Tag: Bidens

Biden’s new deficit hawk persona has some progressives feeling some bad deja vu

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The growing fixation on the deficit is notable for a White House that championed an expansive economic agenda, including trillions of dollars in emergency deficit spending that, it says, proved critical to fighting the pandemic and revitalizing the economy.
The rhetorical shift has quietly worried some progressive-minded Democrats who warn it could undermine the case for future crisis aid — or backfire on Biden himself if the U.S. sinks into a recession that results in greater government spending and fewer tax receipts, driving the deficit higher.
But Biden has leaned enthusiastically into the deficit focus, driven by what advisers described in large part as a political calculation aimed at bolstering his economic record, winning over middle-of-the-road voters, and bludgeoning the GOP over its own deficit-busting policies in the process.
“There’s a salience to this right now,” said one White House official. “The political argument over deficits and spending is about two competing visions.”
Part of what’s driving Biden to home in on the deficit are the coming showdowns with the GOP later this year over the debt ceiling and federal budget.
The president has accused the GOP of demanding spending cuts while backing policies that would add $3 trillion to the national debt. In particular, he’s singled out their plans to roll back taxes on the wealthy and prescription drug reforms projected to ease the deficit. And he’s challenged House Republicans to release their own detailed budget proposal.
Biden’s deficit focus also serves as a preview of what advisers hope will be a clear line of attack in a potential 2024 rematch against former President Donald Trump. Biden himself has noted that “in the previous administration, America’s deficit went up every year, four years in a row.”
A White House spokesperson downplayed the recent uptick in deficit rhetoric, calling the issue a longstanding focus for Biden dating back to the Obama administration. And, so far, some progressives are willing to chalk it all up to political gamesmanship.

“It feels like more of a rhetorical point about the absurdity of Republican policies than an agenda,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, summing up the approach as, “We’ll steal your argument and make you look foolish.”
Still, Biden’s sharper approach toward the deficit of late has troubled other progressives, who fear it signals a surrender of any future willingness to use government support to help in tough economic times.
They note that most voters don’t vote on deficit concerns, and fear echoes of the Obama administration, when the White House spent precious time and resources making concessions to Republicans in hopes of a deficit reduction deal only to see one never materialize.
“You obviously worry. There’s a history here,” said Dean Baker, senior economist at the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research. “I don’t think we’re likely to be there again, but if you did have some serious deficit reduction, we could see it really hitting the economy.”
Stephanie Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University who advised Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run, said Biden’s deficit rhetoric could complicate his defense of ambitious economic spending down the road. The administration’s student debt relief plan, for example, is projected to balloon the deficit by $400 billion over a decade — more than the entire savings created by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.
The expiration of Trump-era pandemic relief spending helped drive down the deficit during Biden’s first two years. But much of the major legislation he’s signed since then, including investments in semiconductor manufacturing and infrastructure, are expected to add to the deficit in the coming years.
In addition, if the U.S. does hit a recession, the slowdown would naturally result in higher spending on government programs and lower tax revenue, driving up the deficit on its own.
“This is the most anticipated recession in the history of the country, and if it finally happens, I promise you the deficit is going to go much higher on its own,” Kelton said. “Might as well anticipate that and not talk yourself into a situation where you told everybody to evaluate you on your ability to keep bringing the deficit down.”
The White House has dismissed concerns about the risk of a recession, arguing that all the major indicators show a robust economy. Officials also said the administration draws a distinction between “long-term programmatic spending” that should be paid for, and “emergency spending,” like bills to fight the pandemic and aid Ukraine, that are not. The overarching focus on the issue, they added, is aimed at showing that it’s possible to reduce the deficit while strengthening government programs, rather than gutting them.
“[Biden] wants to reduce the deficit by having a real conversation about reforming the tax code, by cutting wasteful spending that we make to large corporations,” one White House official said. “He’s not interested in having a deficit reduction conversation that’s about cutting programs Americans really count on.”
Indeed, despite broader wariness of deficit talk, Biden’s refusal to abandon the remainder of his far-reaching Build Back Better agenda has eased concerns among most Democrats that Biden’s rhetoric is much more than a political tactic.
Biden is expected to follow through on his State of the Union vow to propose boosting taxes on billionaires, a revenue-raising move that effectively mainstreams an idea long popular in progressive circles. And he’s continued to push for expansive policies like reviving the expanded Child Tax Credit and instituting universal paid leave, even with no path to passing them through a divided Congress.
He has also stood firm on his pledge not to touch entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, more recently expanding his criticism of Republicans’ budget ideas to include warnings that the party might seek cuts to Obamacare or the Medicaid program.
White House allies said they expect the president’s forthcoming budget proposal will only serve to reinforce that more substantive vision — and as long as it keeps Republicans on the defensive, they’re happy to have Biden talk about the deficit as much as he wants.
“This White House is the opposite of chastened from its first two years agenda,” Green said. “They know what’s popular and they want to run on it.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 28, 2023
United States | The Supreme Court is considering Biden’s plan for student loan forgiveness

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Under the relief plan, anyone making less than $125,000 a year could have their student loans cut by $10,000.
of the United States the supreme court will hear the president on tuesday Joe Biden a plan that would seek to eliminate nearly $400 billion in student loan repayments.
The Supreme Court is expected to make a final decision by the end of June on whether millions of Americans will have their loans forgiven.
Under the relief plan, anyone making less than $125,000 a year could have their student loans cut by $10,000. $20,000 of loans for students with state need-based aid would be forgiven.
#United #States #Supreme #Court #Bidens #plan #student #loan #forgiveness
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( With inputs from : pledgetimes.com )

February 28, 2023
‘We can’t find people to work’: The newest threat to Biden’s climate policies

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“Having the technicians and the engineers and skilled mechanics, that is going to be a challenge in the United States,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a prominent Democratic clean energy proponent whose own 2020 presidential platform helped shape some of Biden’s policies, said in an interview.
Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act includes $369 billion in clean energy incentives that are meant to send a signal to U.S. businesses — encouraging them to build and deploy electric cars, carbon-free energy sources and less-wasteful appliances. And it appears to be working: More than 100,000 clean-energy job openings have sprung up across the U.S. since Biden signed the climate law six months ago, according to Climate Power, a coalition of environmental groups.
But another report cast a more ominous outlook: The U.S. construction industry was short 413,000 workers as of December, while 764,000 manufacturing sector jobs remained open, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the consulting firm McKinsey & Co, expects 550,000 new energy transition jobs will become available by 2030, about 10 percent of which may be filled by people leaving the oil and gas industry.
“The first thing I heard from everyone was the same thing: We can’t find people to work,” said Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), said of a recent visit to his manufacturing-heavy district in northern Ohio. “That’s inhibiting what they can do.”
Companies in the clean energy sector have raised alarms about labor shortages, said Dawn Lippert, CEO of Honolulu-based Elemental Excelerator, a group that helps clean energy start-ups.
“Our portfolio companies have two main concerns: capital and workforce. The need to grow the workforce is evident in all industries, from electricians to finance,” she said.
The climate law recognized the gap. It included incentives, such as more lucrative tax credits, for partnering with registered apprentice programs and broad funding that could be used for workforce development to train people to maintain clean heavy-duty vehicles and heat pumps and to install clean energy projects. Biden underscored the point by visiting a labor union training facility in Wisconsin, his first stop on a manufacturing tour after his State of the Union, where he called the law “a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.”

Those investments will help state leaders who have raised concerns about the pace of workforce development, said Casey Katims, executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a bipartisan coalition of 24 governors. States could use those funds to reorient apprenticeship and community college programs, he said, much as they did in the 1990s and 2000s to prepare people for computer science jobs.

“It’s incumbent on all of us to make sure that our labor markets and our workforce development systems catch up to the shift and the huge opportunity that we’re seeing,” he said.
An emerging field of climate technology known as carbon management offers a warning.
The Biden administration and Congress want to grow the sector, which aims to capture greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning or pull them from the air. The suite of technologies would then pump the gas below ground, turn it into other products or use it as a source for lower-carbon hydrogen power. Scientists have said such innovations may be needed to keep the planet from reaching greenhouse gas concentrations that push the planet past the point of catastrophic warming.
McKinsey and the tech companies Alphabet, Meta, Stripe and Shopify bought into the promise, pledging last year to play a “catalytic role” in the carbon removal industry’s development. Under the banner Frontier Climate, they joined together to announce they would help the carbon removal industry grow, in part by promising to buy the climate credits generated by such projects.
Frontier Climate also built a searchable database to alert scientists, engineers and professionals in other fields to potential careers in carbon management. But when the database was published in November, it identified more than 100 technical issues that must be answered for the technology to scale up.
The exercise also revealed that many of the skills and workers needed to store and transport carbon dioxide, such as geologists and pipefitters, are similar to those employed by oil and gas industry — which could be a potential labor pool.
“Who knows the most about the subsurface and putting the CO2 underground? The oil and gas industry,” said Ryan Orbuch, a former Stripe employee who is now a partner at venture capital firm Lowercarbon Capital.
“We’re not going to do gigatons of carbon removal without employing the people who do gigatons of moving carbon around already,” he added. “Those people just currently work in oil and gas companies because those are the only companies that do this right now.”
Anu Khan, director of science and innovation at Carbon180, an advocacy firm that supports carbon removal, said to avoid a labor crunch in the future, cleantech industries must already begin informing workers with comparable skills in other industries about the opportunities available in clean energy. She said the industry needs trade union members’ skills, such as fitting pipelines to move carbon dioxide, drilling wells to store carbon dioxide and doing the engineering to build and operate machinery.
“We haven’t immediately fully run up against that challenge yet, but it’s on the horizon,” she said of the workforce gap.
Khan is trying to connect the industry with labor unions and tradespeople. The links are sometimes explicit: Roxanne Brown, the United Steelworkers’ vice president at large, is on Carbon180’s board of directors.
“These investments are going to be tremendously helpful to protect jobs in the industrial sector, and make it more sustainable and globally competitive,” Anna Fendley, director of regulatory and state policy with United Steelworkers, said of carbon management in a Jan. 26 call with reporters.
While it’s unclear how many jobs the carbon removal industry could generate, climate researchers have projected potentially major gains from one segment known as direct air capture. (This early-stage technology would pull greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, as opposed to a specific power plant or factory.)
For every megaton of carbon dioxide that a direct air plant can remove per year, the technology will create about 1,500 temporary jobs and then 500 permanent jobs for ongoing operations, climate research firm Rhodium Group estimated. That could translate to 1.5 million construction and 500,000 operation jobs for every gigaton. Direct-air capture at 0.5 gigaton of carbon dioxide removal annually would support a more modest 139,000 operations jobs, environmental non-profit World Resources Institute suggested.
Scientists project that the world will have to remove 10 gigatons annually by 2050 to keep the planet from heating 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the super-ambitious goal set by the Paris climate agreement.
“We’re talking about a trillion or trillions of dollars that this industry will make up when we’re talking about gigaton scale,” said Whitney Herndon, associate director at Rhodium, who authored the report. “A lot of times the gut reaction on our jobs projection is, ‘Whoa, that’s a lot of jobs.’ But I think that’s from a fundamental misunderstanding of how large this industry is going to be.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 28, 2023
Kerry to stay on as Biden’s top climate diplomat

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Kerry’s relationship with his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, has been a rare bright spot between the United States and China. Kerry has sought to carve out a separate lane to discuss climate with China, the world’s top emitter. He told The Boston Globe those talks have been paused for the past and was informed that Xie had been ill with Covid-19.
The future of natural gas and oil is sure to color the upcoming climate talks amid rising energy costs, energy security concerns stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the UAE’s role as a major hydrocarbon producer.
The decision to stay in his current role, however, will also open Kerry up to investigations by the Republican-led House, with House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) already requesting documents and communication from Kerry’s office. Kerry told the Globe “we have nothing to hide.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 27, 2023
Biden’s new weapons sales strategy puts more emphasis on human rights

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The decades-old rule that the U.S. would not use countries’ past behavior against them when deciding to sell has also been abandoned.
“It’s not that we will only decide against arms transfers if they meet that new lower bar of ‘more likely than not,’” said the official, who asked not to be named in order to discuss the policy ahead of its release. “We are going to be looking at and making risk assessments on every arms transfer on a case-by-case basis.”
The official declined to go into details when asked about specific countries, including whether those with long histories of human rights abuses such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Nigeria would be in jeopardy.
The Biden administration had already tweaked its arms sales policy by refusing to sell Saudi Arabia offensive missiles and bombs after the regime used U.S. weapons to strike civilian targets in its war in Yemen.
Sales of defense weapons to Riyadh continue, however, including air defense and air-to-air missiles.
The new strategy also lays out several areas including competitive financing, exportability, technology security and working with the defense industry to sell equipment not used by the U.S. military.
The government wants to ensure that “even if the United States military is not procuring a certain system, that we can be able to identify the needs of our partners and work with industry to be able to act,” the official said.
“If you can use a country’s past behavior as an indicator for future behavior, that’s a win because the Trump administration said you couldn’t do that,” said Rachel Stohl, director of the Conventional Defense Program at the Stimson Center.

Yet a strategy paper isn’t an end in itself, Stohl added.
“The actual implementation of this is going to be a real test, not what’s on the piece of paper,” she said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 23, 2023
Trump’s visit to Ohio derailment gives Biden’s team some breathing room

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Other Trump critics were more blunt in dismissing the motives behind his visit.
“It’s clear that it’s a political stunt,” said former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a Republican and former member of Congress who led DOT during President Barack Obama’s first term. “If he wants to visit, he’s a citizen. But clearly his regulations and the elimination of them, and no emphasis on safety, is going to be pointed out.”
Buttigieg took his own veiled shot at Trump — though not by name — when answering a POLITICO reporter’s question about the tension between Trump’s rail safety record and his criticisms of the Biden administration.
“There is a chance for everybody who has a public voice on this issue to demonstrate whether they are interested in helping the people of East Palestine or using the people of East Palestine,” Buttigieg said. “A lot of the folks who seem to find political opportunity there are among those who have sided with the rail industry again and again and again as they have fought safety regulations on railroads and [hazardous materials] tooth and nail.”
Buttigieg said he was trying to be careful not to violate the Hatch Act, which restricts federal employees’ political speech, by speaking about a presidential candidate from his position as Cabinet secretary.
Ahead of Wednesday’s appearance, the Democratic National Committee sent reporters a list of Trump’s deregulation efforts, with the subject line: “REMINDER: Trump Slashed Transportation Safety and Environmental Rules, Funding.”
A spokesperson for Trump defended his record and said that he was not to blame for the tragedy in East Palestine.
Trump, who launched his latest presidential bid in November, said on his social media network Truth Social that he was venturing to Ohio to visit “great people who need help, NOW!”

On Wednesday Trump appeared in East Palestine, bringing with him Trump-branded water and cleaning supplies. Speaking in front of an East Palestine Fire Department truck, Trump took shots at the Biden administration’s response, including the EPA, Buttigieg and even Biden himself.
While handing out red MAGA hats, Trump told reporters, “Buttigieg should’ve been here already.” He also had a message for Biden: “Get over here.”
Buttigieg plans to travel to East Palestine Thursday, after taking intense heat from Republicans for not going sooner. The Biden administration has said that high-ranking officials, aside from EPA chief Michael Regan, did not visit East Palestine in the derailment’s immediate aftermath to comply with the evacuation order in place and to avoid impeding investigation and emergency response efforts.
Trump also called on Norfolk Southern to “fulfill its responsibilities and obligations” to the village. The EPA formally put the rail company on the hook Tuesday for covering all costs of the clean up, which the railroad had already pledged to do.
“If our ‘leaders’ are too afraid to actually lead real leaders will step up and fill the void,” his son Donald Trump Jr. wrote on Twitter last week.
Among other criticisms, lawmakers of both parties have questioned DOT’s oversight of the railroad industry’s labor and safety practices in light of the fiery Ohio crash, which unleashed plumes of toxic smoke and left lingering worries about air and water contamination. They have also faulted the Biden administration for not sending any senior leaders to the derailment site until EPA Administrator Michael Regan traveled there last week.
Buttigieg has not yet gone there but said he plans to, and the heads of DOT’s Federal Railroad Administration and its hazardous materials agency are expected to be in East Palestine on Wednesday. Biden administration officials have said that top leaders held off from visiting the site to comply with evacuation orders and to avoid creating a distraction. Still, lower-level investigators and employees from agencies such as the FRA and EPA swarmed to East Palestine within hours after the 150-car Norfolk Southern train went off the track with a cargo that included flammable chemicals such as vinyl chloride.
Because the disaster was a chemical spill, White House officials said, Regan was the lead agency official tasked with responding. Regan’s agency has faced skepticism from residents about its assurances that East Palestine’s air is safe to breathe, despite a lingering odor that has left residents in the village complaining about rashes and headaches.
Buttigieg told reporters Monday that he plans to go to the site “when the time is right.”
“I am very interested in getting to know the residents of East Palestine and hearing from them about how they’ve been impacted and communicating with them about the steps that we were taking,” he said.
Even some less partisan observers have questioned why the Biden administration didn’t send a high-profile official sooner to show its support for people in East Palestine.
“There’s a tremendous value when a catastrophe occurs of a high-ranking official taking charge,” William Reilly, who led EPA during the George H.W. Bush administration, told POLITICO’s E&E News for a story Tuesday. He said the purpose of those visits can include “communicating to the locally impacted people and to the country. The communication part is enormously important. And that did not happen here.”
Local and state political leaders said they welcome high-level attention — to a point. They include East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway, a registered Republican who on Monday had called President Joe Biden’s decision to visit Ukraine before coming to his Ohio village “the biggest slap in the face.”
At a news conference Tuesday, Conaway said Trump is welcome to visit but that he does not want the village to become “political pawns.”
“We don’t want to be a soundbite or a news bite,” Conaway said. “We just want to go back to living our lives the way they were.”
A spokesperson for Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Daniel Tierney, declined to comment when asked whether Trump is welcome in East Palestine.
One senior administration official, granted anonymity to speak freely because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said Biden’s appointees are “supporting people in East Palestine” while Trump and other Republicans “see the people there as political props.”
“Trump’s visit validates that this is all about politics for him and Republicans who have been quick to criticize and bizarrely blame Secretary Pete yet are the same people who have done Norfolk Southern’s bidding on rolling back major safety requirements,” said the official. “Trump more than anyone.”
Watering down rail regs
As president, Trump made rescinding regulations a major priority for his agencies, even signing an order requiring them to revoke two rules for every one they enact. At the same time, he said he wanted to “ensure that America has among the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet.”
His administration’s most high-profile action on rail safety was its withdrawal of a 2015 rule mandating more advanced brakes on some trains carrying especially hazardous materials.
That withdrawal, however, stemmed from intervention by Congress, which required regulators to put the rule through a more stringent cost-benefit analysis after the Obama administration had issued the regulation. The rule ultimately failed that analysis.
Even if that rule had taken effect, it would not have applied to the train that derailed in East Palestine, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board — the lead agency investigating the crash — wrote on Twitter last week. Still, environmental groups pressed Buttigieg last week to restore the Obama-era brake rule, writing that “[i]t should not take a tragedy like the recent hazardous train derailment in Ohio … to turn attention to this issue again.”
Trump’s DOT also took several rulemaking actions sought by railroad companies that could weaken safety, including its withdrawal of a rule requiring that a crew of at least two people be present on freight trains. The Obama administration had proposed that rule in response to a fiery oil-train derailment that killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in 2013.
The Trump administration argued that “a train crew staffing rule would unnecessarily impede the future of rail innovation and automation.”
Railroad companies say no factual justification exists for mandating crews of more than one person. Such a requirement, they argue, would make U.S. railroads less competitive and could even undermine climate efforts if it makes shippers turn to trucking, which emits more pollution than trains do.
The Norfolk Southern train that derailed in Ohio had three crew members aboard. After the derailment, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) asked in a letter to Buttigieg whether that was too few people to control such a long train.
The Trump administration also dropped a ban on shipping liquefied natural gas by rail tank car, saying the expansion of U.S. natural gas production necessitated the rollback. The ban had been a response to concerns about possible explosions.
In addition, Trump’s Federal Railroad Administration stopped conducting regular rail safety audits of railroads — which the Biden administration later reinstituted — and allowed railroads to replace some human safety inspections with automation.
Under Trump, “railroads could apply for relief from federal regulations, and FRA would grant them,” said Gregory Hynes, the national legislative director of the country’s largest rail union, SMART Transportation Division.
“It’s really shocking what they’ve been able to get away with,” he said.
On chemicals, a rollback of ‘almost everything’
Advocates of tougher regulations on toxic chemicals expressed just as much frustration.
Under Trump, “there was a rollback of, you know, almost everything,” said Sonya Lunder, the Sierra Club’s senior toxics adviser.
Trump’s EPA repealed regulations intended to prevent chemical accidents at industrial facilities and rolled back requirements for companies to regularly assess whether safer technologies or practices have become available. It also withdrew requirements that companies have third-party audits to determine the root causes of accidents.
The Biden administration last year proposed reinstating all those requirements.
Public health advocates also criticized the Trump administration’s implementation of the Toxic Substances Control Act, a longstanding law that Congress gave a bipartisan overhaul in 2016.
Advocates say the law was designed to require EPA to look at the overall health dangers of chemicals, but the Trump administration took steps to look at risks in only a piecemeal fashion. For instance, it declined to factor in chemicals Americans breathe from the air or drink in their water, limiting analyses to only direct exposure from products or uses. The Biden administration has reversed that policy and reconsidered some chemicals’ risks, with potential restrictions or bans on the way.
A federal court in 2019 faulted the Trump-era EPA for avoiding studying certain health risks of some chemicals like asbestos.
Trump’s political appointees also overruled career scientists on a health assessment for a type of PFAS, or so-called “forever chemicals,” that contaminates almost a million Americans’ drinking water and tried to bury internal reports that warned of unsafe chemicals in the air and water.
In addition, Trump proposed shuttering the Chemical Safety Board, a tiny agency that investigates accidents at industrial facilities but has no regulatory or enforcement power.
These rollbacks were carried out by several political appointees with industry ties. Those included Nancy Beck, a former expert for the trade group American Chemistry Council, who became the top political appointee in EPA’s chemical office and limited the agency’s study of hazardous chemicals. Trump later tried to appoint Beck to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but her nomination stalled in the Senate.
Kayla Guo contributed to this report.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 22, 2023
One of Biden’s top political aides set to leave the White House

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Her departure comes at a time of broader, high profile personnel changes inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with chief of staff Ron Klain and communications director Kate Bedingfield both announcing their own exits in recent weeks. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh became the first cabinet official to willingly depart as well.
At the White House, Frank managed external political relationships with different political stakeholders, including elected officials from both parties and longtime supporters of Biden. She also oversaw all political invitations to White House events, such as receptions and celebrations at the residence — and went on every domestic trip Biden has taken as president.
“Carla has loyally and capably served President Biden for many years,” deputy chief of staff Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement. “Her smarts, competence, and work ethic have been an enormous asset to all of us from the campaign to the inauguration to now, which is why we’ve relied on her for so much.” White House counselor Steve Ricchetti said that throughout her time working for Biden, Frank “made his allies feel like part of the Biden family.”
Early in her career, Frank worked in finance for the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Starting in 2017, she entered Biden world and was one of two employees at Biden’s American Possibilities PAC where she worked to build a slate of more than 100 endorsements of candidates and designed Biden’s campaign travel schedule. More recently, she was director of ballot access and delegate operations for the Biden campaign and also worked on the inaugural committee.
Frank is a graduate of Georgetown and last November married White House digital director Rob Flaherty with a number of top White House officials in attendance.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 18, 2023
What we know about the 25M Americans who signed up for Biden’s student debt relief

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In addition, majority non-white neighborhoods accounted for more applications per capita than did majority-white ZIP codes.
Borrowers in blue states were generally more likely to sign up for the program than borrowers in red states, where many Republican officials have railed against its legality and cost. Congressional districts won by Democrats averaged about 57,000 applications for debt relief while GOP-won districts averaged 50,000 applications.
The new details come as Biden’s debt relief program, which offers up to $20,000 of loan forgiveness, remains stuck in legal limbo. The Supreme Court later this month will hear oral arguments in two cases brought by Republican-led states and a conservative group, which argue that Biden’s debt cancellation is illegal.
POLITICO examined the ZIP codes associated with each of approximately 23.6 million applications for Biden’s debt relief that were received by the Education Department between Oct. 14 and Nov. 11, when the program was frozen in response to a court ruling. The department provided the data in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
POLITICO’s analysis matched application ZIP codes with U.S. Census Bureau estimates of per-capita income, college attendance and racial demographics, as well as the results of the 2022 midterm elections.
Lower-income areas applied at a higher rate
Critics of Biden’s debt relief program, including many Republicans, have decried it as a handout to wealthy Americans who don’t need the help. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C,), who has led the GOP charge against the plan as chair of the House education committee, has blasted the program as a “transfer of wealth from working class Americans to privileged college graduates.”
The White House, meanwhile, claims that about 90 percent of the benefits will go to families earning less than $75,000. When he announced the program, Biden said it was targeted to “working and middle-class people hit especially hard during the pandemic.”
It’s impossible to know the precise income of the tens of millions of borrowers who applied for debt relief because the Education Department didn’t collect that information. On the application, borrowers were required only to self-certify that their annual income fell below the program’s $125,000 limit for individuals and $250,000 for couples.

The per-capita income of the ZIP codes where applicants live is one proxy for estimating their income. Most people, however, earn more or less than the average of their neighborhood.

POLITICO’s analysis found that more than 98 percent of applications came from ZIP codes where the average income is under $75,000. About two-thirds were from neighborhoods with an average income below $40,000.
Applications from higher-income ZIP codes were more rare. Less than 1 percent of the total applications came from the wealthiest ZIP codes where per-capita income is more than $100,000 — roughly corresponding to the portion of Americans who live in these ZIP codes.
Applications from lower-income areas comprised a greater share of the population of adults who attended at least some college compared to applications from higher-income areas.
For example, about 60 percent of those college-educated adults live in neighborhoods where the per-capita income is less than $40,000. But those areas accounted for a greater share, 66 percent, of the applications for student debt.
There were more applications per capita in majority non-white neighborhoods
The NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus and other proponents of student debt cancellation have argued it will help narrow the nation’s persistent racial wealth gap.

Overall, about 15 million applications came from majority-white neighborhoods, while about 8.6 million applications were from ZIP codes that are majority non-white, the POLITICO analysis found. But the number of applications per capita was higher among majority non-white ZIP codes than it was in majority white ZIP codes.
In Georgia, for example, about 43 percent of the total population lives in ZIP codes that are majority non-white. But those areas accounted for about 54 percent of the student debt relief applications.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) was one of the most prominent Democrats pushing Biden to cancel student debt and ran on the issue during his close reelection bid last fall — even as Democrats in other close races distanced themselves from the program.
Several Atlanta-area ZIP codes, the state’s Democratic strongholds, had particularly high volumes of applications. Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) represents the eastern suburbs of Atlanta in a majority-Black district that had among the highest number of applicants of any congressional district in the country.
“My district is a prime example of why the relief is so important,” he said in an interview, noting that about half of his constituents have a bachelor’s degree but “many others” have debt but no degree. He noted the median household income of the district, which is about $69,000, according to the Census Bureau.
“That’s not wealthy,” Johnson said, pushing back on GOP criticism of the program. “That is doing everything you can to keep your head above water.”
Politically speaking, Johnson said, canceling student debt “was a powerful lever” to drive Democratic turnout across Georgia last fall. “I think it was one of the reasons that people turned out to vote for Raphael Warnock” even as other statewide races, notably the gubernatorial contest, went for Republicans, he said.
“People are looking forward to that relief,” Johnson said. “They know that it came from national Democrats, that it was a Biden initiative.”
The debt relief program is more popular in blue states
The White House launched the application for student debt relief during the 2022 midterm election campaign, and Biden promoted the application in several speeches in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
The applications skewed toward congressional districts won by Democrats, according to POLITICO’s estimates. About 52 percent of applications came from Democrat-won districts; 48 percent were from GOP-won districts.

Percent of all applications and percent of all U.S. adults with some college education within congressional districts, by 2022 election margin
In the typical Democratic district, the number of applications was a greater share of the population that attended college than it was in the typical Republican district.
Nationally, about 63 percent of federal student loan borrowers estimated to be eligible for relief had applied for the program or were in line to automatically receive relief, according to the POLITICO analysis of Education Department data.
That sign-up rate was higher in many blue states where Democrats heavily promoted the administration’s debt relief application. In Vermont and Massachusetts, for example, about 68 percent of eligible borrowers raised their hand for relief.
Many GOP states, by contrast, had participation rates that were lower than the national rate. That includes Republican-led states where officials are suing to block the plan, such as Arkansas (57 percent) and Missouri (59 percent). Wyoming had the lowest share of eligible borrowers: about 55 percent apply for the program.
Methodology
This is a snapshot of about 23.6 million out of a total of 25 million applications because the Education Department has not yet — or is unable to — match the remaining applications with ZIP codes of borrowers, or has masked applications counts in ZIP codes where fewer than 100 applications were filed. There may be duplicates in this pool of applications if people submitted multiple applications.
The data analysis was based on ZIP code-aggregated data provided by the Education Department. We crossed the ZIP codes with approximately equivalent Census Bureau-defined ZIP code tabulation areas using a crosswalk compiled by the Health Resources and Services Administration.
Demographic data used for this analysis is mostly from the 2021 Census Bureau American Community Survey five-year estimates. In some cases, the surveys did not provide median income estimates for certain ZCTAs.
To align the ZCTAs with congressional districts, we used the Geocorr tool created by the Missouri Census Data Center. Because ZCTAs sometimes overlap congressional districts, the portion of applications assigned to those districts were weighted by the portion of population living in each congressional district in these estimates.
The Education Department has determined these applications were submitted by real federal student loan borrowers. It matched applications received on StudentAid.gov last fall to ZIP codes it has on file for student loan borrowers. It has not yet determined that these borrowers actually qualify for relief (whether they have the correct type of federal student loan, whether they took out the loan before July 2022, etc.). In other words, they are just applications, not approvals. Before the program was shut down, the department had begun issuing approvals and approved approximately 16 million borrowers for relief by Nov. 11.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 17, 2023
Senate Democrats marked a major milestone on Tuesday: They’ve now confirmed 100 of Joe Biden’s picks for the federal courts.

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That figure eclipses the pace of both Donald Trump and Barack Obama.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 14, 2023
GOP’s newest attack on Biden’s climate law: China

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To Democrats, such projects and the domestic manufacturing incentives included in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act are the key to creating a homegrown clean energy industry that will end China’s dominance, while weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels. But Republicans contend that the president is recklessly pushing a quick transition away from coal, oil and natural gas — and toward green-energy sources that China dominates.
The GOP strategy plays off anger at China among lawmakers in both parties, which spiked again this month after a suspected Chinese spy balloon wafted across the U.S. before the Air Force shot it down.
“We want to stop the rush to green,” said Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), chair of the Energy and Commerce environment, manufacturing and critical materials subcommittee. Under Biden’s policies, he contended, “Energy costs are going to go higher. Quality of life for the American people is going to go down. America’s economy and energy independence is at stake. Let’s harvest those resources as much as we can here at home.”
Energy experts and members of both parties acknowledge that the U.S. cannot yet make a full break from China, which has had a decade-long head start in developing the supply chain for batteries, solar panels and other clean energy production.
But Democrats say their efforts are directed at replacing Chinese batteries and renewable equipment with U.S.-made parts. They say the attacks from Republicans, who unanimously voted against the climate law, are a transparent attempt to undermine alternatives to fossil fuels.
“Republicans sat on the sidelines while we took these huge steps in the direction of being less dependent on China,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) “So they have no high ground whatsoever on this.”
Supporters of Biden’s policies also warn that an immediate no-China approach would be a recipe for paralysis — slowing the U.S. transition to clean energy, leaving the country without crucial materials, and imperiling the fight to cut planet-warming pollution.
“We can’t make our emissions numbers without solar panels that can only come from China today,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), a former environmental lawyer who serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

“Being wary of them is really important, but the notion that you can just flush your contact with China is not possible,” he added. “You have to manage China. There’s going to be a period of transition. They are still going to be a very large economy.”
The flight of the balloon has only worsened U.S.-China acrimony. Beijing also temporarily cut off climate talks and other contacts with the U.S. last year after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, while China’s growing ties to the Russian energy sector have provoked consternation in Washington since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine a year ago.
China’s starring role in clean energy is undeniable, however.
On top of its world-leading position in processing critical minerals and manufacturing solar cells, wafers and modules, China dominates the production of the batteries needed for electric vehicles at every stage of the supply chain, according to a 2022 report from the International Energy Agency.
“We are still in a tight coupling with China, and it isn’t rational or responsible to talk about that relationship like we can turn it off,” said Kevin Book, managing director at ClearView Energy Partners, a research group.
China hosts about three-quarters of the global production capacity for battery cells, along with more than half the global raw material processing of lithium, cobalt and graphite, the IEA said.
Its stranglehold on the polysilicon wafers that turn sunlight into electricity in solar panels is even greater, accounting for 97 percent of the global manufacturing capacity. Lawmakers last year also enacted a federal law that prohibits the importation of goods that include polysilicon from China’s Xinjiang unless an importer can prove the product was not made with forced labor.
Since Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August, companies have announced plans for tens of billions of dollars of green manufacturing projects across the United States, seeking a slice of the law’s $369 billion in incentives for domestically sourced clean energy.
But those projects are also drawing scrutiny from GOP lawmakers. They’ve promised a lengthy oversight process of the green energy spending bonanza bankrolled through the climate law, as well as investments stemming from Biden’s 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.
“I won’t use the phrase this is the tip of the iceberg, but I would say this is the start of a long and methodical and hopefully sterile process of oversight,” said House Science Chair Frank Lucas (R-Okla.).
Lucas, and other lawmakers from both parties, have raised questions about China’s influence over a Texas-based battery company, Microvast, which has received initial approval for a $200 million federal grant through the infrastructure law to build a facility in Tennessee.
Microvast is a publicly traded U.S. company with a subsidiary in China, but with no ownership by the Chinese government, said Shane Smith, the company’s chief operating officer. The Energy Department has said no taxpayer funds have gone to the company yet, and that DOE is conducting a due-diligence review of the award.
Smith said the company, which has worked with DOE since the Trump administration, is now being used to score political points — though he acknowledged that some companies with links to China are worth investigating.
“Frankly, we’re just the wrong company,” he said. “Are there companies out there that are blatantly acknowledged that are Chinese-owned, that could get actual federal dollars? Yes. Why are those not the examples in what they’re trying to communicate rather than an American company?”
Conservatives and GOP state lawmakers have also begun drawing links between China and investments in their states. Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced last month that he had halted efforts to bring a proposed Ford battery plant to Virginia over concerns about its links to a Chinese company and its technology. The U.S.-based auto giant said Monday that it would locate the project in Michigan instead.
In West Virginia, a Republican state delegate has questioned whether investors in a proposed battery plant there have connections to China and Saudi Arabia.
One solar energy industry executive pointed to conservative ire over a recent announcement that JA Solar, a China-based company that is one of the world’s largest solar manufacturers, will build a factory in Arizona. “The suggestion there is that IRA funds could potentially be going to companies linked to the Communist Party,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the industry’s concerns. The person added, “Our concern is that any link to China is going to be a problem.”
But the person saw a potential bright spot: Because anti-China sentiment on the Hill is bipartisan, an opportunity could exist to channel that energy to advance manufacturing investments — if lawmakers were open to having a meaningful discussion.
Republicans, meanwhile, say Biden’s actions are undermining his stated support for developing domestic sources of critical clean-energy minerals. They point to a recent Interior Department order protecting a swath of lakes and wilderness in Minnesota, which effectively halted a proposed copper mine.
Less than a week later, EPA used a rarely employed veto authority to stop Pebble Mine in Alaska, a contentious metals project that would have extracted significant amounts of copper, gold and molybdenum but risked damaging one of the world’s largest salmon habitats
“The fact they would shut those down demonstrates the phoniness of the conviction of all this, especially with regards to [reducing dependence on] China,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).
Republicans also warn that Democrats’ subsidies to clean energy developers can’t keep up with China’s government support of its own green industries, and that the U.S. won’t be able to quickly build energy and mining projects unless Congress passes legislation to streamline lengthy permitting reviews.
“You can’t compete with a nonmarket behemoth economy in a game of subsidies,” said George David Banks, a former international climate adviser in the Trump administration who now advises Republicans in Congress. “You can throw all the subsidies and still not be able to solve the problem because you can’t build anything.”
Democrats counter that Republicans have not offered a comprehensive plan of their own. They say the GOP’s focus on boosting domestic mining overlooks other aspects of the supply chain reliant on China, such as processing of metals used in batteries.
And they say the GOP’s emphasis on easing fossil fuel production and exports risks setting back U.S efforts to compete with China.
“[Republicans] need a plan, and the plan needs to be a real plan not a political plan — a nuts and bolts, how do we continue to onshore manufacturing here,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). “And right now we have the only real tool to do that, which is the industrial policy which was embedded in the IRA.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 14, 2023