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$30 billion
“The Biden administration is telling Congress that it needs an additional $30 billion to press ahead with the fight against Covid-19,” the AP reports.Politico: “While the administration anticipates it has enough vaccines and therapeutics to ride out the Omicron surge, three people with knowledge of the matter said the government doesn’t currently have enough money to respond if another dangerous variant emerges.”
4.6%
“Federal employees and military service members would receive average raises of 4.6 percent next January under the budget President Biden will propose in March, marking what would be the workforce’s largest salary hike in two decades,” the Washington Post reports.
49%
A new Gallup poll finds that across 46 countries and territories, median approval of U.S. leadership stood at 49% under President Biden.
This rating is up from the 30% median approval at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency and matches the rating during former President Barack Obama’s first year in office in 2009.
“Oh, come on. I don’t even think about — I don’t — I have no idea. I have no idea if there will be a Republican Party, do you?”
— President Biden, quoted by the Washington Post, when asked if he was going to run against Donald Trump in 2024.
“The White House just sent Congress the most ambitious immigration reform bill in years. It midwifed a deal to get Merck to mobilize some of its factories to produce Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, and now Biden is saying there should be enough of a supply for every American adult to get vaccinated by the end of May. Imagine! The administration is also working on an infrastructure package that, if early reports bear out, will be the most transformational piece of climate policy — and perhaps economic policy — in my lifetime. Biden is blitzing.”
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Associated Press: “President Joe Biden is the first executive in four decades to reach this point in his term without holding a formal question and answer session. It reflects a White House media strategy meant both to reserve major media set-pieces for the celebration of a legislative victory and to limit unforced errors from a historically gaffe-prone politician.”
61% to 34%
A new Quinnipiac poll finds that two weeks into Joe Biden’s presidency of Joe Biden, a majority of Americans say, 61% to 34%, say that they are generally optimistic about the next four years with Biden as president.
“The fact is that Biden is governing as he promised — further to the left of his own record, further to the left of his ex-boss, former President Barack Obama, and further to the left of any Democrat who made his career prior to the ascendency of the cultural left. … The lesson is that the most important thing that any movement can do is influence the direction of a major political party. If the center of gravity of a party moves, the entire establishment moves with it. So it is that Biden, who has never been woke or surrounded himself with radicals, is attempting to deliver victories to the left-wing of his party almost unimaginable eight or 12 years ago — and do it quickly.”
$1.3 billion
“The Biden administration said it would release $1.3 billion in aid that Puerto Rico can use to protect against future climate disasters, and is starting to remove some restrictions put in place by the Trump administration on spending that was to help the island after Hurricane Maria in 2017,” the New York Times reports.
$20
“With a change of administrations, it looks like Harriet Tubman is once again headed to the front of the $20 bill,” the AP reports. “Biden press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that the Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put the 19th century abolitionist leader on the $20 bill.”
