The Latest: Hundreds of flights canceled nationwide due to government shutdown

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The Federal Aviation Administration ’s unprecedented order to scale back flights nationwide because of the record-long government shutdown took effect Friday morning, with some passengers trying to figure out backup travel plans.

Airlines scrambled to adjust their schedules and began canceling flights Thursday in anticipation of the FAA’s official order, while travelers with plans for the weekend and beyond waited nervously to learn if their flights would take off as scheduled. Airlines also planned cancellations into the weekend, directing passengers to check apps to learn their flight status.

The 40 airports selected by the FAA span more than two dozen states.

The FAA said the reductions would start at 4% and ramp up to 10% by Nov. 14. They are to be in effect between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. and impact all commercial airlines.

The agency said the cutbacks are necessary to relieve pressure on air traffic controllers who've been working without pay for more than a month. Many are pulling six-day work weeks with mandatory overtime, and increasing numbers of them have begun calling out as the financial strain and exhaustion mount.

Here's the latest:

Many of the changes at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the western suburb of Broadview included regular cleanings, ordering bedding and making drinking water and soap more readily available for people detained there.

U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman ordered the changes Wednesday after several hours of emotional testimony from detainees about overflowing toilets, crowded cells, no beds and water that “tasted like sewer.” Gettleman called the alleged conditions “unnecessarily cruel.”

“I am pleased with the government’s report, and hopefully we’re moving in the right direction,” Gettleman said Friday after hearing about recent changes.

The government says it is largely in compliance with Gettleman’s order, which will be in effect for 14 days.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys in the case said they are “doubtful” that the changes have been made and want to be able to inspect the facility.

The high court granted the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to temporarily block a court order to fully fund payments under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program amid the government shutdown.

A federal appeals court had left an order in place that required the administration to provide full SNAP food benefits for November. A U.S. district judge had given the administration until Friday to make the payments through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Some states, such as California, New Jersey and Wisconsin, have already started distributing the payments. The ongoing court battle adds to weeks of uncertainty for the food program, which serves about 1 in 8 Americans.

U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut’s ruling Friday came after the city and state sued in September to block deployment of the National Guard.

During a three-day trial last week, both sides argued over whether protests at the city’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building met conditions for using the military domestically under federal law. The administration said the troops were needed to protect federal personnel and property.

In a 106-page opinion, Immergut, a Trump appointee, found that even though the president is entitled to “great deference” in deciding whether to call up the guard, he did not have a legal basis for doing so because he did not establish that there was a rebellion or danger of rebellion, or that he was unable to enforce the law with regular forces.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

With Thanksgiving less than three weeks away, the question of how much this year’s turkey and trimmings will cost looms large, especially with grocery prices 2.7% higher than they were in 2024.

The president has claimed over the past two days that costs for the Thanksgiving meal are down 25% this year, citing a prepackaged holiday meal basket from Walmart.

But Trump’s numbers are off. Here’s a closer look at the facts.

CLAIM: Walmart prices show that the cost of Thanksgiving dinner is 25% lower in 2025 than in 2024.

THE FACTS: This is misleading. While Walmart’s 2025 meal basket costs about 25% less than the one from 2024, that’s because it offers fewer items and different products that make it more affordable.

The 2025 basket costs less than $40 and feeds 10 people, about $4 a head, according to Walmart. In 2024, a basket for eight cost approximately $56, less than $7 per person. That’s about a 25% decrease, possibly more depending on price fluctuations.

But the baskets differ significantly. For example, this year’s includes just 15 items compared to last year’s 29. It is missing many dessert items, including a pecan pie, mini marshmallows and muffin mix, as well as savory items such as sweet potatoes, yellow onions and celery stalks. The superstore retailer has also substituted some products.

“It’s not apples to apples, right?” said David Anderson, a livestock economist at Texas A&M University. “What this does highlight is individual retailers’ strategies for getting customers in the door.”

More than 60 people have been killed in U.S. military strikes on boats that the administration alleges were smuggling drugs. Trump and top U.S. officials have alleged that the craft were operated by narco-terrorists and cartel members bound with deadly drugs for American communities.

AP has learned the identities of four men — and pieced together details about at least five others — providing the first detailed account of those who died.

In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s northeastern coast from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the men were indeed running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.

Most were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.

▶ Read more about the men who died

Grave markers of U.S. veterans are shown at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery where the upcoming annual Veterans Day program has been canceled due to the federal government shutdown in Dallas, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Volunteers usually gather at Riverside National Cemetery in California on the holiday to place flags on graves. Not this year.

The longest federal government shutdown in history has halted the event due to a lack of resources such as access to restrooms and traffic control. Organizers say they can’t proceed without these essentials.

Communities across the country are canceling or scaling back Veterans Day events. The disruption comes as military families face uncertainty about their pay.

Some groups are finding alternative ways to honor veterans, including providing Thanksgiving dinners instead of holding parades.

▶ Read more about the shutdown and Veterans Day celebrations

It’s a matter of shorter supplies and higher demand.

Drought and years of low prices have led to the smallest herd size in decades, and Trump’s tariffs on Brazil, a major beef exporter, haven’t helped either.

At the same time there’s high demand, according to Glynn Tonsor, who leads the Meat Demand Monitor at Kansas State University. Tonsor said the ownership mix in the meat packing industry hasn’t changed significantly in the past four years.

Oklahoma State agricultural economist Derrell Peel said there’s no evidence to support claims that big packers have undue market power and use it to drive up beef prices.

“The packing industry in this country has been investigated and researched for 50 years, and it’s been an issue for over a hundred years, at least, for some producers,” Peel said.

“If the outcome is to break up the big packers, the outcome will be higher beef prices for consumers and lower cattle prices for producers,” he said.

Her motion, which had been expected, lays out a litany of comments from Trump designed to show the case was driven by personal animus that arose out of James’ lawsuit against the president and his companies.

“This lawsuit, and AG James’ outspoken criticism of the President, triggered six years of targeted attacks. President Trump and his allies have used every insulting term in their vocabulary to deride AG James and call for criminal penalties in retaliation for the exercise of her rights and fulfillment of her statutory duties to fulfill her obligations as New York state’s attorney general,” lawyers for James wrote in urging that the case be dismissed.

Name-calling included epithets like “crooked,” “scum,” “a monster,” and “criminal,” according to the filing.

Prosecutors have accused James of lying on mortgage papers to get favorable loan terms when purchasing a house in Norfolk, Virginia, where she has family.

An appeals court declined Friday to suspend any court orders requiring the administration to spend more money than is available in a contingency fund, and instead allow it to continue with planned partial SNAP payments for the month.

Soon afterward the administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up its request.

The judge gave the Trump administration until Friday to make the payments through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. But the administration asked the appeals court to suspend any court orders requiring it to spend more money than is available in a contingency fund and instead allow it to continue with planned partial SNAP payments.

The food program serves about 1 in 8 Americans, mostly with lower incomes.

The court filing came even as the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a memo to states that it is working to make funds available Friday for full monthly SNAP benefits.

Officials in at least a half-dozen states confirmed that some SNAP recipients already were issued full November payments Friday.

While the USPS relies mainly on ground transportation, the agency does contract with private air cargo and passenger airlines to move some mail.

Kim Frum, senior public relations representative for the Postal Service, said Friday that there may be “slight impacts to mail transportation due to the recent capacity cuts.”

Frum added: “We are working closely with our air partners to monitor the situation and are able to adjust transportation schedules as needed.”

CLAIM: Democrats shut down the government because they want to give free health care to immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally.

THE FACTS: This is false. Democrats say they are pushing for the inclusion of key health care provisions in the next congressional spending package. In particular, they are seeking an extension of tax credits that millions of Americans use to buy insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchange and a reversal of Medicaid cuts made in the bill Trump signed into law in July.

However, immigrants in the U.S. illegally are not eligible for any federal health care programs, including insurance provided through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.

Speaking in the Oval Office about a deal with Pfizer to lower drug prices, Trump predicted the shutdown and made the false claim: ”We’ll probably have a shutdown because one of the things they want to do is they want to give incredible Medicare, Cadillac, the Cadillac Medicare, to illegal immigrants.”

Other Republicans, including Vice President Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson, have made similar claims.

The Senate’s Democratic leader, Sen. Chuck Schumer, rebutted these allegations, calling them “a lie, plain and simple.”

▶ Read more about the facts behind this viral claim here

The president said Friday that no U.S. government officials would be attending this year’s summit for heads of state from the globe’s leading and emerging economies. He had already announced that he would not go.

“It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa,” Trump said on his social media site. He cited “abuses” of Afrikaners, including violence and death as well as confiscation of land and farms.

The administration has long accused South Africa of allowing minority white Afrikaner farmers to be persecuted and attacked. As it restricted the number of refugees admitted annually to the U.S. to 7,500, the administration indicated that most will be white South Africans who it claimed faced discrimination and violence at home.

But the government of South Africa has said it is surprised by the accusations because white people in the country generally have a much higher standard of living than Black residents, more than three decades after the end of apartheid.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has said he told Trump that information about alleged discrimination and persecution of Afrikaners is “completely false.”

Shapiro was responding to Vance calling a court ruling requiring the restoration of SNAP benefits “absurd” on Thursday. The vice president said: “In the midst of a shutdown, we can’t have a federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation.”

Shapiro called Vance “a total phony” and suggested that the vice president betrayed struggling Americans in Appalachia, where Shapiro said many get SNAP benefits. The governor noted that Vance rose to prominence through his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about his youth in the region.

“He made millions of dollars on the backs of telling their stories, and then he turned his damn back on those very people who he likes to write about and claim as his own,” Shapiro said.

His sharp comments offer a preview of potential political contests to come. Shapiro, a Democrat, and Vance, a Republican, are seen as leading contenders for their parties’ presidential nominations in 2028.

Anxious travelers across the U.S. felt a bit of relief as airlines mostly stayed on schedule while gradually cutting flights because of the government shutdown.

At least 1,000 flights were called off on Friday to comply with the Federal Aviation Administration’s order to reduce service. Some passengers were forced make last-minute changes and rebook on different flights.

Plenty of nervousness remained, as more canceled flights are expected in the coming days. Airports in Chicago, Atlanta, Denver and Dallas led the way with the most disruptions, and long security lines added to travelers’ woes.

The upheaval will intensify the longer the shutdown lasts and could become chaotic if it extends into the Thanksgiving holiday, just weeks from now.

That’s because the carrier has already identified the roughly 220 daily flights it will cut through Monday, Chief Operating Officer David Seymour told AP.

“We’re going to notify all of our customers if their flight is disrupted,” he said, so if you haven’t heard from the airline, then your flight is “going to go.”

Seymour says the airline is now working on finalizing its reduced schedule for the remainder of next week, when it is expected to slowly increase the number of cancellations to reach the FAA’s target of 10%.

Jack Smith is repeating his willingness to testify publicly about his investigations into President Trump.

In a letter Friday to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, lawyers for Smith say they have sought guidance and authorization from the Justice Department about his potential testimony.

Smith’s lawyers, Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski, say they look forward to Smith being able to appear at a public hearing “so that the American people can hear the facts directly” from him. They say public testimony is especially important “given continued speculation and mischaracterizations” about his work as special counsel.

Sean Duffy said that every day the shutdown continues the situation with more controllers calling out of work may get worse.

So additional flight cuts might be needed -- particularly after controllers receive nothing on payday next Tuesday for the second time.

“If this shutdown doesn’t end relatively soon, the consequence of that is going to be more controllers don’t come to work,” Duffy said. “And then we’re going to have to continue to assess the pressure in the air space and make decisions that may again move us from 10% to 15%, maybe to 20. I don’t want to see that.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has rejected Democratic leader Chuck Schumer’s offer to reopen the government as part of a bill that also includes a one-year extension of health care subsides for coverage through the Affordable Care Act.

“I think everybody who follows this knows that’s a nonstarter,” Thune said.

Thune made the comments as he prepared to meet with Senate Republicans on the way forward for ending the government shutdown. He has insisted that health care talks occur after Congress has funded the government.

“There is no way the Obamacare extension is the negotiation,” Thune said. “That’s what we’re going to negotiate once the government opens up.”

Jonathan Welle, 39, traveled 11 hours on the train to avoid flying to Washington D.C. from Cleveland, Ohio, for a work trip earlier this week.

Welle, who helps develop cooperative small businesses, opted to fly back to save time, only to have two flights canceled: the first on Thursday night and then the second on the rebooked flight Friday morning.

“I realized that if I had just taken the train at the original time I would have been home sooner, more reliably,” Welle said.

Luckily, American Airlines notified him of the changes before he left for the airport.

But he said the experience is making him reconsider his honeymoon in Vietnam later this month -- a trip that he and his partner have waited a year for. The pair rarely travels and afforded the trip through generous gifts from wedding guests.

“I’m concerned about what this new normal could mean,” Welle said.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán says his country has received an exemption from U.S. sanctions on Russian energy after a meeting in the White House with President Donald Trump.

The allowance will keep Russian oil and gas flowing to Hungary in a sign of the close affinity between the two leaders.