Category: Joe Biden

Mayor Pete becomes Secretary Pete, with a fan club and unusual celebrity status

Pete Buttigieg takes the reins at DOT and brings his Twitter army with him.

Pete Buttigieg will be the next Transportation secretary, bringing his political celebrity and legion of super fans to a mammoth agency that’s not used to headlines — unless they’re jokes about “Infrastructure Week.”

After four years of leadership under former President Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, a Washington, D.C., insider who was notoriously unavailable to reporters, DOT has a new leader who made near-daily appearances on cable TV even before the Senate confirmed him in an 86-13 vote Tuesday.

The one-time presidential candidate and former mayor of South Bend, Ind., has fielded questions during cable TV appearances on everything from impeachment to the former administration’s transgender military ban, serving as what amounts to a surrogate for President Joe Biden’s policies writ large. Continue reading.

Biden immigration orders include family unification task force

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President Biden will sign three executive orders on Tuesday focused on reforming the immigration system and undoing actions of the Trump administration, including establishing a family reunification task force and calling for a review of the public charge rule.

One of the orders will create a task force focused on identifying all of the minor children separated from their parents or guardians due to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy in 2018, which a senior Biden administration official called a “moral failure and a national shame.”

The task force will be charged with reuniting the hundreds of migrant children who still have yet to be brought together with their families, and it will provide regular updates to the president on how to prevent future family separations. Continue reading.

Senate confirms Biden’s DHS pick after GOP delay

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The Senate on Tuesday voted to confirm Alejandro Mayorkas after a Republican effort stalled confirmation of President Biden’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Mayorkas was one of the first of President Biden’s Cabinet nominees to gather significant pushback from Senate Republicans.

He was confirmed by a 56-43 vote. Continue reading.

Robert Reich: The GOP’s COVID relief proposal isn’t a compromise. It would be a total surrender

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Ten Senate Republican have proposed a COVID relief bill of about $600 billion. That’s less than a third of Biden’s plan. They promise “bipartisan support” if he agrees.

Their proposal isn’t a compromise. It would be a total surrender. It trims direct payments and unemployment aid that Americans desperately need. Biden should reject it out of hand.

Republicans say America can’t afford Biden’s plan. “We just passed a program with over $900 billion in it,” groused Senator Mitt Romney. Continue reading.

Biden’s Approval Rating Is Trump’s in Reverse

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Support from a slim majority might be all President Biden can expect — and maybe it’s all he needs.

President Biden entered the White House last month with a broadly positive approval rating — but well shy of the two-thirds of Americans who expressed support for his former boss, Barack Obama, when he took office 12 years ago.

In fact, Biden’s net approval rating is lower than that of any incoming president since the dawn of modern polling, except for his predecessor, Donald Trump. It’s just another clear sign that we’ve entered a new era of partisanship: Media fragmentation and the hard-line politics it has helped foster may make it impossible for any leader to become a true consensus figure.

But it also bears noting that Biden’s approval rating is basically a reverse image of Trump’s. In addition to being loathed by Republicans and embraced by Democrats, he’s firmly in positive territory among independents — who had consistently disapproved of Trump’s performance. Continue reading.

Growing extremist threats put more pressure on Biden

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With far-right domestic terror threats on the rise, experts are urging President Biden to go beyond his initial executive actions and ensure national security forces are better equipped to address homegrown threats.

Biden is coming under pressure to shift resources and boost intelligence sharing following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, when law enforcement agencies were caught flat-footed by hundreds of violent protesters who stormed the building in support of former President Trump.

And the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last week warned that the U.S. may face heightened threats from “ideologically-motivated violent extremists.” Continue reading.

‘It’s a mess’: Biden’s team exposes the chaotic Trump White House they inherited

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President Joe Biden has been in office for 10 days and, already, his administration has uncovered a number of chaotic issues inherited from the Trump administration. 

According to Politico, Biden’s team had a prioritized focus on combatting the raging coronavirus pandemic, but instead of completely focusing on their 200-page pandemic response plan, this week has been largely dedicated to “trying to wrap their hands around the mushrooming crisis — a process officials acknowledge has been humbling, and triggered a concerted effort to temper expectations about how quickly they might get the nation back to normal.”

While the Biden administration’s work should be well underway, they are still working to locate more than 20 million doses of coronavirus vaccines that have already been shipped to states. According to Biden’s administration, they inherited a deeply flawed for maintaining proper records and inventory of vaccine distribution. Continue reading.

Biden’s cleaning up after Trump just like he promised — and the GOP is outraged

President Joe Biden has issued more than 30 executive orders since taking office.

Congressional Republicans are complaining that President Joe Biden has issued a large number of executive orders in his first week in office. They fail to mention the fact that many of Biden’s orders undo some of the 220 executive orders issued by Donald Trump during his time in the White House.

While the lawmakers’ counts have varied, the outrage has been consistent.

“President Biden is setting records and breaking promises,” complainedRep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) on Thursday. “Biden has signed more executive orders in his first week (22) than any other president in history (on pace to sign more than 4,500 EOs in four years).” Continue reading.

Pentagon halts Trump appointments to advisory boards

The move effectively prevents a number of Trump allies, including Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, from actually serving on panels.

The Pentagon has suspended the processing of a number of former President Donald Trump’s last-minute appointees to defense advisory boards as the new administration looks to weed out loyalists to the former president.

The move effectively prevents a number of Trump allies, including his 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and deputy campaign manager David Bossie, from actually serving on panels tasked with providing advice to the defense secretary, at least for the time being.

The news came in an email to advisory board members on Wednesday. The message was obtained by POLITICO and confirmed by two people familiar with the discussions. Continue reading.

Biden just took his first step to expand health coverage

Biden is opening up Obamacare enrollment and planning an ad blitz.

Eight days into his administration, President Joe Biden took a small step to expand health coverage during the Covid-19 pandemic — one that Donald Trump refused to take last year.

In an executive order Biden is signing Thursday, the president directs the US Department of Health and Human Services to open a special enrollment period on HealthCare.gov, allowing Americans to sign up for a new health insurance plan subsidized by the federal government. From February 15 to May 15, people who are uninsured can log on to the federal website and choose a health plan. (HealthCare.gov serves most states but not all; Biden officials said they expected the states that run their own insurance marketplaces to also open up enrollment.)

“These actions demonstrate a strong commitment by the Biden-Harris Administration to protect and build on the Affordable Care Act, meet the health care needs created by the pandemic, reduce health care costs, protect access to reproductive health care, and make our health care system easier to navigate and more equitable,” the White House said in a statement announcing the order. Continue reading.