Category: Joe Biden

U.S. to buy 500 million Pfizer doses to share with the world

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The Biden administration will buy 500 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to share with countries around the world, with the option to buy an additional 200 million, two sources familiar with the deal tell Axios.

Why it matters: That’s a big step toward making the U.S. a major global vaccine supplier and comes as Biden departs for his first foreign trip as president.

Details: The doses were purchased at a not-for-profit price rather than the $19.50 per dose the U.S. paid in its initial Pfizer contract, according to the sources. Most or all of the doses will be distributed through the global COVAX mechanism. Continue reading.

Biden pushes protection for more streams and wetlands, targeting a major Trump rollback

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The change could have broad implications for farming, real estate development and other activities, the latest salvo in a decades-long battle

The Biden administration is set to toss out President Donald Trump’s efforts to scale back the number of streams, marshes and other wetlands that fall under federal protection, kicking off a legal and regulatory scuffle over the fate of wetlands and waterways around the country, from the arid West to the swampy South.

Michael Regan, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said his team determined that the Trump administration’s rollback is “leading to significant environmental degradation.” The EPA and Army Corps of Engineers will craft a new set of protections for waterways that provide habitats for wildlife and safe drinking water for millions of Americans, according to a joint statement.

With the announcement, the Biden administration is wading into a decades-long battle over how far federal officials can go to stop contaminants from entering small streams and other wetlands. Continue reading.

Biden official shuts down Lauren Boebert: ‘That’s not a question with an assumption I’m going to assume’

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Acting White House Budget Director Shalanda Young on Wednesday refused to recognize a question from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) because it assumed that the Biden administration had ceded control of the southern border to Mexican cartels.

Boebert asked the question during a House Budget Committee hearing.

“How long will you be ceding the southern border to the cartels?” she wondered.

Young responded by pointing out that the Trump administration had diverted funds from the U.S. military to use for border control. Continue reading.

Biden revokes, replaces Trump executive orders on Chinese-owned apps

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President Biden signed an executive order Wednesday on ensuring the security of American user data in regard to foreign-owned apps such as TikTok, revoking and replacing three Trump-era executive orders to impose a more structured “criteria-based decision framework” for potential bans.

Driving the news: It’s the latest in a series of China-related steps Biden is taking ahead of his first overseas trip to Europe, where curtailing Beijing’s abuses will be a top agenda item in meetings with G7 and NATO leaders.

Details: The EO replaces three previous Trump-era EOs and directs the Department of Commerce to “instead evaluate foreign adversary connected software applications” under new rules. Continue reading.

HUD to reinstate Obama-era fair housing rule gutted under Trump — minus the ‘burdensome’ reporting requirement

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Some housing discrimination experts worry suspending the requirement could undermine enforcement.

Nearly a year after the Trump administration replaced an Obama-era fair housing rule that critics decried as “burdensome” and that President Donald Trump alleged would “abolish” suburbs, President Biden’s housing department is restoring the requirement that communities take steps to reduce racial segregation or risk losing federal funds.

But missing from the requirement is the 2015 mandate that communities undergo an extensive analysis of local barriers to integration and submit plans to dismantle them to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to senior HUD officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an “interim final rule” before its publication in the Federal Register on Thursday.

Biden administration HUD officials said the creation and review of these assessments of fair housing “proved to be unnecessarily burdensome” for communities as well as the agency, echoing some of the complaints voiced by former HUD secretary Ben Carson. Continue reading.

Biden ends infrastructure talks with key Republican

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President Biden on Tuesday cut off prolonged infrastructure negotiations with a GOP group led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and will instead move forward on discussions with a bipartisan group of senators.

The White House announced Biden’s move after the president and Capito spoke Tuesday afternoon. The two remained far apart on a deal during that discussion despite weeks of talks. The White House as a result is shifting to talks with a bipartisan group that is crafting its own proposal, an administration official confirmed.

Members of the bipartisan group include Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and other Senate moderates, such as Sens. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). The senators are aiming to release a proposal by the end of the week.  Continue reading.

Biden’s Task Force Identified More Than 3,900 Immigrant Children Who Were Separated From Their Families Under Trump

“Our efforts to reunify every family continue,” a senior Department of Homeland Security official said.

The Biden administration has identified 3,913 children who were separated from their parents at the southern border as a result of Trump’s zero tolerance policy as efforts to reunite them ramp up.

Officials believe the latest official government tally released on Tuesday accounts for nearly all separation cases, but said there is still a lot of work required to undo the damage to the families.

“Children were unjustly ripped from the arms of their mothers and loved ones and forced to separate. It is no experience any family should have to live through,” a senior Department of Homeland Security official said on a call with reporters. “Our efforts to reunify every family continue.” Continue reading.

Justice Department proposes policies to address mass shootings

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Administration focuses on stabilizing braces and red flag laws

The Justice Department proposed a new rule Monday to more closely regulate pistols that have “stabilizing braces” to allow them to be fired from the shoulder, which it said has been used in at least two mass shootings in the past three years.

Companies now sell accessories that make it easy for people to convert pistols into more dangerous weapons known as short-barreled rifles, which have heightened regulations because they are easy to conceal, can cause great damage and are more likely to be used to commit crimes, the DOJ said. 

Those accessories mean the owners can get a short-barreled rifle without going through the National Firearms Act’s background check and registration requirements, the proposed rule states. Congress passed the law in 1934 to regulate certain “gangster” type weapons by taxing them, the DOJ said. Continue reading.

As Job Growth Doubles, Republicans Insist Biden ‘Failed’

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House Republicans spent Friday morning attacking President Joe Biden over the latest jobs numbers, suggesting the figures, which were slightly lower than predicted, constituted a failure.

The U.S. economy in fact added 559,000 jobs in May — more than double the number added the month before. The improving employment data comes as new unemployment claims have dropped to new pandemic lows in recent weeks, in the wake of Biden’s American Rescue Plan and a successful COVID-19 vaccination drive.

Though the new job totals were slightly below the economists’ predictions of around 650,000 new jobs, the unemployment rate dropped to 5.8 percent — better than those same economists’ 5.9 percent expectation. Continue reading.

White House Disavows Knowledge of Gag Order on Times Leaders in Leak Inquiry

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The Justice Department also said it was changing its policy to bar seizing reporters’ phone and email records in hunts for their sources.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration said on Saturday that no one at the White House had been aware that the Justice Department was seeking to seize the email data of four New York Times reporters and had obtained a gag order in March barring a handful of newspaper executives who knew about the fight from discussing it.

The disavowal came one day after a court lifted the gag order, which permitted a Times lawyer to disclose the department’s effort to obtain email logs from Google, which operates the Times’s email system. It had begun in the last days of the Trump administration and continued until Wednesday, when the Biden Justice Department asked a judge to quash the matter without having obtained the data about who had been in contact with the reporters.

“As appropriate given the independence of the Justice Department in specific criminal cases, no one at the White House was aware of the gag order until Friday night,” Jen Psaki, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. Continue reading.