This is the eighth edition of the Biden Tracking newsletter. This week's newsletter covers the last two weeks. Last week, on the two-year anniversary of Biden’s inauguration I posted 6 Biden Administration Actions You Forgot About.
In the last two weeks, the Biden Administration announced a new pick for Chief of Staff, announced new exceptions for Title 42, and appealed a court ruling ending the public transportation mask mandate. It is Monday, January 23rd, 2023, day 734 of the Biden Presidency.
The main story the last two weeks was reporting from multiple outlets that Jeffrey Zients would become Biden’s new Chief of Staff, replacing Ron Klain. If you are a progressive, and I assume you are, you should be very disappointed in this pick. Zients is not new to the Biden Administration. From January 2021 to April 2022 he led the Biden Administration’s COVID response. In that role, Zients allowed thousands to die from COVID-19 while downplaying the health impacts of COVID and encouraging the end of mask mandates. Prior to his time in the Biden Administration, Zients was a businessman. The healthcare companies that Zients controlled, invested in, and helped oversee were forced to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle allegations of Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Zients is also a former member of Facebook’s Board of Directors.
It was incredibly unlikely that President Biden was going to pick a true progressive to be his next Chief of Staff. Ron Klain was not a progressive, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, of the American Immigration Council, pointed out that he had reportedly been one of the most aggressive immigration hawks in the White House. But progressive lawmakers, including AOC, have mentioned that he was willing to work with them. Zients’s past suggests that he will be much more pro-business, which is not, in my opinion, a good thing.
One other body note, you will notice the absence of Biden’s other major story this week, the finding of classified documents in his personal residences, in this week’s newsletter. That’s because this is a rapidly changing story, and I want to wait it out, to ensure my opinions on the matter are not too uninformed. What you should know is that Biden’s lawyers initially found the documents and reported them to the Department of Justice. Since then, Lawyers, and an approved raid by the FBI, have found more documents.
In other news…
Tuesday, January 10th (Day 721)
Biden Administration Considers Ending COVID Emergency in Spring
On January 10th, Politico reported that the Biden Administration was discussing ending the COVID-19 health emergency as soon as this Spring. Doing so would trigger a complex restructuring of the federal response to the disease. Maybe most importantly, it would set the stage for the eventual shifting of greater responsibility for vaccines and treatments to the private market. This would mean treating COVID as an endemic disease, like the Flu. While we haven’t seen a Winter COVID surge like last year, the current 7-day daily average for COVID deaths is 569, the highest since March of 2022. COVID is certainly not over, and making COVID treatments more expensive, and thus harder to access, doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.
Thursday, January 12th (Day 723)
Title 42 Acceptions are Surprisingly Broad
After the CPB One app, which allows Asylum seekers to apply for acceptions to Title 42, went live on January 12th, we learned new exceptions for Title 42. They are broad. The most important acceptions are those who have “no access to safe housing or shelter in Mexico.” This should apply to most, if not all, vulnerable Asylum seekers. However, as I said in my last newsletter, there are some security concerns with the CPB One app, as well as concerns that people without access to cell phones or cell reception are being unfairly excluded. Later in the week, the app began having issues. Seemingly instituting a cap on the number of people allowed to apply for Title 42 exceptions. That is absolutely unacceptable.
Friday, January 13th (Day 724)
CPB Continues Construction of Border Wall at the Morelos Dam
On January 13th, the Acting Chief Patrol Agent of the United States Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector, Patricia McGurk-Daniel, said on Twitter that construction of Trump’s border wall would be continuing at the Morelos Dam. Specifically, this construction would fill gaps in the existing wall. This is incredibly disappointing. In 2020, President Biden pledged that there would not be another foot of wall constructed. This was an easy promise to keep. He failed.
Tuesday, January 17th (Day 728)
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice officially appealed a ruling that declared unlawful a government order requiring masks on airplanes, buses, trains, ridesharing services, and at airports and other transportation hubs. It should be noted that the Justice Department did not seek a stay when the ruling was issued in April 2022. It is not immediately clear what took the DOJ so long to appeal the ruling.
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