(DCNF)—President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet picks could temporarily jeopardize the GOP’s slim majority in the House of Representatives.
The GOP has held on to control of the House, securing the 218 seats needed for a majority with five races still yet to be called, according to The Associated Press. However, Trump has already selected three Republican House representatives to serve in his presidential cabinet, resulting in special elections that could reduce the GOP’s already razor thin majority in the chamber.
“There will not be a minute to waste, you can see his resolve already in how quickly he’s making really smart picks,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Tuesday following Trump’s nominations of Republican New York Rep. Elise Stefanik for Ambassador to the United Nations and Republican Florida Rep. Mike Waltz for National Security Adviser. “I know he’s already pulled a few, really talented people out of the House, hopefully no more for a little while until special elections can come.”
Rep. @SteveScalise on President-elect Trump: "I know he's already pulled a few really talented people out of the House, hopefully no more for a little while…" pic.twitter.com/gTnOWgMxor
— CSPAN (@cspan) November 12, 2024
The day after Scalise made the comment, Trump nominated former Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz for U.S. Attorney General, with Gaetz stepping down from congress shortly thereafter.
The process of filling vacancies in Florida can take months, as state law does not stipulate a specific amount of time within which the governor must call a special election, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. The replacement of former Democratic Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings following his death in 2021, for example, took roughly nine months.
If the three GOP vacancies remain unfilled when the 119th Congress begins on Jan. 3 and the Democratic party wins the five remaining uncalled races — four of which are currently within 1.5 percentage points — House Republicans could start the session with a 215-217 seat minority.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is not expected to slow walk filling Waltz and Gaetz’ seats, writing on X that he had “instructed Secretary of State Cord Byrd to formulate and announce a schedule for the upcoming special elections immediately.”
Florida’s special election process takes at least six weeks from when the governor begins the process, according to the Tallahassee Democrat, meaning Gaetz’ seat could be filled early on in the new congress. If Waltz leaves around Inauguration Day, his seat would not be filled until at least March.
Unlike Florida, New York law requires Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul call a special election within ten days of when Stefanik leaves the House, with the election to be held between 70 and 80 days after the call is made. As a result, if Stefanik leaves on Jan. 20 the special election would be held in April.
Gaetz resigned and indicated he would not be sworn in to the new Congress. It is unclear when Waltz and Stefanik will put in their notice.
While the vacancies could temporarily weigh on the GOP House majority, the seats are considered to be in safe districts. Gaetz, Waltz and Stefanik all won re-election by more than 20 percentage points in November, according to the AP.
Regarding the special election to replace Stefanik, New York State Republican Party spokesman David Laska told the Daily Caller News Foundation, “this is a safe Republican seat. We expect to retain it comfortably, irrespective of how much resources the DCCC chooses to waste on the race.”
Laska went on to address the GOP majority broadly, telling the DCNF: “The Republican House majority will remain intact, delivering President Trump a trifecta to implement the overwhelming mandate he and Republicans received from the American people last week.”
Republican Florida Rep. Carlos Gimenez echoed a similarly confident sentiment regarding the Florida special elections.
“Florida is now a Safe Republican state blessed with a bounty of GOP talent,” Gimenez told the DCNF. “The Members of Congress selected to serve in the Trump Administration, hail from rock-solid Republican districts where the eventual GOP Congressional nominee is surely to win the General Election. Speaker Johnson has been an exceptional leader & is actively working with all those involved to ensure our GOP majority is not impacted by these nominations. Our Members understand that we must vote in unison to pass President Trump’s agenda through Congress & protect our nation!”
The Florida GOP and Scalise’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Johnson’s office did not provide original comment.
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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.
