The News Caravan

Tag: Bidens

  • How Biden’s campaign video triggered the timeline

    How Biden’s campaign video triggered the timeline

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    In the days that followed, suspense continued to build about Biden’s decision and the timing of his announcement. But there shouldn’t have been — because once Biden’s team hired the film crew, he was boxed in, required by federal law to announce his candidacy within 15 days, even though some of his aides didn’t realize that at the time.

    According to two people familiar with events, some aides involved with the run-up to Tuesday’s launch sought legal guidance after the video segments were recorded and were reminded about what’s known as “the 15-day trigger,” the requirement that campaigns file paperwork within 15 days of spending $5,000 on campaign-related expenditures.

    “I assume that the campaign spent more than $5,000 to produce [the announcement video],” said Erin Chlopak, the senior director for campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center. “Under federal regulations, once a candidate spends that, they are required to file their official statement of candidacy within 15 days.”

    As late as last week, the people said, legal guidance was still being sought as to whether an announcement was required within that timeframe as a result of the video. According to people familiar with the deliberations, the legal requirement to file paperwork triggered by making the launch video was ultimately not part of the calculation to make the reelection bid official. The decision to flip the switch had already been made. Hence, hiring the video crew.

    “There was no ambiguity among the senior team about what happens once you enter the 15-day window,” one Democratic strategist close to the process said, disputing that those involved in deciding to go ahead with the video production had failed to realize the implications.

    Still, up until this week’s launch, there was robust debate among Democratic operatives close to top Biden aides about whether it made sense to announce in April. Biden himself, known for taking his time with weighty decisions, has long seemed inclined to seek a second term. But he hesitated about the timing of when. Some people close to the campaign speculated that those pushing for an earlier launch were trying to box him into announcing in April. One thing they had in their favor was Biden’s sense of nostalgia and superstition. Tuesday’s announcement came on the four-year anniversary of his last campaign launch.

    But the announcement still left little time for sorting out more of the campaign structure, from lining up surrogates to launching a robust email program. Nor did the launch come with the usual pomp and circumstance that usually accompanies making the first step in a bid for the White House. Biden spoke before a gathering of union workers and did not mention the election run he’d just embarked on. There was only a spattering of fundraising solicitations sent around — a level that, one Democratic digital operative suggested, would have been more robust had the president’s digital team had a bit more prep time. There was no rally (though, Barack Obama similarly held off on doing a campaign event until weeks after making his 2012 bid known via a video).

    The just-launched campaign declined a request for comment. Still, as the campaign gets going, top aides may want to keep the lawyers on speed dial.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Biden’s campaign launch is immediately overshadowed by other events — and his team loves it

    Biden’s campaign launch is immediately overshadowed by other events — and his team loves it

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    Biden’s announcement came on a day when the leading Republican contender to challenge him, former President Donald Trump, began a trial where he is accused of rape. Another GOP hopeful, Nikki Haley, delivered a speech reaffirming the party’s commitment to restricting access to abortion, an issue that continues to galvanize voters on both sides perhaps more than any other.

    The most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, is fighting to wrangle his unruly caucus to get behind a proposal to tie major spending cuts to any debt ceiling increase, setting up another dramatic vote on the House floor as early as Wednesday. And the smoke is still just clearing from the sudden firings Monday of two outsized media personalities, Tucker Carlson by Fox and Don Lemon by CNN.

    The chaotic tableau was not just a revealing snapshot of a particularly frenetic American moment — it may foreshadow the campaign to come, too. Biden, as he was at times during last year’s midterms, could find himself relegated to the background, as more extreme characters dominate the news and the nation’s collective consciousness. Rather than fret their second-fiddle fate, the president’s advisers find it advantageous.

    “I go back to the first election, where he presented himself as… someone who is steady, someone who is thoughtful, someone who keeps his eyes on the prize,” said Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), one of the Biden campaign’s co-chairs. It is not, she added, about “the antics of the moment.”

    For an incumbent eager to frame the next election, as he did last year’s, as a choice and not a referendum on his own record, being somewhat out of the spotlight’s glare has its benefits. Biden’s team wants to present him as a trusted, experienced politician; the drama-free alternative to extremism on the right. The media’s focus on louder, more strident voices — and his own innate unobtrusiveness — are not just an outgrowth of circumstances but also a key part of his campaign’s strategy.

    “None of this backdrop to Biden’s announcement is a coincidence. It’s all part of the same reckoning that the country is going through,” said Jennifer Palmieri, who served as communications director on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “When Biden ran the first time, he was talking about being a transitional president. He’s talking about ‘finishing the job’ because we have not completed this transition. We are still in this epic fight where big questions about democracy and fundamental rights are at stake.”

    Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump and Democrats’ ability to defy historical headwinds last November and far surpass the party’s midterm expectations, Palmieri added, showed that “Biden and Democrats don’t have to be top of the news to win. They just have to make sure voters understand what’s at stake.”

    Executing such a strategy is a bit easier when running against a sitting president rather than running as one. And, over the coming months, Biden world’s efforts to run as the drama-free, more competent alternative to what the Republican Party is offering will be tested by that Republican Party’s attempts to create drama and frame him as inept.

    In his campaign launch video, Biden took the first step towards trying to set the contours of the debate. The video focused on Republican extremism in setting up the rationale for his campaign. It highlighted the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the conservative Supreme Court’s decision striking down federal protections for abortion and GOP efforts at the state level to ban books, limit early voting and restrict transgender rights, as well as Republicans’ inaction on gun safety amid a surge of mass shootings. “MAGA extremists,” Biden says in the video, are “lining up to take away those bedrock freedoms.”

    That’s a shift from last year’s focus on Democrats’ legislative accomplishments over Biden’s first two years in office. The White House has launched a major publicity blitz to tout the benefits of new laws — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Chips Act boosting America’s tech sector and the Inflation Reduction Act, which has led to $200 billion in new investments in renewable energy projects. But none of those laws were referenced in the president’s three-minute launch video.

    Instead, Biden focused on those accomplishments during a lunchtime speech at the annual meeting of the North America’s Building Trades Unions, a gathering that represents a critical piece of the president’s political base. The speech was an official address, with the only flourish from the just-launched campaign effort being Biden’s new “finish the job” catchphrase.

    “Under my predecessor, Infrastructure Week was a punchline. On my watch, we’re making Infrastructure Decade a headline,” Biden said, addressing the audience directly. “Union workers will build roads and bridges, lay internet cable, install electric vehicle chargers. Union workers are going to transform America. And union workers are going to finish the job!”

    Those remarks occurred, however, shortly after CNN cut away from live coverage of the speech, which was a familiar rehash of the president’s well worn economic message.

    Biden world has long scoffed at the notion that they should gear their approach around the whims of cable or Twitter at that. And the campaign’s strategy with its launch day, which also featured Vice President Kamala Harris speaking about reproductive rights at an event in Maryland, appeared to reflect a broader awareness about how Americans consume their news now. With the initial video push, followed by two events featuring Biden and Harris that could practically be turned into videos themselves, the campaign will be able to reach a number of constituencies with multiple messages. Creating banner headlines on cable TV, it seems, was not the point.

    Biden’s former communications director Kate Bedingfield, who CNN opted to interview from a Washington studio rather than carrying Biden’s remarks, made it clear that the president isn’t especially reliant on the mainstream media. His team often prefers to engage with content creators with large followings or to package the president’s comments themselves for distribution via social media platforms and email lists.

    “We’re living in an incredibly fractured media environment, and so the president and his team have to think about how do we reach people where they’re actually getting their news,” Bedingfield said.

    With polls showing a majority of Americans preferring that Biden not seek a second term, the campaign team has its work cut out for them. The task being to gin up support from your own base while keeping yourself off of center stage can, at times, be in conflict. But there is one way to do both: focusing attention on the Republican alternative.

    “Republicans nominating Trump again plays right into Biden’s message,” GOP pollster Whit Ayres conceded. “Biden only won in 2020 by a hair in the Electoral College, and he has significant problems now. But his unobtrusiveness is not one of them. In part, that’s what he ran on: not being in your face every day.”

    Jennifer Haberkorn contributed to this report.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Joe Biden’s 2024 enthusiasm gap

    Joe Biden’s 2024 enthusiasm gap

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    There’s an almost obsessive preoccupation with Biden’s age. And in his video, Biden sought to portray himself as an ageless champion who will “battle for the soul of America” by taking on conservatives who are banning books, making it more difficult to vote and meddling in women’s health care decisions.

    This campaign, though, will be far different than the socially distanced one he successfully navigated in 2020 with few public appearances during the height of the pandemic.

    There’s a perceived dearth of enthusiasm for his campaign, with many Democratic activists resigned to the fact Biden is their best chance to stop Republicans from reclaiming the presidency. And the reality for Biden is many activists — natural surrogates to bolster his message — are growing weary. Many see themselves as loyal foot soldiers in the fight against culture war battles being waged in conservative legislatures which are pushing for stricter laws targeting abortion and voting.

    Many don’t view Biden himself as a galvanizing force in 2024.

    “It’s not going to be him energizing the base,” Cliff Albright, executive director of Black Voters Matter Fund, told The Recast newsletter with a hint of a chuckle.

    “It’s obviously going to have to be surrogates to do the energizing part, but he’s got some achievements, including some that influence Black folks directly that he can craft a message around.”

    Albright says the relaunch video was strong and that he was glad to see Biden lean so heavily into voting rights, an issue he says he is key for Black voters — even though Democrats were unsuccessful in enacting federal protections when the party held a governing trifecta.

    “Sometimes all Black folks want to see is, ‘We want to see you fight,’” Albright says. “We’re not naive. We’re used to being in fights we know we can’t win because we don’t have the votes … but we want people to fight for us.”

    Many Democratic strategists and activists give the Biden administration high marks for stabilizing the economy following the pandemic shutdowns, passing bipartisan infrastructure legislation and nominating Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.

    Those, they say, are achievements Biden should be touting.

    They also hope the Biden administration can craft a coherent campaign message, one that showcases his achievements but also serves as a clarion call for the battles ahead that still require a united front of elected officials and activists to achieve. Keeping the activist class engaged and energized is key, but there’s also a hard truth being spoken amongst grassroots organizers.

    “I think what you’re seeing is that we’re burnt out,” says longtime Democratic political strategist and activist Nina Smith, who worked on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign last cycle.

    “There are a lot of folks right now that are just tired and they’ve stepped away. Folks that I worked alongside with in 2020 have stepped away and they are not as engaged anymore.”

    “That’s the real danger here,” she adds.

    Activists note that if the Biden campaign invests in and engages community organizers early on, this early fatigue can be overcome.

    Many also say that Biden should rely on a new class of elected officials, including freshman Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) and Tennessee state Reps. Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, to help elevate his campaign to a weary progressive base.

    The “two Justins” as they are sometimes referred to, are both young Black men who were each expelled from the GOP-led Tennessee Legislature, before being reinstated the following week.

    Together with state Rep. Gloria Johnson, who is white and survived an expulsion vote, they form the “Tennessee Three.” On Monday, they met with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the White House to push the administration to declare gun violence a public health emergency.

    Still, activists on the left may be looking past Biden, who will be 82 years old should he be sworn in for another term. Instead, they say, they are inspired by the woman who is leading his campaign: Julie Chávez Rodríguez. She’s a senior White House adviser and the granddaughter of Cesar Chavez, famed labor leader and Chicano icon.

    Not everyone agrees it’s enough.

    “That alone is not going to be something that is going to [bring] Latino voters out for President Biden,” says Mayra López-Zuniga, a political strategist with the progressive group Mijente. “I think we need a little bit more substance.”

    As she sees it, many Latino voters don’t feel their lives have changed for the better during the Biden administration. Huge wage gaps persist between Latinas and non-Hispanic men. By one measure from the Justice for Women report, Latinas make 54 cents for every dollar a white man makes.

    Then there’s immigration, which was not mentioned in the president’s campaign video relaunch and is seen as a potential liability for Biden heading into 2024.

    “The president hasn’t been able to deliver on immigration, no asylum reform, DACA is still up in the air,” López-Zuniga tells The Recast. “So I don’t know, at this point, that there’s a huge energy for what 2024 is going to look like.”

    While Biden and his advisors seek to project the image of a spry commander in chief, questions about his vitality will hover over his reelection prospects — as are concerns that voters just aren’t that into him. The latest datapoint underscoring that came in an NBC News poll released Sunday.

    It found a whopping 70 percent of Americans say Biden should not run — including 51 percent of Democrats. That is compared to just 26 percent who said he should run. Of those who said he shouldn’t run, a combined 69 percent cited his age as a reason.

    Still: A lot can happen in a campaign over the course of 18 months. If anyone knows this, it’s Biden himself.

    This article first appeared in an edition of The Recast newsletter.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Torres: Biden’s age isn’t ideal but ‘best hope’ to win

    Torres: Biden’s age isn’t ideal but ‘best hope’ to win

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    NEW YORK — Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) on Tuesday faulted Democrats for not doing more to cultivate the “next generation of leadership,” adding it wasn’t ideal that President Joe Biden was mounting a reelection bid at age 80.

    “He has a powerful record on which to run for reelection,” Torres said at a Manhattan event hosted by the Association for a Better New York, a pro-business civic group. “But is it ideal that we have an 80-year-old running for president? No. But he’s the best hope we have for beating Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis.”

    Torres has backed Biden’s reelection bid.

    Biden, who is already the oldest person to be elected president, has had to confront difficult questions about whether he’s mentally fit for four more years of grueling schedules. If elected, Biden would turn 86 at the end of his second term.

    Torres, 35, made the remarks as part of a wide-ranging conversation on his first term in Congress alongside colleagues who have gotten significantly older than they were decades prior.

    “I’m like an embryo in Congress,” the Bronx Democrat joked.

    He faulted Democrats for not setting term limits for committee chairs like their Republican counterparts, a setup he said emboldens lawmakers to “feel they have a right to die with their gavel.”

    “That stifles, I believe, the development of the next generation of leadership,” Torres said. “We have to be much more effective at building a bench rather than benching our young talent.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • This is who’s running Joe Biden’s campaign

    This is who’s running Joe Biden’s campaign

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    A longtime Democratic aide, she’s currently the highest ranking Latina in the White House. She also served in several roles in the Obama administration, and is the granddaughter of labor icon Cesar Chávez.

    Quentin Fulks, Principal Deputy Campaign Manager

    A democratic strategist, Fulks was most recently the campaign manager for Sen. Raphael Warnock’s reelection campaign last year — the first successful reelection bid for a Democratic senator in Georgia in more than 30 years. Before that, he was the deputy campaign manager and senior political adviser to Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, helping flip the seat blue in 2018. He has also held several positions at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, EMILY‘s List and Priorities USA.

    Kevin Muñoz, Media Relations

    Most recently an assistant White House press secretary, Muñoz will take care of press for the reelection bid initially as a larger team is built out. None of the other hires on the comms team or their potential roles in the campaign have been set in stone, two people familiar with the process said. At least one other campaign staffer is set to be announced soon.

    National Co-chairs

    Rep. Lisa Blunt-Rochester (D-Del.) has been close with Biden for years, helping him choose his running mate for the last campaign. A long-time family friend, she’s also the first woman and first African American to represent Delaware in Congress.

    Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), another longtime ally, threw his support behind Biden in 2020. That gave the president a stamp of approval among Black voters at at a critical time for the campaign, following a string of losses to Sen. Bernie Sanders and coming just days before the state’s primary.

    Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) has served as the “bridge” between the Hill, the White House and foreign capitals during the Biden presidency. Abroad, he has served almost as a proxy to Biden, being talked about in the U.S. and internationally as a shadow secretary of State.

    Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a veteran and the first Thai American woman in Congress, was floated as a vice presidential candidate in 2020. Since then, she has been a Biden ally, but also challenged the president two years ago for not naming Asian American Cabinet secretaries, vowing to oppose nominees on the floor before backing down.

    Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) has been a staunch defender of the administration’s handling of the southern border crisis, an issue that’s likely to be central in the 2024 presidential campaign. One of the first two Latinas to represent Texas in the House of Representatives, she represents El Paso, the largest city at the U.S. border.

    Jeffrey Katzenberg, a film producer and major Democratic fundraiser, has been key to Biden’s presidential endeavors, backing him in 2020 and raising millions of dollars for Dems alongside the president.

    Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who was also floated as a potential vice presidential candidate, has been a close Biden ally for years. She vocally backed the president despite dwindling Democratic enthusiasm earlier this year, and endorsed him for president in 2020.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Biden’s Running. Which Republican Has the Best Chance of Beating Him?

    Biden’s Running. Which Republican Has the Best Chance of Beating Him?

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    Perhaps most importantly, Biden proved in 2020 that not only could he rebuild the so-called Blue Wall (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), he could snag increasingly purple Arizona and Georgia.

    So which Republican contender is best positioned to take on Biden and win back those swing states? Here’s a clear-eyed look at their strengths and weaknesses.

    Former President Donald Trump

    Twice impeached, once indicted, the only president since the advent of polling whose approval ratings never cracked 50 percent, Trump doesn’t exactly cut the profile of a model challenger. Even in his two presidential runs, his high-water mark in the popular vote was just under 47 percent. But in 2016, he showed there was a path to an Electoral College win nonetheless.

    In a rematch with Biden, Trump would likely be better politically positioned than many of his GOP rivals on issues like entitlement reform and abortion, where he’s tacked a bit more to the center. Still, there is the matter of the five states that Biden flipped in 2020. Trump wouldn’t need to win all of them back to recapture the White House but he would likely need at least three of those states — and none of them is a slam dunk.

    That’s not because of Biden’s strengths, but Trump’s flaws. There are clear signs of a more professionalized Trump campaign operation than in the past. But Trump is still Trump (see, for example, his Easter message on the holiest day on the Christian calendar). The swing states that will decide the 2024 election are among those that have been the most destabilized by Trump’s polarizing politics, either because of his conflicts with the state parties or the forces unleashed by his baseless claims of election fraud.

    Take Georgia: The 2022 Republican primary there represented a massive repudiation of the former president; the cherry on top came in the December Senate runoff, when Trump’s handpicked nominee Herschel Walker was defeated. In Arizona, ground zero for election denialism, the Trump-endorsed statewide candidates crashed and burned in November. Biden was no asset to Democrats in 2022, but Trump was equally damaging. While 38 percent of Arizona voters said they cast their votes to oppose Biden, according to exit polls, 35 percent said their votes were to oppose Trump.

    The Blue Wall that Trump cracked in 2016 is equally daunting. Democrats are now in ascendance in Michigan and Pennsylvania — which have moved in tandem in presidential elections for close to 40 years — in no small part due to a backlash against Trump in their most populous suburbs. Short of a massive rural turnout in those states, or a black swan event, Biden has a decided edge against Trump in both places.

    In Wisconsin, the closest of the three states in 2020, a mere 20,000 votes separated Biden and Trump. But the trendlines for the GOP aren’t promising there either. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump ran behind traditional Republican margins in the conservative suburbs of Milwaukee that are essential to GOP chances. Worse, the Trump era has seen the rise of liberal Dane County as an electoral powerhouse — witness the recent state Supreme Court election — and a Trump-led GOP ticket is guaranteed to generate another monster turnout there.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

    In the view of many Republican officials, DeSantis is Trump without the baggage and drama. If he runs, they envision a conservative big-state governor, fresh off a landslide reelection, prosecuting a vigorous case against an enfeebled Biden — an incumbent who’s nearly twice his age.

    It’s true that DeSantis might staunch the bleeding in traditionally Republican suburbs, particularly across the Sun Belt, while maintaining the other elements of the MAGA coalition. Just as important, his robust performance among all Latino groups in Florida in his 2022 reelection caught both parties’ attention — he outpaced even Trump’s 2020 Latino gains.

    But the governor’s recent stumbles have raised real questions about how he’d fare on the national stage under the relentless pressures of a presidential election — where there is no place for the press-averse DeSantis to hide from the media. And the disciplined approach and sharp political instincts that enabled his rapid rise on the national scene haven’t been sufficient to shield him from Trump’s assault. If he does emerge from a smashmouth primary against Trump — and with Trump, there is no other kind — DeSantis will enter the general election against Biden with deep scars to show for it.

    In presidential elections, governors typically face questions about their lack of foreign policy experience, and DeSantis’ description of Russia’s war in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” — which he later walked back amid bipartisan criticism — will only bolster the case for Biden as an experienced hand.

    Yet that stance may not be nearly so politically problematic as the bill he signed recently banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. DeSantis — who is expected to announce his candidacy in May, after the legislative session — may have advanced his prospects in a GOP primary, but polling and recent election results in the swing states that will decide the presidency suggest his position could be a millstone. If DeSantis is the GOP nominee, the ban makes it more likely than ever that abortion rights will be a central issue in 2024, drowning out the other issues where Biden would be more vulnerable.

    Former Vice President Mike Pence

    Biden proved that former vice presidents can sit on the sidelines for four years and still return to win the presidency. But Pence is no ordinary vice president. For one thing, his boss expressed support for hanging him amid the Jan. 6 riot.

    That strained relationship with Trump has made Pence, who said Sunday he’ll announce his 2024 presidential decision “well before” late June, a longshot to win the nomination. The best case for Pence in a general election is that he is a Reagan conservative whose loyal service to Trump could bridge the gap between traditional Republicans and the MAGA wing of the party. As a former Midwestern governor, he’s positioned to compete in the industrial swing states that flipped to Biden in 2020. Georgia’s 16 electoral votes would also seem to be in reach for Pence, given the architecture of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s successful 2022 reelection campaign.

    The flip side is that some corners of the MAGA movement might never forgive Pence’s refusal to bend to Trump’s pressure to block certification of the 2020 Electoral College votes. And Pence’s vote-winning appeal on his own remains uncertain. Despite his estrangement from Trump — and a suburban dad image — he can’t easily sidestep his affiliation with Trump’s slash-and-burn politics. Pence ran statewide just once — in 2012 in Indiana, a red state where he ran well behind Mitt Romney’s pace that year. He was no shoo-in for reelection in 2016 before Trump plucked him to join his presidential ticket.

    Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley

    The daughter of Indian immigrants, Haley would be a historic nominee — the first woman and the first person of color to lead the GOP ticket. That status, along with her age — she’s roughly 30 years younger than Biden — would make for a stark contrast on the campaign trail.

    Haley, who announced her bid in February, also offers the prospect of shrinking the gender gap in the general election — which was a yawning 57-42 in 2020. Exit polls from her 2014 reelection also showed Haley ran strong in the suburbs and with independents, two additional groups Trump lost in 2020.

    But establishing her independence from Trump won’t be easy. She’s frequently been critical of the former president, including in 2016 when she decried “the siren call of the angriest voices.” But she also went to work for Trump as his ambassador to the U.N. and has spent the last few years praising his agenda — positions that could limit her appeal with voters looking for a clean break from Trump.

    South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott

    Scott’s formidable political skills have been on display since then-Gov. Nikki Haley appointed him to the Senate in 2013. Within a year, he had outperformed both Haley and senior Sen. Lindsey Graham on the ballot. In 2016, he ran ahead of Donald Trump in South Carolina by more than 86,000 votes.

    In his three Senate campaigns, however, Scott has never faced serious Democratic opposition or intense media scrutiny. It showed on his second day of campaigning after announcing a presidential exploratory committee, when he stumbled badly on the question of whether he’d back federal abortion restrictions.

    And any expectation that Scott, who would be the GOP’s first Black presidential nominee, could carve out some of Biden’s considerable support among Black voters must be tempered by Scott’s actual performance. While the senator has improved his percentages over the past decade, he regularly loses the majority of the state’s nine majority Black counties.

    Other Candidates

    Several candidates making the early state rounds — among them, Vivek Ramaswamy and Perry Johnson — don’t have an electoral record to assess. But former two-term Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and current New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu have met with success at the ballot box, not to mention some of the highest approval ratings in the nation. As popular, traditional conservatives who have been lonely Trump critics within the party, they’d likely be well positioned to compete across the map in a general election — but the GOP base doesn’t show much appetite for nominating a Trump critic.

    Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a one-time Trump ally who has become a sharp critic, faces the same predicament. He’s the rare conservative who’s won statewide in a blue state and his successful stint as chairperson of the Republican Governors Association gives him familiarity with the demands of running competitively across the national map.

    But an experience during his failed 2016 presidential campaign captured both the promise and the flaws of a potential candidacy. In winning the coveted endorsement from the New Hampshire Union-Leader, a prominent voice in the early state’s primary, publisher Joseph McQuaid described Christie as “a solid, pro-life conservative” who managed to win and govern in a liberal state.

    Several months later, however, the newspaper rescinded its endorsement after Christie’s surprise endorsement of Trump. “Watching Christie kiss the Donald’s ring this weekend — and make excuses for the man Christie himself had said was unfit for the presidency — demonstrated how wrong we were,” McQuaid wrote. “Rather than standing up to the bully, Christie bent his knee.” Biden wouldn’t have to try very hard to remind the public.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Biden’s next student loan headache: A cash crunch at the Education Department

    Biden’s next student loan headache: A cash crunch at the Education Department

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    The funding woes threaten to exacerbate the political pain of what was always going to be a tricky endeavor for Biden: Sending millions of Americans student loan bills for the first time since their payments were suspended at the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

    Borrowers are set to face longer hold times to speak with their loan servicing company, potentially slower paperwork processing and reduced call center hours.

    “It is a slow-moving car crash,” said Jared Bass, senior director for higher education at the Center for American Progress and a former Democratic appropriations staffer. Bass urged lawmakers to find a way to add money for administering student aid programs even before Congress debates government-wide funding this fall. “We see what’s about to unfold, so let’s just prevent it now and just step in and take preventative measures,” he said.

    Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told House appropriators during a hearing last week that restarting payments will be an “unprecedented” undertaking that requires an “all hands on deck” approach.

    “Never has this ever been done where — depending on the decision of the Supreme Court — up to 43 million borrowers are going to start repaying,” Cardona said. “It’s a huge lift for our team.”

    The Biden administration has said publicly that the moratorium on payments will end this summer, with payments resuming 60 days after either the Supreme Court rules on student debt cancellation or June 30, whichever comes first.

    But the Education Department is also contemplating a transition period that would push repayment well into the fall.

    Department officials have told loan servicers to prepare to resume charging interest on federal loans in September, according to documents obtained by POLITICO under public records requests. Officials are eyeing October as the first month in which any borrower will be required to make a payment, the documents show, noting the requirement that borrowers receive a billing statement at least 21 days in advance of their due date.

    In addition, Education Department officials are planning a “safety net” period in which borrowers aren’t penalized for missing payments once repayment begins, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

    Officials had previously settled on a grace period for the first 90 days after payments are due. But they are now considering extending that flexibility to borrowers for as long as a year after repayment starts, according to two people familiar with internal discussions, who also cautioned that the plans are in flux and could change.

    The administration is looking at a range of other policies designed to make the student loan system more borrower-friendly amid the looming restart of payments. For example, the Education Department last month directed loan servicers to stop collecting on borrower balances that total $100 or less and to write off those debts, according to one of the documents. That is an increase from the previous policy of writing off small balances under $25.

    But the cash-strapped budget for restarting payments remains a major obstacle for the administration.

    In a budget document released last month, the Education Department warned that the current level of funding for its student aid operations “poses significant risks” for implementing a “smooth return to repayment.”

    Already the department has been forced to slash funding to federal loan servicing companies by nearly 10 percent. As part of the cutbacks, Biden administration officials last month allowed the loan companies to curtail their call center operations by 10 hours each week, including eliminating all Saturday hours. Officials also informed the companies they would not be penalized for failing to meet a performance standard in their contract related to long call wait times that caused borrowers to hang up before reaching a customer service representative.

    “The Department is deeply concerned about the lack of adequate annual funding made available to Federal Student Aid this year,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement to POLITICO. “As the Department has repeatedly made clear, restarting repayment requires significant resources to avoid unnecessary harm to borrowers, such as cuts to servicing.”

    “We continue to urge Congress to fully fund President Biden’s FY24 budget request, which would provide critical resources to FSA,” the statement continued. “At the same time, we will continue to work closely with servicers to prioritize providing services to borrowers as quickly and effectively as possible.”

    The administration is deliberating over how to restart student loan payments as conservatives and businesses are ratcheting up pressure to get Biden to end the payment pause, which costs the government roughly $5 billion each month in foregone revenue.

    SoFi, a private student loan company, and the Mackinac Center, a conservative group, have each filed lawsuits to stop the payment pause, arguing that it’s illegal and no longer properly linked to the pandemic emergency.

    On Capitol Hill, Republicans are pushing for a vote in the coming weeks on legislation to overturn Biden’s student debt relief policies, including the pause on payments. Speaker Kevin McCarthy also last week included a repeal of Biden’s student loan policies as part of his opening package of policy concessions that House Republicans want in exchange for raising the debt limit.

    Progressives, meanwhile, are focused on making sure the White House feels the pressure to deliver on student debt cancellation before restarting payments.

    “President Biden has persuasively argued that the only way to responsibly restart loan payments without unleashing an economic catastrophe is to broadly cancel student debt,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center advocacy group. “The president cannot be baited into becoming America’s ‘debt collector-in-chief’ by his opponents. At the end of the day, his name goes on 40 million student loan bills.”

    Beyond the customer service the department has already been forced to reduce, other efforts to ease borrowers back into repayment remain in limbo. That includes extra outreach to populations of borrowers who are particularly at risk of falling behind on payments. And it’s also not clear whether the Education Department will be able to fully implement Biden’s new, more generous repayment program before the payment pause ends.

    The budget challenge stems from Congress’ decision last year to keep funding for the Office of Federal Student Aid flat at about $2 billion, rejecting the administration’s request for a roughly 30 percent increase. Republican appropriators offered to increase Education Department’s administrative funding for student loans, but only if it came with a prohibition on using the money for debt cancellation, according to two people familiar with the negotiations.

    In recent weeks, Education Department officials briefed congressional staff on the funding situation for the remainder of this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. The agency expects its available funds will be “fully utilized” to support a return to repayment, and the department plans to re-program and shift around some money to boost its loan servicing operations, according to a copy of the plan obtained by POLITICO.

    Democrats plan to press for more funding for the Office of Federal Student Aid in the coming months as Congress hammers out government funding for next year, according to House and Senate aides. The administration said it needs a $620 million increase, about 30 percent, from the current level of funding, though that figure assumes debt cancellation will happen and there will be tens of millions of fewer accounts to manage.

    A group of Senate Democrats, led by Elizabeth Warren, earlier this month warned of “catastrophic consequences for millions of working and middle-class Americans” if the Education Department doesn’t get that funding to help borrowers navigate the restart of payments.

    Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, “will continue to fight for additional resources to FSA to help Pell Grant recipients and student borrowers,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

    Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that advocates for deficit reduction, said that while he’s sympathetic to the Education Department’s need for funding to properly restart payments the administration has a “credibility gap” on the issue.

    “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me seven times, shame on me,” he said, referring to the Education Department’s many extensions of the payment pause. “There’s no question that they need resources to be able to restart payments and collect the money. The question is: If you give them resources, are they going to use it for that? Or are they going to use it for their various debt cancellation schemes?”

    Goldwein said he supports efforts by the administration to minimize the massive disruption of payments restarting for millions of borrowers, such as pulling borrowers out of default and suspending typical penalties for missed payments.

    “It’s much better to do this well and with a little bit more grace than to do it poorly and save a few dollars,” he said.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Biden’s team fears the aftermath of a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive

    Biden’s team fears the aftermath of a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive

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    One side will say that Ukraine’s advances would’ve worked had the administration given Kyiv everything it asked for, namely longer-range missiles, fighter jets and more air defenses. The other side, administration officials worry, will claim Ukraine’s shortcoming proves it can’t force Russia out of its territory completely.

    That doesn’t even account for the reaction of America’s allies, mainly in Europe, who may see a peace negotiation between Ukraine and Russia as a more attractive option if Kyiv can’t prove victory is around the corner.

    Inside the administration, officials stress they’re doing everything possible to make the spring offensive succeed.

    “We’ve nearly completed the requests of what [Ukraine] said they needed for the counteroffensive as we have surged weapons and equipment to Ukraine over the past few months,” said one administration official who, like others, was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal considerations.

    But belief in the strategic cause is one thing. Belief in the tactics is another — and behind closed doors the administration is worried about what Ukraine can accomplish.

    Those concerns recently spilled out into the open during a leak of classified information onto social media. A top secret assessment from early February stated that Ukraine would fall “well short” of its counteroffensive goals. More current American assessments are that Ukraine may make some progress in the south and east, but won’t be able to repeat last year’s success.

    Ukraine has hoped to sever Russia’s land bridge to Crimea and U.S. officials are now skeptical that will happen, according to two administration officials familiar with the assessment. But there are still hopes in the Pentagon that Ukraine will hamper Russia’s supply lines there, even if a total victory over Russia’s newly fortified troops ends up too difficult to achieve.

    Moreover, U.S. intelligence indicates that Ukraine simply does not have the ability to push Russian troops from where they were deeply entrenched — and a similar feeling has taken hold about the battlefield elsewhere in Ukraine, according to officials. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the U.S. hasn’t adequately armed his forces properly and so, until then, the counteroffensive can’t begin.

    There is belief that Kyiv is willing to consider adjusting its goals, according to American officials, and a more modest aim might be easier to be sold as a win.

    There has been discussion, per aides, of framing it to the Ukrainians as a “ceasefire” and not as permanent peace talks, leaving the door open for Ukraine to regain more of its territory at a future date. Incentives would have to be given to Kyiv: perhaps NATO-like security guarantees, economic help from the European Union, more military aid to replenish and bolster Ukraine’s forces, and the like. And aides have expressed hope of re-engaging China to push Putin to the negotiating table as well.

    But that would still lead to the dilemma of what happens next, and how harshly domestic critics respond.

    “If the counteroffensive does not go well, the administration has only itself to blame for withholding certain types of arms and aid at the time when it was most needed,” said Kurt Volker, the special envoy for Ukraine during the Trump administration.

    A counteroffensive that doesn’t meet expectations will also cause allies in foreign capitals to question how much more they can spare if Kyiv’s victory looks farther and farther away.

    “European public support may wane over time as European energy and economic costs stay high,” said Clementine Starling, a director and fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, D.C. “A fracturing of transatlantic support will likely hurt U.S. domestic support and Congress and the Biden administration may struggle to sustain it.”

    Many European nations could also push Kyiv to bring the fighting to an end. “A poor counteroffensive will spark further questions about what an outcome to the war will look like, and the extent to which a solution can really be achieved by continuing to send military arms and aid alone,” Starling said.

    Biden and his top aides have publicly stressed that Zelenskyy should only begin peace talks when he is ready. But Washington has also communicated to Kyiv some political realities: at some point, especially with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, the pace of U.S. aid will likely slow. Officials in Washington, though not pressing Kyiv, have begun preparing for what those conversations could look like and understand it may be a tough political sell at home for Zelenskyy.

    “If Ukraine can’t gain dramatically on the battlefield, the question inevitably arises as to whether it is time for a negotiated stop to the fighting,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s expensive, we’re running low on munitions, we’ve got other contingencies around the world to prepare for.”

    “It’s legitimate to ask all these questions without compromising Ukraine’s goals. It’s simply a question of means,” Haass said.

    Earlier this month, Andriy Sybiha, a deputy head in Zelenskyy’s office, told the Financial Times that Ukraine would be willing to talk if its forces reach Crimea’s doorstep. “If we will succeed in achieving our strategic goals on the battlefield and when we will be on the administrative border with Crimea, we are ready to open [a] diplomatic page to discuss this issue,” he said.

    That comment was quickly rebuffed by Tamila Tasheva, Zelenskyy’s Crimea envoy: “If Russia won’t voluntarily leave the peninsula, Ukraine will continue to liberate its land by military means,” she told POLITICO earlier this month.

    It doesn’t help America’s confidence that the war has slowed to a brutal slog.

    Both sides have traded punishing blows, focused on small cities like Bakhmut, with neither force able to fully dislodge the other. The Russian surge ordered up earlier this year, meant to revitalize Moscow’s struggling war effort, seized little territory at the cost of significant casualties and did not do much to change the overall trajectory of the conflict.

    The fighting has taken a toll on the Ukrainians as well. Fourteen months into the conflict, the Ukrainians have suffered staggering losses — around 100,000 dead — with many of their top soldiers either sidelined or exhausted. The troops have also gone through historic amounts of ammunition and weaponry, with even the West’s prodigious output unable to match Zelenskyy’s urgent requests.

    U.S. officials have also briefed Ukraine on the dangers of overextending its ambitions and spreading its troops too thin — the same warning Biden gave then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani as the Taliban moved to sweep across the country during the U.S. military withdrawal in 2021.

    But the chances of Ukraine backing down from its highest aspirations is, to say the least, unlikely. “It’s as if this is the only and last opportunity for Ukraine to show that it can win, which of course isn’t true,” said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Unions pour on support for Biden’s Labor pick amid confirmation worries

    Unions pour on support for Biden’s Labor pick amid confirmation worries

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    congress labor secretary 59286

    The “Stand with Su” effort is a direct counterweight to some of the forces that have been lobbying against her — including the name choice, as one of the main anti-confirmation groups is called “Stand Against Su.”

    “Julie Su has been a champion for labor, and labor is mobilizing in the way only we can,” AFL-CIO spokesperson Ray Zaccaro said.

    A key part of the pitch is that Su, who faces a committee vote Wednesday, is in the same mold as former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, a seasoned politician who had fans on both sides of the aisle and who has been directly involved in rounding up support for her, according to an administration official. Su served as Walsh’s deputy secretary beginning in July 2021 and has been acting head of the department for the past month, after Walsh stepped down to run the NHL Players’ Association.

    “She has worked hand in hand with Marty Walsh,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten told POLITICO. “If you liked the way Marty Walsh operated as the Secretary of Labor, then there’s no reason not to embrace Julie Su.”

    But Republicans say Su, who was labor secretary in California before coming to Washington, would veer sharply left of Walsh and used a confirmation hearing this week to portray her as anti-business and captive to labor’s priorities. Although all five of the senators in question voted to confirm Su as deputy secretary, Manchin, Tester and Sinema are likely to face tough reelection fights next year.

    “The more that people learn about her track record and just how bad she was in this role in California, we’re seeing that shifting the debate,” Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.), a leading critic of Su, told POLITICO prior to her confirmation hearing. “It’s very different when you’re going for the top position than being under Marty Walsh.”

    The battle over Su is the Biden administration’s first attempt at replacing a Cabinet secretary, and the latest test of Democratic leadership’s ability to confirm nominees after multiple high-profile misfires. Though Su is already steering the department, administrations are typically wary of issuing major policy decisions without a permanent leader, meaning that a protracted confirmation fight could bog down the agency for months.

    Administration officials are holding nightly “war room” calls with Su’s backers to discuss the game plan for the following day and to track developments, according to a White House official. The administration also holds 15 to 20 check-in calls per day across labor and business groups.

    Walsh has also been actively engaged in the process and advocating for Su with labor and business leaders and senators, according to an administration official.

    Many Democrats on Capitol Hill are hopeful Kelly, Tester and King will support Su. If that is the case, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein remains in San Francisco recovering from shingles, Su and the White House would still need to win over Manchin and Sinema, both of whom have bucked the president in the past.

    Neither senator is on the committee that will vote Wednesday on whether to advance Su’s nomination to the floor and attention will fully turn to them immediately after the vote.

    Su has been ramping up her meetings with senators of both parties in recent weeks, though she has yet to meet with several key holdouts. She has spoken to Sinema, according to two sources familiar with the situation, and the White House is in touch with Manchin, an administration official said.

    Su doesn’t have a traditional “sherpa,” a veteran lawmaker or some other plugged-in operative who typically leads Cabinet officials and other important nominees through the confirmation process on Capitol Hill. The lack of one has raised eyebrows among some of Su’s supporters about the White House’s level of support for the nomination.

    The term “sherpa” is being phased out at the White House, however. Instead, she has a “navigator” — the senior leader of the Labor Department’s congressional affairs shop. The office has led Su through the process and accompanied her at each of her Senate meetings, according to that official.

    Su is only the second Cabinet official to go through the confirmation process since the first months of the Biden administration — Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Arati Prabhakar being the other — and the agencies now lead the confirmation process, an administration official said.

    With an obvious eye toward Manchin, the White House has heavily touted Su’s support from labor unions, including the AFL-CIO, Teamsters and, most significantly, United Mine Workers of America.

    While a recent letter of support from Mine Workers President Cecil E. Roberts may pull weight with Manchin, Su supporters have been cautious to not be too heavy-handed with either him or Sinema, knowing that an overt lobbying effort may backfire.

    “The White House knows what they need to do for the best outcome to get Julie Su confirmed,” said an organized labor official, who requested anonymity to discuss political strategy. “They know the relationship dynamics they have with the senators in question. And they know it’s a complicated circumstance that requires deft and delicate management.”

    The White House’s light-touch strategy is not entirely reliant on unions to shoulder the lobbying load and the administration has highlighted her support from groups like the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Small Business Majority and those representing Asian American and Pacific Islanders. If confirmed, Su would be Biden’s first AAPI Cabinet secretary and his fourth AAPI Cabinet member overall.

    But organized labor is at the center of the pro-Su push.

    “There’s a world of Julie Su supporters out there, and we’re trying to show that,” the labor official said. “We saw these senators vote for her [to become deputy secretary] and there’s no reason to vote against her now. It remains to be seen just how uncertain they actually are.”

    — Daniella Diaz contributed to this report.

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    #Unions #pour #support #Bidens #Labor #pick #confirmation #worries
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Biden’s Earth Day order aims to ease pollution in poor communities

    Biden’s Earth Day order aims to ease pollution in poor communities

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    image

    The new actions could become especially significant as Biden’s climate agenda pushes the implementation of a host of clean-energy projects that raise local pollution concerns, including mineral mines, battery factories and carbon dioxide pipelines.

    The executive order will be released a day before Earth Day in front of leaders from predominantly low-income and minority communities. In 2020, these activists helped shape his climate, environmental and social justice agenda while driving enthusiasm for his initial White House bid.

    “Those are the groups that came out for this administration and those are the communities that I think the administration will look to again to form a coalition of communities that he will rely on in the next cycle,” Ana Baptista, an adviser to community environmental groups who was invited to the White House event, said in an interview. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence. This is his base.”

    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday that the order “is a continuation of what [Biden has] promised the American people.”

    “He’s going to sign a new executive order making environmental justice the mission of every federal agency,” she said. “When you think about that being the DNA of the administration, I think that’s an important piece here.”

    Biden’s new order will offer direction to federal agencies on how to work with communities early in projects’ development. It will also tell them to improve their collection and use of data on the “cumulative impacts” of an area’s environmental and health problems when weighing decisions on infrastructure such as pipelines, waste incinerators, chemical processing facilities and highways.

    Under current procedures, regulators typically assess pollution from new facilities or projects on a plant-by-plant basis rather than in conjunction with existing emissions from other sources. This method underestimates the health risks, community advocates say.

    By instructing agencies to research and incorporate new data on those cumulative impacts and involving communities early in the process, Biden marries two of the “four historic crises” he identified on the campaign trail in 2020: climate change and racial inequality. Most people who face outsized health and climate vulnerabilities from concentrated pollution sources are people of color and low-income households.

    The order comes as the Biden administration attempts to strike a contrast with House Republicans. They are pushing provisions that would put deadlines on environmental reviews for energy infrastructure projects, expand oil and gas drilling and exports, and slash chunks of clean energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ massive climate legislation.

    The White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in recent days have sniped at each other over negotiations on lifting United States borrowing limits, a standoff that could have major implications for the U.S. and global economy. McCarthy on Wednesday proposed passing his caucus’ energy bill, H.R. 1 (118), in exchange for a one-year debt ceiling increase, as Democrats accused Republicans of turning what had once been a fairly routine procedural vote into hostage-taking.

    “Speaker McCarthy and his extreme caucus’ proposals, including H.R. 1, would be a climate and health disaster that President Biden won’t allow on his watch,” a White House official said in a statement.

    Baptista, who is also an associate professor at The New School in New York City, said Biden’s order could have major implications for areas already brimming with heavy industry where residents are suffering health risks.

    But she said its effectiveness will depend on political will. It will be up to agencies, for example, to craft methodologies that help them decide whether to deny permits because of pervasive health and environmental disparities.

    Raul Garcia, vice president of policy and legislation with the environmental group Earthjustice, said Biden’s executive order “gives us high hopes” that the federal government would curb new pollution in communities already bearing a disproportionate environmental burden. Weighing various sources of pollution in aggregate rather than individually should raise the bar for pollution in a particular place because “people on the ground don’t experience pollution pollutant by pollutant,” he said.

    Still, implementing the order across the federal government will require hard work, Garcia said.

    Recent decisions by the administration would exacerbate environmental and health inequalities for some communities, he said, such as the Interior Department’s approval last month of the Willow oil project in Alaska. He also criticized the White House embrace last year of a bill from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) that would have changed environmental review laws to speed permitting for energy projects.

    “On its merits, it’s something the country has needed for a very long time,” Garcia said of the new executive order. “At the same time, it does come on the heels of very dangerous decisions coming out of the Biden administration. We have to analyze the whole of the thread of decisions as we’re reacting to this.”

    Biden has nonetheless made eliminating environmental inequalities central to his climate and energy agenda, including the IRA. He has pledged that at least 40 percent of clean energy and climate benefits will flow to environmentally overburdened communities to correct historical inequalities and underinvestment. Republicans have proposed cutting one of his administration’s signature programs for driving clean energy investment to poorer communities — a $27 billion green bank created by the IRA.

    While his administration set lofty goals, the White House has taken criticism from many advocates in the environmental justice movement, which seeks to address systemic imbalances in the way pollution and other harms burden low-income communities and people of color. They have accused the Biden administration of failing to properly staff its environmental justice initiatives, and have sought more transparent accounting of how the administration is reaching its 40-percent goal.

    The activists have also slammed the subsidies for carbon capture and hydrogen power found in the IRA and in 2021’s bipartisan infrastructure law.

    Friday’s actions, however, address a key concern for the movement, as asking agencies to consider the totality of already-present pollution and health risks has been a pillar of its agenda since its infancy.

    That push took on increased attention in recent years in Congress. Getting the federal government to more seriously assess the cumulative impacts of pollution was also the primary goal for the late Rep. Donald McEachin (D-Va.), an early Biden supporter whose input shaped the then-candidate’s platform on environmental justice. McEachin sponsored the Environmental Justice For All Act, H.R. 1705 (118) — which now bears his name — along with House Natural Resources Committee ranking member Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.). That bill would require agencies to consider cumulative impacts.

    The moves announced Friday also answer other concerns activists wanted the White House to address.

    The order creates a White House Office of Environmental Justice to coordinate and implement efforts across the federal government, although a White House fact sheet did not specify how many people will work for it. The office will be housed inside the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

    The Biden administration will also unveil a scorecard to evaluate agencies’ environmental justice progress and detailed new programs at the Commerce Department, National Science Foundation and NASA that qualify for Biden’s 40-percent pledge.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )