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Dozens of people on FBI terrorist watch list came to D.C. the day of Capitol riot

InternationalJan 15. 2021Supporters of President Donald Trump mob the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Photo for The Washington Post by Evelyn Hockstein

By The Washington Post · Devlin Barrett, Spencer S. Hsu, Marissa J. Lang

WASHINGTON – Dozens of people on a terrorist watch list were in Washington for pro-Trump events Jan. 6, a day that ended in a chaotic crime rampage when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, according to people familiar with evidence gathered in the FBI’s investigation.

The majority of the watchlisted individuals in Washington that day are suspected white supremacists whose past conduct so alarmed investigators that their names had been previously entered into the national Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB, a massive set of names flagged as potential security risks, these people said. The watch list is larger and separate from the “no-fly” list the government maintains to prevent terrorism suspects from boarding airplanes, and those listed are not automatically barred from any public or commercial spaces, current and former officials said.

The presence of so many watch-listed individuals in one place – without more robust security measures to protect the public – is another example of the intelligence failures preceding last week’s assault that sent lawmakers running for their lives and left five others dead, some current and former law enforcement officials argued. The revelation follows a Washington Post report earlier this week detailing the FBI’s failure to act aggressively on an internal intelligence report of internet discussions about plans to attack Congress, smash windows, break down doors and “get violent . . . go there ready for war.”

Other current and former officials said the presence of those individuals is an unsurprising consequence of having thousands of fervent Trump supporters gathered for what was billed as a final chance to voice opposition to Joe Biden’s certification as the next president. Still, the revelation underscores the limitations of such watch lists. Although they are meant to improve information gathering and sharing among investigative agencies, they are far from a foolproof means of detecting threats ahead of time.

Since its creation, the terrorist watch list, which is maintained by the FBI, has grown to include hundreds of thousands of names. Placing someone’s name on the watch list does not mean they will be watched all of the time, or even much of the time, for reasons of both practicality and fairness. But it can alert different parts of the government, like border agents or state police, to look more closely at certain people they encounter.

It’s unclear whether any of the dozens of people already arrested for alleged crimes at the Capitol are on the terrorist watch list.

“The U.S. Government is committed to protecting the United States from terrorist threats and attacks and seeks to do this in a manner that protects the freedoms, privacy and civil rights and liberties of U.S. persons and other individuals with rights under U.S. law,” a U.S. official said, adding that because of security concerns, the government has a policy of neither confirming nor denying a person’s watch list status.

The FBI declined to comment.

The riot’s political aftershocks led the House of Representatives on Wednesday to impeach President Donald Trump for allegedly inciting the violence – his second impeachment in a single four-year term – and may have significant consequences within law enforcement and national security agencies.

Inside the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, officials are grappling with thorny questions about race, terrorism and free-speech rights as some investigators question whether more could have been done to prevent last week’s violence.

While some federal officials think the government should more aggressively investigate domestic terrorism and extremists, others are concerned the FBI, DHS and other agencies may overreact to the recent violence by going too far in surveilling First Amendment activity like online discussions.

Several law enforcement officials said they are shocked by the backgrounds of some individuals under investigation in connection with the Capitol riot, a pool of suspects that includes current and former law enforcement and military personnel, senior business executives and middle-aged business owners.

“I can’t believe some of the people I’m seeing,” one official said.

The TSDB, often referred to within government as simply “the watch list,” is overseen by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, which was created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks carried out by al-Qaida. The watch list can be used as both an investigative and early warning tool, but its primary purpose is to help various government agencies keep abreast of what individuals seen as potential risks are doing and where they travel, according to people familiar with the work who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the work is sensitive.

Often that can be done as a “silent hit,” meaning if someone on the watch list is stopped for speeding, that information is typically entered into the database without the individual or even the officer who wrote the ticket ever knowing, one person said.

After the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, for instance, the FBI quickly searched a similar database to see which people on it had recently traveled to that city or raised other suspicions about possible involvement.

Before the Jan. 6 gathering of pro-Trump protesters, FBI agents visited a number of suspected extremists and advised them against traveling to the nation’s capital. Many complied, but according to people familiar with the sprawling investigation, dozens of others whose names appear in the terrorist watch list apparently attended, based on information reviewed by the FBI.

Separately, while the FBI is hunting hundreds of rioting suspects who have dispersed back to their hometowns, federal agents are increasingly focused on alleged leaders, members, and supporters of the Proud Boys, a male-chauvinist group with ties to white nationalism, these people said.

The Proud Boys participated in last week’s protests, and FBI agents are taking a close look at what roles, if any, their adherents may have had in organizing, directing or carrying out violence, according to people familiar with the matter.

The group’s chairman, Enrique Tarrio, had planned to attend Trump’s Jan. 6 rally but was arrested when he arrived in D.C. and charged with misdemeanor destruction of property in connection with the burning of a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a Black church during an earlier protest in Washington. He is also accused of felony possession of two extended gun magazines.

Tarrio told The Post on Wednesday that his group did not organize the Capitol siege.

“If they think we were organizing going into the Capitol, they’re going to be sadly mistaken,” he said. “Our plan was to stay together as a group and just enjoy the day. We weren’t going to do a night march, anything like that. That’s it as far as our day.”

Tarrio said he’s actively discouraging members from attending planned armed marches scheduled Sunday, and the Million Militia March next week when Biden is inaugurated. Proud Boys, he said, are on a “rally freeze and will not be organizing any events for the next month or so.”

It is unclear how many Proud Boys devotees will abide by the freeze, or if such a shutdown might lessen the FBI’s interest in the group. Even before the Jan. 6 riot, federal and local investigators were working to understand the group’s plans, goals and activities. Privately, some federal law enforcement officials have described the group as roughly equivalent to a nascent street gang that has garnered an unusual degree of national attention, in part because Trump mentioned them specifically during one his televised debates with Biden during the campaign. Other officials have expressed concern that the group may be growing rapidly into something more dangerous and directed.

The FBI already has arrested dozens of accused rioters, and officials have pledged that in cases of the most egregious conduct, they will seek to file tough, rarely used charges like seditious conspiracy, which carries a potential 20-year prison sentence.

The bureau continues to face criticism over its handling of a Jan. 5 internal report warning of discussions of violence at Congress the next day. Steven D’Antuono, the head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, claimed in the days after the riot that the bureau did not have intelligence ahead of time indicating the rally would be anything other than a peaceful demonstration.

The Jan. 5 FBI report, written by the bureau’s office in Norfolk, Va., and reviewed by The Post, shows that was not the case, and the Justice Department took other steps indicating officials were at least somewhat concerned about possible violence the next day. The Bureau of Prisons sent 100 officers to D.C. to supplement security at the Justice Department building, an unusual move similar to what the department did in June to respond to civil unrest stemming from racial justice protests.

Mindful of the criticism that law enforcement took a heavy-handed, all-hands-on-deck approach to Black Lives Matters protests in D.C. in the spring and summer, Justice Department officials deferred to the Capitol Police to defend their building and lawmakers there. Some former officials have questioned whether the FBI and Justice Department should have done more.

“It would not have been enough for the bureau simply to share information, if it did so, with state and local law enforcement or federal partner agencies,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department national security official. “It was the bureau’s responsibility to quarterback a coordinated federal response as the crisis was unfolding and in the days thereafter. And it’s presently not clear to what extent the FBI asserted itself in that fashion during the exigencies of January 6 and in the immediate aftermath.”

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Experts warn of vaccine stumbles ‘out of the gate’ because of Trump officials’ refusal to consult with Biden’s team

InternationalJan 15. 2021

By The Washington Post · Laurie McGinley, Amy Goldstein, Lena H. Sun, Isaac Stanley-Becker

WASHINGTON – The last time a presidential transition began during a national emergency – in 2008, amid the Great Recession – the outgoing Bush administration set aside partisanship to work closely with incoming Obama officials about how to deal with the economic collapse.

“Everyone was completely responsive to any question,” said Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama. “They talked to us about major decisions.”

That smooth handoff is in stark contrast to what is happening now as President-elect Joe Biden prepares to assume power during a double-barreled crisis involving a lethal virus and its economic fallout that experts say demands close cooperation. Instead, as the coronavirus overwhelms U.S. hospitals and kills more than 3,300 people a day on average, the Trump administration has balked at providing access to information and failed to consult with its successors, including about distributing the vaccines that offer the greatest hope of emerging from the pandemic.

For more than a month, the Biden team pressed to attend meetings that offered “real-time information on production and distribution of vaccine” – important details for the president-elect’s advisers debating ways to bring the pandemic under control, said a transition official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions.

While health agencies’ career staff have been helpful, it was not until this week that Biden officials were allowed to attend meetings of Operation Warp Speed, the administration’s initiative to accelerate vaccine development and distribution. They were also not invited to the two Warp Speed sessions this weekend when Trump officials decided on sweeping changes to try to speed up the sluggish vaccine rollout. Nor were they briefed on those changes in advance.

While some of those policies mirrored Biden plans, others raised red flags among the president-elect’s advisers. One is a recommendation to offer vaccines immediately to tens ofmillions under 65 who have high-risk medical conditions – a change the Biden team fears could overwhelm state supply and already stressed sign-up systems, while creating unrealistic expectations for those eager to get inoculated.

Another new policy, involving the controversial question of whether to penalize slower-moving states, was to take effect the week after Biden becomes president. State officials say they are uncertain about whether to take the new policy seriously or to brush it off because it seems to lack support from the incoming administration.

But on Thursday, Conn. Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, tweeted that federal officials had notified the state that it would receive an additional 50,000 doses next week “as a reward for being among the fastest states” to get shots into arms. West Virginia, which is moving at the fastest clip based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, did not get any additional doses, said Holli Nelson, a spokeswoman for the state’s National Guard. An HHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Biden transition official also said it took the transition team several weeks to get access to Tiberius, a data system that would have helped officials understand earlier “where vaccine is going, which states are ordering, when it is moving.”

“Look, we are still prepared to meet our goal of 100 million shots in 100 days,” the official said, referring to a commitment Biden made in early December. “But it would have been a lot more helpful if we’d had access to real-time information.”

On Thursday afternoon, another senior Biden official described “uneven cooperation” from the Trump administration. He spoke on the condition of anonymity before Biden’s speech Thursday night calling on Congress for an additional $400 billion to fight the pandemic, including $20 billion for a national vaccination program.

The lack of coordination has alarmed public health officials and experts on presidential transitions, especially as a more contagious virus variant first identified in Britain spreads across the United States and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects as many as 477,000 covid-19 deaths by Feb. 6.

The dearth of coordination “means we are stumbling out of the gate with the vaccine,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “We are failing at a government level on distribution because there is no game plan. There is a chaotic Trump one and a learning-curve Biden one.”

The decision to urge states to immediately vaccinate a much larger pool of people – about 81 million between the ages of 16 and 64 with high-risk medical conditions- was “absolutely inappropriate,” said Michael Osterholm, a member of Biden’s covid-19 advisory board and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

“When you make a recommendation that . . . far exceeds the number of doses that are available for the foreseeable future, that’s not helpful,” Osterholm said. “It only creates confusion, frustration and, frankly, a lack of trust in the system.”

At least 11.1 million people have received one dose of the vaccine in the U.S.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and other Warp Speed officials said they made the decision to dramatically increase eligibility because too many doses are sitting in freezers and they have greater confidence in a reliable supply of vaccines.

A senior Trump official denied there was any effort to keep Biden in the dark about Warp Speed activities. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said that while Biden officials only recently have been invited to Warp Speed meetings, they have been regularly briefed on what has been discussed.

The official said it was not appropriate for the Biden team to take part in making decisions because the United States has “one government at a time.” He added that when Biden becomes president, “they can change everything if they want.”

Tensions between incoming and outgoing administrations aren’t unusual – for example, the post-election period between Democrat Harry S. Truman and Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in the early 1950s was especially acrimonious. But it’s hard to imagine a transition more fraught than this one, with a president raging against the election results as a deadly pandemic rages out of control.

“It’s a very bad TV show that I would stop watching because it is so unbelievable,” said Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan.

The transition initially was stalled when the General Services Administration, headed by a Trump appointee, refused to recognize Biden’s victory and provide funding to his transition team. The GSA administrator reversed course on Nov. 23.

But even when Trump career officials were told they could talk to the Biden team, they were permitted to share only publicly available information, said an administration health official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “After that, we could share nonpublic information, but it had to be cleared first.”

Even if the Trump forces did not want to cooperate with Biden in some areas, there should have been a free flow of information on vaccine issues, said the Trump health official, who compares the current crisis to a war. “The pandemic should have been a DPZ – depoliticized zone,” he added.

Brinkley shared that view. “Operation Warp Speed should be deeply bipartisan” with a constant exchange of information, he said. “The fact that has not been happening with Trump is because he’s called it a fraudulent election. Why would I give data to somebody who is a fake president-elect?”

Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service and an expert on presidential transitions, described handoffs of power as a relay race in which runners have to pass the baton. “You run side by side as fast as possible so you can win,” he said. “You don’t want it to be a start-and-stop strategy, you want it to be a smooth handoff.

“Because your decisions might only last for another week, there should be an alignment” with the incoming administration, he added.

Despite the challenges, Biden and his team have scooped up extensive information about coronavirus vaccine production and distribution from long-standing contacts in pharmaceutical companies and federal agencies. And they have gotten information through back channels from career staff working “off the clock” and using personal email accounts.

Jeffrey Koplan, a former director of the CDC, said it was “shocking” that members of the outgoing administration hadn’t involved Biden’s team in their decision-making.

“It’s not rocket science – it’s been done before,” said Koplan, who was head of the CDC under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

There also was much more discussion and cooperation in prior transitions on a range of health issues, said Nicole Lurie, who is advising the Biden team, participated in the Obama transition and later served as Obama’s assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS.

“I knew the person who had been in the role before me, we had a period of overlap, and there was just a lot of information-sharing,” Lurie said. “It’s nowhere near as complicated as it is now.”

While the Bush-Obama handoff is often cited as a model, a well-functioning transition has been regarded by leaders of both parties as an important goal until very recently, according to former administration officials and historians.

Through most of the 20th century, outgoing and incoming presidents were occasionally antagonistic, such as in the transition between Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early 1930s, Brinkley said. Yet even in those times, it was thought that “the crown jewel of American democracy is the smooth transition. You go out for political combat for two years” until the election, followed by a seamless transition, he said.

Partisanship intensified in the 1990s, he said. But even after the 2000 election, which was contested for more than a month before being decided by the Supreme Court, Bill Clinton’s staff provided the George W. Bush team with intelligence data on al-Qaida and other terrorist groups. That occurred before it was clear that Bush – not Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore – would be the next president, Brinkley noted.

Recalling the drawn-out election battle, Summers, who in 2000 was Clinton’s outgoing treasury secretary, said: “We didn’t think what happened was fair or legitimate. But it didn’t occur to anyone to not concede, or to not work with the transition once the Supreme Court ruled.”

Said Brinkley, “It used to be seen as anti-American not to have a smooth transition.”

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Biden to ask for $400 billion to bolster fight against covid-19

InternationalJan 15. 2021Workers hang banners Thursday for President-Elect Biden ahead of next week’s inauguration. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford

By The Washington Post · Amy Goldstein

President-elect Joe Biden is calling on Congress to pour another roughly $400 billion into fighting the coronavirus pandemic to create a national vaccination program, expand testing, and hire 100,000 more community health workers.

Part of a broad relief package to lift up the nation’s economy and ease the devastation caused by the pandemic at its worst moment so far, Biden’s request spells out his oft-stated determination for the federal government to assume a far more muscular role in responding to the public health crisis.

The scale of what the president-elect envisions far outstrips the funding Congress devoted to fighting the pandemic in a stimulus package it adopted late last year, as well as the sums that House Democrats had unsuccessfully sought.

In particular, senior members of the incoming administration said before Biden’s Thursday night speech that he wants to invest an additional $20 billion to build a federal infrastructure for administering vaccines to protect Americans against covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. It would include adding an unspecified number of locations in communities across the country where people could get shots, as well as mobile sites to go into rural communities and other places where retail pharmacies and health-care facilities are scarce.

“This is a national emergency, and we need to treat it like one,” said one Biden official, speaking on the condition of anonymity before the president-elect’s remarks. “We are woefully behind on where we need to be . . . Delay means more illness and more deaths.”

Biden’s push a half-dozen days before he takes office comes as criticism has mounted of the sluggish pace of immunizing Americans, since two vaccines won federal authorization for emergency use last month. The mass vaccination campaign is considered urgent to protect people from the virus, which is overwhelming many hospitals and killing thousands of people every day.

As of Thursday, at least 11.1 million people have received a first dose of one of the vaccines, each of which requires a two-dose regimen. That is slightly more than a third of the 30.6 million doses that have been distributed to states, cities and U.S. territories, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Biden said more than a month ago that he wants 100 million shots to be given within the first 100 days of his presidency, a period that goes through late April.

He is scheduled to release a detailed vaccine plan Friday, but the financial underpinnings laid out Thursday reflect the fundamental difference between the incoming administraton’s approach and that of President Donald Trump. In the fall, the Trump administration directed each state to write and submit its own vaccination plan. Biden’s team maintains that such an unprecedented vaccination campaign requires strong federal coordination, greater funding and some aspects to be run by the federal government itself.

“We are in a race against time,” the Biden official said. “We need these resources to vaccinate Americans and put covid behind us.”

The $20 billion Biden requested in additional money for vaccines compares with nearly $29 billion included in Congress’s December stimulus package – about $9 billion of the latter for vaccine distribution.

Overall, the approximately $415 billion for pandemic-fighting in Biden’s relief request compares to roughly $50 billion approved by Congress last month for that purpose, according to Marc Goldwein, senior vice president for the Committee for a Responsive Federal Budget. Goldwein said House Democrats had wanted earlier last year to spend approximately $100 billion for that purpose.

The president-elect also wants to invest $50 billion in a large-scale expansion of coronavirus testing, including the purchase of tests that provide rapid results and to expand laboratory capacity. Such expansion, his team contends, would allow schools to test students and staff more frequently, making it safe for schools to reopen – another goal he set last month for his first 100 days in office.

Biden is seeking money to hire 100,000 public health workers to encourage people to get vaccinated, as well as to do contact tracing to figure out who has been exposed by people who test positive. Over the longer term, he envisions these workers helping to build up the nation’s depleted public health departments. His advisers did not spell out how much money would be needed for this purpose.

A portion of the funds would be used to expand genomic sequencing to detect new strains of covid-19, including more-rapidly spreading variants that were first detected in Britain and South Africa.

Other aspects of his request are intended to provide help to people living in poor communities or those belonging to racial and ethnic minorities who have been especially hard hit by the pandemic. His proposal would expand funding for community health centers and for health services for Native Americans on tribal lands.

The proposal would, in addition, help states deploy “strike teams” to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities with outbreaks of covid-19, as well as to help slow the virus spread in prisons and detention centers.

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Biden unveiling $1.9 trillion economic and health care relief package

InternationalJan 15. 2021Joe Biden

By The Washington Post · Erica Werner, Jeff Stein

WASHINGTON – Poised to inherit a health-care disaster and a deteriorating economy, President-elect Joe Biden is laying out a $1.9 trillion emergency relief plan Thursday night that will serve as an early test of his ability to steer the nation out of the pandemic disasters and make good on his promises to unite a divided Congress.

The wide-ranging package is designed to take aim at the twin crises Biden will confront upon taking office Jan. 20, with a series of provisions delivering direct aid to American families, businesses, and communities, and a major focus on coronavirus testing and vaccine production and delivery as the pandemic surge continues.

Biden is aiming to get GOP support for the measure, senior transition officials said, although at nearly $2 trillion the price tag is likely to be too high for many Republicans to swallow. But after campaigning as a bipartisan deal-maker, Biden wants to at least give Republicans the opportunity to get behind his first legislative effort as president.

“We think there is a broad understanding of the urgency of the moment, of the immediacy of the crisis and the need to act,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters ahead of the speech. “And so we’re hopeful that the ideas that are laid out here and the action that is reflected here is something that there’s a lot of support for, and you’re going to see the president-elect tonight call for the kind of move toward pragmatism and unity to try to get something done.”

The package is titled the “American Rescue Plan.” Biden officials described it as a package of emergency measures to meet the nation’s immediate economic and health care needs, to be followed in February by a broader relief plan.

The proposal, which Biden will lay out in a speech at 7:15 p.m. Eastern time Thursday night, comes at a critical time for the nation. More than 4,200 people in the United States died of the coronavirus on Tuesday, a new daily-record high. Also, the economic recovery appears to be backsliding, with jobless claims spiking to a new high since August, as nearly a million people filed for unemployment last week.

It also comes six days before Biden’s inauguration, and a day after the House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump, highlighting the president-elect’s challenge of trying to get his top agenda item passed even as the Senate is likely to be enmeshed in an impeachment trial. Biden has expressed the hope that the Senate can simultaneously move forward on his agenda while also conducting an impeachment trial, although it’s unclear how well that might work in practice.

The plan contains a raft of provisions that build on the approximately $4 trillion Congress has already devoted to addressing the pandemic, which included a $900 billion measure Trump signed in December which Biden has repeatedly described as unfinished business.

It is divided into three major areas: $400 billion for provisions to fight the coronavirus with more vaccines and testing, while reopening schools; more than $1 trillion in direct relief to families, including through stimulus payments and increased unemployment insurance benefits; and $440 billion for aid to communities and businesses, including $350 billion in emergency funding to state, local and tribal governments.

The plan will aim to make good on Biden’s plan for a universal vaccination program, devoting $20 billion to that goal, as well as $50 billion for a “massive expansion” of testing and $130 billion to help schools reopen safely. Among the many goals laid out in the proposal, Biden hopes to deliver 100 million vaccine shots in 100 days, and re-open a majority of K-12 public schools in that same time frame.

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had urged Biden to consider a higher price tag than what he was initially eyeing for the proposal, according to a person familiar with the conversation who spoke on condition of anonymity to recount the conversation. The size and scope of the package exceeded the expectations of a number of outside advocates, while answering demands from economists for a major new investment to get the economy on a sounder footing.

“We do need more stimulus. In the United States, fortunately, there is fiscal space to do so,” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in an interview with The Washington Post, adding that she favored “sizable support.”

The legislation includes a number of priorities sought by top congressional Democrats, including some of the more liberal members, from increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour to adding billions in funding for childcare.

Biden calls for increasing federal unemployment benefits from $300 per week to $400 per week for millions of jobless Americans. The benefits would be extended through September, preventing millions of people from losing their jobless aid in March, as would occur under current law. Biden’s plan states that he will also “work with Congress” to link the level of unemployment benefits to general economic factors, aiming to implement “automatic stabilizers” long sought by Democratic policy experts. These measures would require the federal government to automatically increase benefits when the unemployment rate spikes, meaning federal support could not be contingent on Washington gridlock.

As expected, Biden’s proposal would also increase to $2,000 per person the stimulus payments approved by Congress in December, which had been $600 per person. Trump enthusiastically endorsed the $2,000 stimulus payments, as did congressional Democratic leaders, but many Republicans oppose the idea. Biden’s plan would also expand eligibility for the stimulus payments to families where one parent is an immigrant, as well as to adult children claimed as dependents on their parents’ tax returns. Both categories were excluded in the last relief packages due to GOP opposition. About 13.5 million adult dependents were excluded from the checks as a result, including millions of disabled people.

A major expansion of tax credits is also included in Biden’s proposal, both for children and lower-income workers. Biden’s plan would expand a tax credit for children to $3,600 a year per child under six years of age, as well as $3,000 a year for children under 17. It would also extend eligibility for the credit to millions of very poor families who currently cannot access it. It would also dramatically boost the Earned Income Tax Credit, a tax benefit to workers, from $530 to $1,500, while also expanding eligibility for that program.

The size of the package and its embrace of multiple liberal priorities that are anathema to Republicans — including a large sum for state and local governments, which has proven a sticking point for the GOP for months — raises questions about how much bipartisan support Biden will be able to get for the proposal. Biden is already facing pressure from liberals on Capitol Hill who want to use their newfound control of Congress to push through aggressive and costly legislation.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who will chair the Budget Committee, has said he is working to put together a massive stimulus bill that could pass under special budget rules with a simple majority vote in the Senate, instead of the 60-vote margin normally required.

Biden, however, wants to try for a bipartisan majority on his first bill. Democratic aides say that if Republicans do not appear willing to cooperate, they can shift gears quickly and move to “budget reconciliation,” the procedure that would allow them to pass legislation without GOP votes. That was the process Republicans used to pass their big tax cut bill after Trump took office and that President Barack Obama used for the Affordable Care Act.

The Senate will be divided 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats in the new Congress, giving Democrats control of the chamber because Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will have the tie-breaking vote. Democrats’ 222-211 majority in the House is the narrowest for either party in years.

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Biden aims for new course on trade, breaking with Trump and Democratic predecessors

InternationalJan 15. 2021Katherine Tai speaks after being formally nominated by President- elect Joe Biden to be U.S. Trade representative on Dec. 11, 2020, at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Del. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Joshua Lott

By The Washington Post · David J. Lynch

It may not take long for President-elect Joe Biden to distinguish his trade policy from his predecessor’s “America First” approach.

When members of the World Trade Organization meet in Geneva to agree on a new chief, probably within a few weeks of Inauguration Day, Biden could drop the Trump administration’s veto of the consensus candidate, former Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and allow her to become the first woman to head the global trade body.

Accepting the well-respected official favored by almost all other U.S. trading partners would mark a sharp break from President Donald Trump’s go-it-alone stance and begin reshaping international economic policy after years of tariff threats and trade wars.

Biden hasn’t said publicly whether he will endorse Okonjo-Iweala, a naturalized U.S. citizen. And a spokesman for his transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

But whatever he decides about the WTO leadership, Biden’s handling of trade policy is expected to represent a departure from that of Trump and past Democratic presidents alike.

The Wall Street-friendly push for trade liberalization that held sway for a quarter century after the Cold War has been rendered obsolete by domestic political developments, supply-chain security concerns triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, and growing alarm about China’s rise.

“We need to do things differently,” said Cathy Feingold, director of the AFL-CIO’s international department. “You can’t go back.”

Biden and his advisers have sketched a trade policy that echoes Trump’s focus on manufacturing jobs and seeks to use foreign economic engagement to promote the U.S. middle class.

But unlike Trump, Biden describes most foreign nations as potential partners, not adversaries bent on unfairly competing for commercial spoils. The Democrat is likely to substitute industrial policy for tariffs, seeking to revive domestic factories with a $400 billion “Buy America” initiative and $300 billion in clean energy research.

Katherine Tai, the top trade lawyer for the House Ways and Means Committee and Biden’s choice as chief U.S. trade negotiator, called last summer for bolstering U.S. competitiveness and workers’ skills rather than concentrating on tariffs and enforcement efforts.

“Policy has been disproportionately shaped by what’s good for corporations. Now, the focus will be: What’s it mean for workers?” said one Democratic congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for lack of authorization to speak publicly.

Still, Biden will confront the same question that has bedeviled U.S. policymakers for three decades: How can the United States shape for maximum benefit its overseas commercial engagements?

In the 1990s, as the Soviet bloc crumbled and China opened its market, U.S. presidents sought greater economic efficiency through liberalized trade and promised to compensate American workers who suffered as a result.

That financial support and retraining help, however, was inadequate, leaving millions of factory workers at the mercy of low-wage foreigners. The resulting blue-collar resentments helped elevate Trump, who vowed to shield American jobs behind a tariff wall.

The populist Republican, however, proved more adept at identifying problems than solving them. The U.S. trade deficit, which he assailed as a drain on national wealth and vowed to close, stands at a 14-year high. And after growing by 4 percent during his first three years in office, manufacturing employment is now lower than when he took office.

On the campaign trail, Biden promised a “pro-American worker tax and trade strategy.”

In practice, that means labor and environmental concerns will now get top billing at the negotiating table, potentially overshadowing corporate America’s investment-oriented agenda. New agreements might borrow provisions from Trump’s North American trade deal requiring a certain percentage of work to be conducted in high-wage countries such as the United States. With China, U.S. diplomats may spend more time on Beijing’s use of forced labor in Xinjiang province, supplanting Trump’s focus on forced technology transfer.

“I’m somewhat more optimistic than I expected to be,” said Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach, a longtime critic of trade liberalization.

Biden will face a long to-do list, including decisions about how to handle Trump’s tariffs on most Chinese goods as well as on imported steel and aluminum. The Democrat will inherit unfinished negotiations with the United Kingdom and Kenya. And he must balance calls to rejoin a Pacific trade deal that Trump quit with union worries about potential job losses.

The shift may be most evident in relations with Europe, which Trump has castigated and threatened with auto tariffs. Biden’s hopes of reestablishing robust trans-Atlantic ties depend upon resolving a thorny dispute about European efforts to tax U.S. digital economy giants.

Still, no major policy moves are expected before the completion of a 100-day supply-chain review intended to avoid a repeat of the medical product shortages that the United States experienced early in the pandemic.

“I would expect trade to be on a slower track,” said Michael Wessel, a longtime trade consultant. “It’s climate change and infrastructure that are the priorities.”

But with Australia, China, Japan and the European Union having reached new trade deals, the incoming president won’t be able to afford an indefinite hiatus.

“Our allies in Europe and Asia have cut deals with the Chinese, so the incoming administration shouldn’t take too long to lay out our trade agenda,” said Myron Brilliant, executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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‘Sizable’ stimulus needed from the U.S., IMF managing director urges

InternationalJan 15. 2021International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva

By The Washington Post · Heather Long

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva is urging the United States to go big on additional stimulus to aid the economy as the pandemic rages and to ensure low-income workers are not left behind.

“We do need more stimulus. In the United States, fortunately, there is fiscal space to do so,” Georgieva told The Washington Post, adding that she favored “sizable support.”

President-elect Joe Biden is set to give a major speech Thursday evening proposing another stimulus package of at least $1 trillion. This would be on top of the $3.5 trillion the nation has spent so far in an effort to address the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and the most deadly pandemic in a century.

Georgieva said the pandemic is “moving from bad to worse” and that additional help for the economy is needed to get people through the next few months until vaccines are more widely available. She characterized this period as an “unprecedented race” between the virus and the vaccines.

“We are still faced with tremendous uncertainties about the exit from the health crisis and we do have a difficult period ahead. There is scarring from [it] we are yet to address,” Georgieva said.

In a sign of renewed pain for the economy, the U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday that new applications for unemployment aid spiked to nearly 1 million last week – the highest since August. Overall, more than 18 million Americans are receiving unemployment aid and the nation is grappling with even deeper job losses that during the Great Recession.

Some Republicans have expressed concern that the United States cannot afford to spend so much money to address the crisis, but Georgieva said now is not the time to focus on the debt. She noted that it is incredibly cheap for the United States to borrow money and the nation has ample capacity to borrow more. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has made the same argument to Congress in recent months.

“In our view, the time to take action on debt and deficit is when we have a durable exit from the health crisis. In other words, we see it in the rearview mirror,” Georgieva said.

While the top priority of the incoming Biden administration should be getting the virus under control, Georgieva also urged Biden’s team to use this moment to enact policies to lessen inequality and put the economy on a more sustainable course by tackling climate change.

“I am convinced that as crisis … is opportunity. This is our best shot to change course for the better. We must take it on,” she said

Biden has said he wants big investments to upgrade U.S. infrastructure and address climate change, initiatives that he hopes will boost growth and jobs.

Georgieva said climate action is a “win, win, win” that can help the planet, boost growth and create a large number of jobs, especially for people who are getting left behind by the digital economy.

Nearly 10 million people who lost their jobs between March and April of last year still have not been able to gain employment again. Biden is under pressure to create conditions that get as many of these people back to work as quickly as possible. It’s a tall order. Among recent presidents, only Ronald Reagan in his second term and Bill Clinton in each of his terms managed to oversee that scale of job creation.

Georgieva also called on China, India, and other nations to enact more stimulus, and she warned that the pandemic has further exacerbated inequalities between the rich and poor in many countries as well as between rich nations and poor nations.

She cautioned that there could be more protests and riots if countries don’t focus on fighting poverty, creating job opportunities and ensuring all people receive vaccines as quickly as possible.

“Without coordinated international support we will see that divergence becoming a problem for the countries themselves but also for security and stability of the world in the future,” she said.

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France is banned from using drones to enforce coronavirus rules

InternationalJan 15. 2021

By The Washington Post · Rick Noack

PARIS – France’s privacy watchdog has banned the use of drone cameras to enforce coronavirus restrictions and for other law enforcement purposes, marking a victory for groups arguing that the pandemic has given rise to excessive surveillance.

France’s Interior Ministry had conducted drone flights “outside of any legal framework,” the privacy watchdog, known as CNIL, said in its strongly worded rebuke released Thursday.

France imposed some of Europe’s toughest measures in response to the virus last year and initially deployed helicopters and drones to monitor adherence to the rules. The drones were equipped to spot lockdown violators, guide teams on the ground and broadcast warnings on loudspeakers. But privacy activists feared that the drone monitoring could serve as a trial run for more expansive surveillance programs. The concerns prompted a legal challenge and a ruling by France’s highest court last May to suspend the practices in Paris.

Privacy groups said French authorities carried on despite the ruling, continuing to deploy drones at protests.

The decision by France’s privacy watchdog – which significantly ups the stakes for the French government as it applies nationally – comes amid a broader tug-of-war between privacy activists and authorities in Europe over how to police coronavirus restrictions. That debate has played out around the world in recent months, as leaders and authorities in a number of countries were accused of using the pandemic as a pretext to expand their powers. But Europe’s extensive privacy laws have put civil liberties activists in a stronger position than activists elsewhere.

After a Belgian police force said last month that it would use drones with heat cameras to monitor end-of-year festivities in people’s homes, privacy activists rallied against the plans. Belgium’s college of public prosecutors subsequently ruled that drones should not be used to crack down on violations of coronavirus rules, even though they can still be deployed to assess crowd sizes from afar.

In Germany and Austria, privacy concerns have largely revolved around police officers’ access to private homes to enforce coronavirus rules. Both countries have a high burden of proof that’s required for officials to be able to enter homes, and lawmakers in Germany quickly rushed to reassure citizens that this wouldn’t change. After criticism, Austria’s government abandoned an attempt to change the law.

European governments have faced similar issues in the context of smartphone apps to trace contacts of infected individuals. Whereas officials had hoped such apps could become crucial tools to curb the spread of the virus, privacy concerns have prevented public health authorities from accessing the data and reduced people’s willingness to download the technology. The limitations prompted frustration among users and health authorities – one German health officials called his country’s app “useless.”

In a joint statement last November, numerous United Nations agencies, including the World Health Organization, offered support for countries that have relied on data-gathering during the pandemic, arguing that “the collection, use, sharing and further processing of data can help limit the spread of the virus.” But the agencies also warned that the collection of personal data could result in the “infringement of fundamental human rights and freedoms” if it’s abused.

In France, authorities have faced multiple setbacks over privacy concerns since the pandemic began. Last summer, the Parisian transport authority suspended an effort that monitored whether Metro riders were wearing masks, using camera-equipped AI technology. France’s privacy watchdog had criticized the experiment, arguing that it risked “a feeling of general surveillance among citizens” that could “undermine the proper functioning of our democratic society.”

Even though the cameras had been installed for experimental purposes and were not used to impose fines, the watchdog objected to the absence of a way for people to opt out of the footage.

The watchdog’s ruling on drones is based on similar concerns.

It means that officials will also no longer be allowed to use drones to monitor protesters until the watchdog’s concerns have been resolved – a stance that could put the authority in direct opposition with a government proposal to expand their use. The proposal is part of a broader draft security bill that has been fiercely debated in France in the recent weeks, with critics viewing it as a serious threat to civil liberties in the country.

The draft bill, given the initial green light in the French National Assembly last year, is set to be discussed in the French Senate later this month.

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Johnson’s leadership at risk without U.K. lockdown exit plan

InternationalJan 15. 2021Prime Minister Boris Johnson

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Tim Ross, Kitty Donaldson

Prime Minister Boris Johnson faces a threat to his leadership from rebels in his Conservative Party who are demanding a clear path out of the U.K.’s economically damaging lockdown.

Steve Baker, a senior rank-and-file member of Parliament, said in a letter to his Tory colleagues it could be a “disaster” if pandemic restrictions last until spring.

He urged them to contact Johnson’s team to warn that the premier’s position will be at risk unless he announces a route out of the current measures.

“Government has adopted a strategy devoid of any commitment to liberty without any clarification about when our most basic freedoms will be restored and with no guarantee that they will never be taken away again,” Baker wrote. “If we continue forward with a strategy that hammers freedom, hammers the private sector, hammers small business owners and hammers the poor, inevitably the prime minister’s leadership will be on the table.”

Baker, a former minister, said he would rather not topple Johnson, but he urged his colleagues to take stock of the risks in order “to avoid severe problems later.”

The U.K. entered its third national lockdown last week, with schools, non-essential retail and hospitality businesses all forced to close. The economy already suffered its deepest recession for more than 300 years as a result of the first shutdown last year and is at risk of being tipped into a double-dip contraction.

It is not yet clear how much support Baker will have for his move, but he’s an experienced campaigner and an influential figure among rank-and-file Conservative members of Parliament.

Previously leader of a pro-Brexit group of MPs who put pressure on successive prime ministers over the U.K.’s divorce from the European Union, Baker is now concerned about the impact of the government’s pandemic strategy on the economy and individual liberty.

He is one of 55 Tories who voted against Johnson’s pandemic plan for a tougher system of tiered restrictions organized by regions in December.

On paper, it would take only 40 Tory MPs to vote against the government to inflict a defeat on Johnson if all the opposition parties also decided to block the prime minister’s plans. Similarly, if 55 Conservatives submit letters of no confidence in the premier, it would trigger a vote on whether he should continue as party leader.

In last week’s vote on the third lockdown, only 14 Tories opposed the measures but many others raised concerns during the debate about how long the lockdown will last.

The current rules could continue until the end of March but Baker’s supporters say the arrival of vaccines should mean the restrictions on daily life and commerce are lifted sooner. Johnson aims to vaccinate the 15 million most at-risk people and carers by Feb. 15.

In his letter, Baker urged Tories to tell the party’s chief whip — the official responsible for internal discipline — that the “debate will become about the PM’s leadership if the government does not set out a clear plan for when our full freedoms will be restored, with a guarantee that this strategy will not be used again next winter.”

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South Africa’s busiest border closes after week of covid chaos

InternationalJan 15. 2021Commuters wearing protective face masks cross Strand Street in Cape Town, South Africa, on Jan. 11, 2021. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Dwayne Senior.

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Brian Latham

South Africa’s decision to shut its land borders was preceded by a week of pandemonium as hundreds of thousands of foreigners tried to return to work after the December holidays.

Beitbridge, the only legal road crossing between Zimbabwe and South Africa — and southern Africa’s busiest inland border post — was the worst affected. People waited, not always patiently, for as long as four days in lines of traffic that stretched miles from the border gate with delays caused by the need to produce a certificate showing a negative test for covid-19.

Without restrooms or restaurants, they relied on unmasked vendors selling homemade traditional street food, while the scrubby roadside bush made do as a communal and unhygienic restroom with little social distancing on the Zimbabwean side of the border.

The chaos was a demonstration of the disruption and economic damage the coronavirus is wreaking as South Africa battles to contain the spread of the coronavirus, which has infected more than 1.2 million people in the country and killed more than 33,000. In addition to delaying people from returning to work, the congestion curbed trade at Beitbridge, a key gateway to the rest of the continent for goods trucked from South Africa or its ports.

“It is on the trade route,” said Trudi Hartzenberg, executive director of the Tralac Trade Law Center in Stellenbosch, South Africa. “The transport and development corridors, going into the region and a single border closure has a knock-on, or a regional impact, which can be quite significant.”

The snarl-up meant that some reached South African immigration authorities after their coronavirus test certificates, which have to be presented within three days of having being taken, had expired. Many had to spend days mingling with unmasked street vendors.

“This is my fourth day in the line and my certificate will have expired even if we get through today,” said Wilson Ncube, 32, a boilermaker driving back to Johannesburg with his wife after visiting family in Zimbabwe. “I’m already late for work, and if I need to wait another 24 hours after being retested my boss is going to be” angry, he said.

Calls to Zimbabwe’s immigration department and South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs weren’t answered.

On average, Beitbridge processes about 25,000 people a day, according to Zimbabwe’s immigration department, but that number rises dramatically in January. Many of the 2 to 3 million Zimbabweans working in South Africa return home in December and the rush back to work in early January sees numbers spike. Adding to the congestion, both countries shut the border to private vehicles soon after nightfall to speed the processing of buses and trucks. Over 1,000 of them cross daily, customs officials said, mostly 40-ton rigs ferrying supplies to and from South African ports.

Trucks were backed up over 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) on the Zimbabwean side of the border on Jan. 8, while four lanes of private vehicles extended in a line for 3 kilometers. Soon after nightfall, movement of private vehicles ground to a standstill after the gates shut. It would take them between 35 and 72 hours to cross the Limpopo River into the South African customs and immigration facility.

South Africa’s main Lebombo border post with Mozambique suffered worse congestion, at least for truckers, after a new coronavirus testing regime saw the operations shut down periodically for sterilization. A line of trucks extended 21 kilometers on both sides of the border.

At Beitbridge, the interminable wait to enter Zimbabwe’s expanded border post ended on entering the gates and encountering a vast and almost empty car park. Travelers were processed rapidly and social distancing and mask wearing enforced. Vehicles then sat on the the 382-meter (1,253-foot) bridge over the Limpopo for as long as an hour as it shook under the weight of heavy trucks rumbling across.

Aside from workers being late for their jobs, truckers spoke of missing shipping deadlines at ports.

“If I’m going to make it, I’ll have to drive through for another 24 hours straight without sleep,” said Jonathan Sando, from the cab of a Freightliner truck hauling 40 tons of granite destined for Italy. “It’s not fun, this job.”

On the night of Jan. 11 South African President Cyril Ramaphosa brought the chaos to a halt by announcing that 20 of South Africa’s land border posts would be closed until Feb. 15 to almost all travelers with the exception of those hauling freight.

In doing so he stranded a substantial portion of South Africa’s workforce.

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Biden to begin presidency pushing emergency relief, other ambitious economic plans

InternationalJan 15. 2021President-elect Joe Biden speaks about the economy at the Queen in Wilmington, Del., on Dec. 4, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Demetrius Freeman.

By The Washington Post · Jeff Stein, Erica Werner

WASHINGTON – President-elect Joe Biden will arrive in Washington with an ambitious economic agenda, starting with plans to prod Congress to pass a multitrillion-dollar coronavirus relief bill before moving on to enact his other broad proposals to overhaul the U.S. economy.

Biden’s presidency comes at a precarious moment for the nation, with the economy at risk of sliding more deeply into an already devastating recession or expanding into a healthy recovery.

The economy lost 140,000 jobs in December, the first month of job losses since the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, even as infections soared with more than 360,000 already dead. Much of the effort to right the economy will depend on whether the Biden team can get the rollout of the coronavirus vaccines on track, as well as factors outside the administration’s control, including the spread of a potentially more contagious form of the virus and a global economic downturn.

Although Biden’s initial relief package will center on measures such as increasing unemployment insurance and cutting Americans new stimulus checks, he also is expected to push later this year for more permanent economic reform such as investment in infrastructure, clean energy jobs, the health-care system and other domestic priorities. He will aim to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and rewrite immigration laws. Overall, Biden will attempt to reverse many of the Trump administration’s economic policies, toward a more activist role for the government.

Biden has made clear that by far his top economic priority is addressing the coronavirus pandemic and its far-reaching fallout. His capacity to do so will set the tone for his entire presidency, and determine whether the nation’s economy can rebound from the pandemic’s grasp.

“Millions of Americans are still hurting through no fault of their own,” Biden said last week in Wilmington, Del.

“The basic story is simple,” he said. “If we don’t act now, things are going to get much worse and harder to get out of the hole later, so we have to invest now.”

A Purple Line overpass in Riverdale Park, Md., near Kenilworth Ave. and Route 410 sits unfinished on June 10, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Toni L. Sandys.

Biden has sketched out the broad outlines of a relief bill he said will cost trillions of dollars. It would increase one-time stimulus payments for Americans to $2,000, extend enhanced unemployment insurance set to expire in March, and include assistance for school districts, small businesses, and state and local governments. The legislation would invest heavily in vaccine distribution, as Biden aims to make up for lost ground where the Trump administration has failed to meet its own goals.

“Getting the virus under control and getting the vaccines right is the critical thing to getting the economy back on track. They need to do this, and they need to do it fast,” said Constance Hunter, chief economist at KPMG, adding that the nation is “nowhere close” to vaccinating as many people as it should be daily.

Biden has also proposed temporary increases in Social Security payments to seniors and student loan forgiveness of as much as $10,000 per person, and has called for expanding emergency sick leave and eliminating patient costs for covid-19 treatment.

The legislation would come on top of about $4 trillion Congress already has devoted to addressing the pandemic, most recently with a $900 billion measure President Donald Trump signed in December. Many Republicans are reluctant to spend anywhere near the amount of money Biden is discussing, and the proposal is sure to renew long-simmering disputes about the federal deficit, which ballooned under the Trump administration beginning with the GOP’s unpaid-for tax-cut law.

Biden has made clear that although future programs may be offset with tax increases or other measures, the coronavirus legislation will constitute emergency spending and will be added to the deficit like the previous pandemic stimulus measures. The final cost of the bill might eliminate hopes of bipartisan support and force him to attempt to pass the legislation with only Democratic votes.

Democratic control of the House and the Senate would allow him to do that, but the margins in both chambers are narrow and divisions within the Democratic Party are deep and, in some cases, acrimonious. Therefore, whether Biden will be able to get his coronavirus package passed will stand as an early test of the legislative prowess and dealmaking ability he boasted of bringing to the White House.

“We have these transformational moments, these historical pivots, maybe once in a generation,” said Timothy Naftali, a clinical associate professor of history and public policy at New York University, citing political reforms in the 1960s and after the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s. “Biden and [Vice President-elect Kamala] Harris do not have all the votes they need to enact the progressive agenda, but they have the opportunity to pass legislation that can shape the post-pandemic economic recovery in a way that can be transformational.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who will become majority leader now that Democrats have won control of the Senate, leaves the Capitol after a vote on Jan. 1. MUST CREDIT: photo for The Washington Post by Amanda Voisard.

Biden will take office with the House and the Senate both controlled by Democrats, which makes the path for his agenda much smoother than if Republicans were in charge. But the margins are exceedingly narrow. The Senate will be divided 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, with Harris as the tie-breaking vote for Democrats, giving any individual Democratic senator the ability to hold up legislation with demands. The most conservative Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has already voiced reservations about the size and scope of Biden’s plan for stimulus payments, forecasting tricky negotiations ahead on that and any number of other issues.

Although major legislation in the Senate usually requires 60 votes, Biden and incoming Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will have the ability to use special budget rules to pass at least two major packages this year with a simple majority. The first is expected to be devoted to Biden’s coronavirus relief legislation, while the second is expected to become the vehicle for his other major legislative priorities, including infrastructure and efforts to fight climate change.

That second “budget reconciliation” package also could take in Biden’s health-care proposals, which would constitute the largest expansion of federally run health care in decades, including a government plan that millions of Americans could join. Biden’s proposal would allow companies and patients to buy directly into the government plan, aiming to force private insurers to lower their prices, while also making the subsidies on the Affordable Care Act exchanges more generous.

Biden also has called for federal spending to repair and upgrade infrastructure – repairing roads, bridges and the nation’s electrical grid – which also spurs job growth, economists say. That effort probably would be coupled with an environmental push to encourage move U.S. energy sources away from fossil fuels. Biden has called for trillions in new spending to put the nation on a path to having net-zero emissions by 2050.

Some of these efforts would be financed by proposed tax increases, including Biden’s call to increase the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% after Republicans cut it from 35% to 21% in 2017. Biden has proposed more than $2 trillion in new tax increases, although it is unclear how many of them would be included in a broader legislative package.

Known as a pragmatic dealmaker who defeated a slate of more liberal opponents in the Democratic presidential primary, Biden will face pent-up pressure from those further to the left. For the past two years, bill after bill passed in the Democratic-controlled House and died in the GOP-led Senate.

“There is no excuse for Biden not to deliver an economic recovery package that confronts wage stagnation, the climate crisis, systemic racism and public health. That is what progressives are hoping to see,” said Waleed Shahid, spokesman for the progressive group Justice Democrats. At the same time, Biden must step carefully to retain support from Manchin and other moderates, and avoid offering ammunition to Republicans, who already are describing his agenda as socialism.

Health-care workers (some with appointments after dusk) wait in line to get coronavirus vaccines at the Fairfax County Government Center in Fairfax, Va., on Jan. 2. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael S. Williamson.

Republicans traditionally outpoll Democrats on the economy, which remained a bright spot for Trump through much of his administration. Even during the pandemic, he scored relatively high marks from voters on the economy. Trump’s connection with working-class voters on economic issues helped him beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, while Biden won on his ability to connect with those voters.

Democrats are desperate to claim a political advantage on economic issues and are hoping that Biden will be able to do so.

“If we get the economics right, if we really stay on that and communicate consistently on it, we have the ability to permanently make ourselves the majority party and shore up weaknesses among blue-collar voters, independents and Latino voters,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster.

“We need to establish an economic message to win in 2022, or in 2024 or 2044. It’s the most important thing.”

Biden may have a short window to accomplish all his goals. The first two years of a president’s first term are typically the most productive. Because Democrats’ hold on Congress is particularly narrow, losing either chamber in the 2022 midterm election could leave many of Biden’s incomplete agenda items to languish.