in government history [is] a shutdown of choice by the Democrats, a shutdown that’s never happened over a simple clean funding bill.” He called it “a reflection of a Democratic Party that has not only lost touch with its roots in places like Iowa, but it is clearly putting partisan, extreme primary politics ahead of the entire country.”
While most federally elected Democrats were content to abandon the communities that Nunn spent the shutdown visiting, Trump struck major deals across the world.
Nunn said that Trump’s Asia trip in particular is welcome relief for his district.
“For farmers, manufacturers and, candidly, for rural America, this is huge,” Nunn said. “For the last four years, under the Biden administration, we went from trade parity to a $50 billion trade deficit just in the ag sector alone. In my home state of Iowa, half of soybeans go to export markets.”
Trump, Nunn said, has “done two things. He’s done, first of all, not just a great deal with China to get them to open back up, but he’s worked the entire region, everywhere from Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, specifically, a 95 percent reduction on tariffs for Iowa ag, in the course of 24 hours. This is huge. This is what we need. We need Iowa farms to be successful, because they can’t just be the big farms that can sell overseas. It’s got to be the hometown farms that can have a market for this.”
The other aspect, which he has discussed with both the White House and with the Treasury Department, is that “we’ve got to have the opportunity to have a better domestic market here for being able to sell our commodities,” he said. “That’s everything from our beef market to our biofuels market. And I’m happy to say the administration is hearing us on that, and that is something that helps out not just rural America be successful, but it drives down the cost of food and fuel for the entire country.”
“Affordability in all of its aspects is going to come in those two areas, where, if we can drive down the cost of people being able to purchase goods at a cheaper and feed their families at cheaper rate, we’re moving in the right direction,” Nunn said.
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Zach Nunn, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Nunn, can you walk us through how the past several weeks of unprecedented and historic obstruction from your Democratic colleagues is harming states like Iowa and districts like yours specifically?
Rep. Zach Nunn:
Let me just begin by saying I’m a common sense conservative, and I think that that goes a long way when I have one of the most competitive congressional districts in the entire state. We just had an election that showed that people were really frustrated with the dysfunction of D.C., and they want to see people who are going to be change agents delivering on things from affordability to housing to what we’re doing in the ag sector, particularly for both domestic and for the export market. Just this week, we spent a lot of time with farmers. This is the big thing. Harvest is ongoing. USDA, the Department of Agriculture, their offices are closed. We’ve got guys who are having their hardest farm year ever, and it’s coming on the back of the fact that the president has gone above and beyond to try and open up new markets, particularly in Asia, for things like soybeans, corn, and beef. All good news. But this also come off the heels of four years of the Biden administration being a complete failure on moving forward with domestic production as well. That’s things like biofuels, including E15, 45Z tax credits, really looking at the sustainable irrigation fuel. These are two things that farmers are looking for now, and until we can win just five holdouts the Democratic caucus, Democrats have decided to hold the entire country hostage, hold the Midwest hostage on this issue. So that’s my farmer issue. The second issue that we’ve really talked to here are the folks who depend on farmers. That is young families and women and independent children. SNAP and WIC are having big time impacts. I’ve been out at both the food bank that collects all this and the food pantry that distributes all this. We have seen record requests coming in from Iowa families who don’t know whether they should save their money to fill up the minivan, save their money to fill up the refrigerator, or save their money because they have no idea when they’re going to get paid again. I just talked to TSA guys on this and a number of them are on SNAP. They’re barely making it by in their front line position that protects us all, but now they’re also in the third missed pay period. This is putting a real stress on men and women who are being asked to show up on shift to protect all of us. But Democrats, again, thought that their liberal, progressive base deserved first priority on Election Day, versus 350 million Americans. And Foldi, I’ll also highlight this; I’m in a +1 Democrat district. And I get that. I work with people who are Republicans, people who are independents, and people who are Democrats, but I am hearing across the board here from these folks that they blame the Senate for this. They see they’re on the same side here now as the air traffic controllers union, the teamsters union, the hardcore federal union guys who are saying that Senate Democrats need to pass what the House Republicans passed back in September because now it’s crushing their own workforce. They can’t even be out there lying trying to justify this thing anymore. This is hopefully a wake up call to folks that if Democrats have lost everybody, from, Fetterman to union workers in Des Moines, Iowa, they’re in real trouble.
Washington Reporter:
You were mentioning the election results; how do you think that those are going to impact the Democrats’ approach to ending the shutdown? And how do you think it’s changing your approach here as you think about how to get out of the shutdown?
Rep. Zach Nunn:
We’ve offered a very clean pathway to end the shutdown. It should have been done two months ago, and every day that goes by, it hurts more and more Iowans. That’s unacceptable. I’ve been so aggressive as to say it’s catastrophic, not just for our food banks, not just for our farmers, but for the 2,000 National Guardsmen from Iowa who are currently deployed to Iraq who are going to go through a second month without their pay, that is unacceptable, particularly as somebody who continues to serve and fight with our armed forces. This should never have happened. The second part of this is, I am afraid the Democrats are taking the wrong lesson away from this. There is a handful of folks who are on the far left who think that the success of a Democratic socialist communist in New York is an indication that holding America hostage is how they get the things that they’re crying about. But as we heard from Schumer himself, you don’t throw a tantrum and shut down the government when you don’t get your way. That’s what he said six months ago. Here we are, beyond six weeks and the man hasn’t been able to find an off ramp with his own base to get the government open, and so while Democrats on the far coasts are talking about how we can continue to leverage this independents, and what I would call old school Democrats back home in Iowa have said, this is enough, and it’s hurting people who are the least able to bear the brunt of the Democratic shutdown operation. And as a result, just like with union Democrats, just like with old school Democrats, they went over to Trump in waves, I think we’re seeing a second coming of this, at least in the Midwest, of folks who are done with the shutdown and they don’t see liberal elites taking them into consideration.
Washington Reporter:
I’m particularly curious what you learned from your law enforcement roundtable and your Drake University Head Start visit, because you already touched on the farmer aspect and the TSA aspect. How does the shutdown impact law enforcement in the Midwest and Head Start and university programs?
Rep. Zach Nunn:
Well, first and foremost, we’ve gone out to our first responder groups across the 3rd District in Iowa. That means meeting with multiple police departments and sheriff’s offices, as well as both our full time and our volunteer firefighters and EMS. For the volunteers, this is just crushing; all of their SAFER grants are now on hold, and this is major equipment purchases. I talked with the Crescent Fire Department that wants to buy a multimillion dollar fire truck that helps protect them, particularly during the harvest season, when we have a lot of heavy operations going on, and they need to be able to respond both with the ambulance and the hook and ladder truck, and they can’t get it. When it comes to our sheriffs and our county law enforcement here, these guys are seeing an uptick in the number of challenges that are coming from domestic situations related to not getting the assistance that families need, and it puts a lot of stress on the community, particularly a rural community, when it doesn’t have a food bank up the street, but it depends on things like SNAP and WIC to take care of kiddos, to take care of senior citizens, so these are the unintended consequence of a shutdown, but it’s the totally foreseeable result of bad policy management in D.C. When Washington doesn’t pay its bills with taxpayer dollars that we sent from Iowa, Iowans end up getting hurt by this. The other side of the story, which is really tragic here, is we’ve got a Head Start program that does phenomenal work, particularly for little kiddos and young families. We’re talking about two, three, and four year olds that I spent time with, hearing it directly from both the staff at Head Start, the educators, as well as the parents who, if Head Start, runs out, not only do they not have WIC, they do not have SNAP, but now they can’t even go to work because they don’t have the opportunity for child care. It’s a triple strike for these families, and they’re going to be out big time if these programs aren’t able to be funded. I’m happy to we’ve been able to lead some good legislation on this, getting our SAFER grants, our cops grants, and Head Start in Des Moines effectively supported. We’ve gone out of the way to make sure that we worked with the White House on getting our troops paid through October. But this is not forever, and while SNAP and WIC are going to be able to be extended, we’ve got to get to a solution. The longest shutdown in government history, a shutdown of choice by the Democrats, a shutdown that’s never happened over a simple clean funding bill, is a reflection of a Democratic Party that has not only lost touch with its roots in places like Iowa, but it is clearly putting partisan, extreme primary politics ahead of the entire country.
Washington Reporter:
Iowa and Oklahoma don’t have any federally elected Democrats. Over in Oklahoma, Stephanie Bice was telling me that the shutdown shows that Democrats don’t care about rural America. Is that what’s going on here?
Rep. Zach Nunn:
When two guys from an extreme leftist state like New York are more worried about if they are going to have to try and get the endorsement of the new communist Mayor than they are the guys like Fetterman, who basically said that Democrats need to get their shit together if they can’t help feed the people who are poorest in this country, not only are you no longer championing what Democrats say they’re going to do, but you’re hurting the people, regardless of political party, who are the Americans on the front line of facing a Thanksgiving without food, without fuel, and without a future.
Washington Reporter:
I was struck by your point on Trump earlier, and obviously he spent a lot of the shutdown getting trade deals while Democrats in D.C. were doing no deals. Can you give us a sense of how the Asia trip, for example, is being received, especially by farmers in your district and in your state?
Rep. Zach Nunn:
For farmers, manufacturers and, candidly, for rural America, this is huge. For the last four years, under the Biden administration, we went from trade parity to a $50 billion trade deficit just in the ag sector alone. In my home state of Iowa, half of soybeans go to export markets. And the president’s done two things. He’s done, first of all, not just a great deal with China to get them to open back up, but he’s worked the entire region, everywhere from Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, specifically, a 95 percent reduction on tariffs for Iowa ag, in the course of 24 hours. This is huge. This is what we need. We need Iowa farms to be successful, because they can’t just be the big farms that can sell overseas. It’s got to be the hometown farms that can have a market for this. And then the other aspect of this, and one of the areas where I’ve been very vocal with both the White House and with the Treasury Secretary, is that we’ve got to have the opportunity to have a better domestic market here for being able to sell our commodities. That’s everything from our beef market to our biofuels market. And I’m happy to say the administration is hearing us on that, and that is something that helps out not just rural America be successful, but it drives down the cost of food and fuel for the entire country. Affordability in all of its aspects is going to come in those two areas, where, if we can drive down the cost of people being able to purchase goods at a cheaper and feed their families at cheaper rate, we’re moving in the right direction.
Washington Reporter:
Do you think that people’s Thanksgiving plans are going to be ruined by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries?
Rep. Zach Nunn:
Every single day of September, October, and now going in November, has been ruined by the Schumer shutdown. Hakeem and Schumer has the opportunity to end this tonight. They’ve had 14 times to end it prior to this. And I’ll be very clear here, there are five individuals who make the decision for the entire country right now. Republicans have been clear in the House. Republicans have been clear in the Senate, and the majority of both chambers want this. But more importantly, the majority of Americans, regardless of party, want this. Five people can do the right thing. It’s up to them to decide whether families are going to get to have the Thanksgiving and the Christmas they deserve.
Washington Reporter:
Well Congressman, we’d all be better off if they listen to you. Thanks for chatting as always.