Politics & Stuff

[Vesper 29,143]

U.S. troops killed, wounded in Jordan attack blamed on Iranian proxies

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/28/americans-killed-drone-jordan/

Three U.S. troops were killed and at least 34 injured in a militant drone attack Sunday in Jordan, officials said, marking the first deadly military action against American service members since the war in Gaza triggered a steep rise in violence throughout the Middle East..

President Biden blamed the attack on groups supported by Iran, and the incident raised immediate questions about when, where and how forcefully the Pentagon might respond. In a statement, he said the United States will “hold those throughout the Middle East. responsible to account at a time and in a manner our choosing.”

As the number of attacks on deployed American personnel has surged to more than 160 since October, the Pentagon has carried out selective retaliatory strikes against Iranian proxies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But to the frustration of many in Washington, those actions have failed to deter the groups perpetrating the violence, and the president’s critics seized on this development to intensify their demands for more aggressive countermeasures.

Sunday’s attack targeted a facility known as Tower 22. The base, which houses about 350 U.S. troops, is located in northeast Jordan along the country’s shared borders with Syria and Iraq. A U.S. defense official said the one-way drone struck the base’s living quarters, causing injuries that ranged cuts and bruises to brain trauma.

It was not immediately clear from which country the attack was launched, said the official, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the incident. Military commanders are working to determine that information and, crucially, why U.S. air defenses failed to intercept the drone.

Some of the wounded personnel required medical evacuation, the official said. The identities of those slain were not disclosed, pending family notifications. Biden, in his statement, called them “patriots in the highest sense.”

Sunday’s bloodshed spotlighted Jordan’s attempt to walk a tenuous line as many in the Arab world, outraged by Israel’s punishing assault on Gaza, have faulted the United States for its unconditional backing of the Jewish state despite the war’s enormous civilian toll. The kingdom has continued to partner with the United States on counterterrorism while looking to avoid the wrath of Iran and other regional neighbors. On Sunday, despite the U.S. government’s disclosure about where the attack occurred, Jordanian officials claimed it was another U.S. base in the region — one located on the Syrian side of the border — that was targeted.

The defense official characterized operations at Tower 22 vaguely, saying the Americans deployed there are on an advise-and-assist mission.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group that includes Kataib Hezbollah, Nujaba and other Iranian-backed militants, claimed responsibility for the attack, according to a senior official with the organization who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity in accordance with its rules.

“As we said before, if the U.S. keeps supporting Israel, there will escalations. All the U.S. interests in the region are legitimate targets and we don’t care about U.S. threats to respond, we know the direction we are taking and martyrdom is our prize,” the Islamic Resistance in Iraq official said.

The group is a front for Iran-backed militias there. Its forces began targeting U.S. interests in 2018, after then-President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from a landmark nuclear deal with Tehran.

There are about 2,500 U.S. troops deployed in Iraq and another 900 in Syria. They have been focused on preventing a resurgence of the Islamic State, the terrorist network that took over large swaths of both countries until a U.S.-led military campaign left the group decimated. Last week, amid deepening strain between the U.S. and Iraqi governments, the Pentagon signaled its openness to reducing the American military presence there.

Friction between the two countries has worsened in recent weeks, as U.S. forces have fought back against the rise in Iranian proxy attacks. On Jan. 4, the Biden administration launched a rare retaliatory strike on a base belonging to a militia in central Baghdad, killing the group’s commander. American officials said at the time that it was hoped the strike would serve as a deterrent against further hostility toward U.S. troops. Instead, the attacks have grown more ambitious.

Iran hawks in Congress leveraged Sunday’s attack to amplify their criticism of Biden and his management of the Gaza-related spillover violence that has left much of the Middle East on edge. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) implored the administration to impose “serious crippling costs” on Iran and its proxies.

“The time to start taking this aggression seriously,” McConnell said, “was long before more brave Americans lost their lives.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said the president’s strategy for deterring escalation had “failed miserably.” He called for striking “targets of significance inside Iran” — a prospect that many national security experts fear would draw the United States into a cataclysmic war.

“The only thing the Iranian regime understands is force,” Graham said. “Until they pay a price with their infrastructure and their personnel, the attacks on U.S. troops will continue.”

Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A total of five U.S. troops have died since violence in the Middle East widened with Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Two Navy SEALs were lost in an accident earlier this month while on a mission to interdict Iranian weapons components bound for Yemen, where militants continue to target commercial and military vessels off the Arabian Peninsula.

As the SEALs attempted to board a boat suspected of carrying illicit arms, one of them slipped and fell from a ladder and the other jumped into the strong waves to help, officials have said. They were declared dead days later following an expansive search mission.

Edited January 28, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 29,143]

MR. FISH.......

SLAUGHTERHOUSE

[Vesper 29,143]

[Vesper 29,143]

THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG

[KEVINAA 108]

 

 

Just some last 24 hours news in tweets.

 

 

[MoroccanBlue 5,320]

buT dO yOU CoNDeMn oCtOBeR 7th??????

Israeli special forces disguised as doctors kill three militants at West Bank hospital

[Fulham Broadway 16,962]

6 minutes ago, MoroccanBlue said:

buT dO yOU CoNDeMn oCtOBeR 7th??????

Israeli special forces disguised as doctors kill three militants at West Bank hospital

Imagine the global outrage if some Palestinians disguised themselves as Hasidic jews and went into a Tel Aviv hospital to murder 3 Israeli soldiers....

 

[Vesper 29,143]

Joe Biden issues executive order against Israeli settlers in West Bank

Financial sanctions and visa bans imposed on four individuals as US frustration with Israel grows

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/01/joe-biden-expected-issue-order-israeli-settlers-west-bank-palestinians

Joe Biden has issued an executive order targeting Israeli settlers in the West Bank who have been attacking Palestinians, amid fast-growing frustration in Washington at Israel’s trajectory in the midst of its war in Gaza.

The order initially imposes financial sanctions and visa bans against four individuals, and US officials said they were evaluating whether to punish others involved in attacks that have intensified during the Israel-Hamas war. According to at least one report before the executive order, options included the potential to sanction officials.

 

 

Israel’s campaign in Gaza ‘plausibly’ amounts to genocide, US court finds

Palestinian authorities say some Palestinians have been killed, and rights groups say settlers have torched cars and attacked several small Bedouin communities, forcing evacuations.

In the order, Biden said that extremist settler violence in the West Bank had “reached intolerable levels and constitutes a serious threat to the peace, security and stability of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, and the broader Middle East region”.

He said: “These actions undermine the foreign policy objectives of the United States, including the viability of a two-state solution and ensuring Israelis and Palestinians can attain equal measures of security, prosperity, and freedom.

“They also undermine the security of Israel and have the potential to lead to broader regional destabilisation across the Middle East, threatening United States personnel and interests.”

Biden has been facing growing criticism for his administration’s strong support of Israel as casualties mount in the conflict, which began when Hamas, the militant group that rules Gaza, attacked Israel on 7 October.

The order is a rare step against the US’s closest ally in the Middle East as Biden has pressed Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to show greater restraint in its military operations aimed at rooting out Hamas.

Biden and other senior US officials have warned repeatedly that Israel must act to stop violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank, which Palestinian authorities and activists say has intensified since the Gaza war started.

The Biden administration had also considered moves targeting two far-right Israeli ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, according to a report on the Axios website.

Last month a US visa ban was announced for any Israeli settlers implicated in attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

The new order will give the Treasury department the authority to impose financial sanctions on settlers engaged in violence, but is not meant to target US citizens. A substantial number of the settlers in the West Bank hold US citizenship and they would be prohibited under US law from transacting with the sanctioned individuals.

Israel is facing growing international discontent over its repeated refusal to contemplate the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, amid growing warnings that countries including the US and the UK may be considering unilateral recognition of statehood.

After comments by the UK foreign secretary, David Cameron, last week that the UK might consider recognition on the day after the war in Gaza ends, US officials have indicated that the state department has been ordered to examine options for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with security guarantees for Israel.

The state department’s spokesperson, Matthew Miller, declined to give details on its internal work on the issue but told a news briefing that the effort had been an objective of Biden’s administration.

The US and the UK, among other states, have long held up the goal of a Palestinian state as part of a negotiated peace process but recent moves in the midst of the Gaza war have highlighted the increasing sense of international frustration with Netanyahu, who has long worked to prevent a Palestinian state.

The Israeli prime minister has in recent weeks spoken of an extended period of military security control by Israel in Gaza while rejecting a role for any revitalised Palestinian Authority.

Washington and London appear to have indicated a change in emphasis in the sequencing of a recognition of a Palestinian state, which in the past was seen as the final step.

Miller told a state department briefing that the US was “actively pursuing the establishment as an independent Palestinian state, with real security guarantees for Israel, because we do believe that is the best way to bring about lasting peace and security for Israel, for Palestinians and for the region”.

He added: “There are any number of ways that you could go about accomplishing that. There are a number of sequencing of events that you can carry out to accomplish that objective. And we look at a wide range of options and we discuss those with partners in the region as well as other partners inside the United States government.”

Lord Cameron said the issue of recognising a Palestinian state would be part of a diplomatic process in which the Palestinian people would have to be shown “irreversible progress”.

Axios reported on Wednesday that the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had asked the state department to conduct a review and present policy options on possible US and international recognition of a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza.

The executive order comes as Biden was due to visit Michigan on Thursday to rally support from union members in a key presidential battleground state. The Democratic president has faced sharp criticism from Arab and Muslim leaders over his handling of the war with Hamas, and the shadow of the conflict has some Democrats worrying that it could have a major effect on the outcome of the November election.

[Vesper 29,143]

Former Whitehall mandarin led Premier League ‘Stasi’ which banned gender-critical Newcastle fan

https://web.archive.org/web/20240203203445/https://news.yahoo.com/web/20240203203445/https://news.yahoo.com/former-whitehall-mandarin-led-premier-201357426.html

The Premier League “Stasi” unit which carried out an investigation that led to a gender-critical Newcastle United fan being banned was presided over by a former Whitehall mandarin fined over partygate.

A special unit set up to root out racism in the game was used to trawl through social media comments about transgender issues made by Linzi Smith, a loyal supporter of the club, despite them having nothing to do with football.

The 11-page Online Investigation and Target Profile produced by the Premier League investigation unit led to the club revoking her membership in November and banning her from games until 2026.

Now, this publication has learnt that Helen MacNamara, who was fined by the police in the partygate scandal, was until recently the Premier League executive responsible for the very policies now at the centre of Ms Smith’s legal battle.

Ms Smith is taking legal action to overturn her ban from Newcastle United, arguing that her right to exercise gender-critical views – the opinion that transgender women are not women – is protected in law, and that the Premier League’s trawl of her personal social media account constituted a breach of data protection laws.

As director of policy and corporate responsibility for the Premier League from 2021 until last year, Ms MacNamara was second in command to the chief executive and responsible for the top-flight league’s privacy policy, including “legal and regulatory matters” and “data protection”.

She also helped implement a new equality, diversity and inclusion standard in the Premier League, introduced in 2021, which is “mandatory and requires clubs to demonstrably embed and develop equality, diversity and inclusion across all areas”.

The former deputy cabinet secretary was fined £50 by police for attending a “raucous” lockdown party in June 2020 at which her karaoke machine was used and there was a drunken brawl, The Telegraph previously disclosed.

The latest revelation has sparked pressure from campaigners for Ms MacNamara and the Premier League to clarify whether or not the “shadowy intelligence agency” is quietly investigating other fans too.

The investigation unit, which does not have an official name, is part of the league’s legal department and based at its headquarters in Paddington, west London. It was set up in 2019 to monitor abuse, in particular racist abuse, directed at players.

Ms Smith, 34, was shocked to discover that the Premier League had compiled a dossier detailing where she lives, works and walked her dog. There was never any suggestion she had made any offensive comments at the stadium or during a match.

The 11-page document, compiled last July, was marked confidential and included data on “associated aliases” and “vulnerabilities”.

Ms Smith has accused the Premier League unit of behaving “like the Stasi” in carrying out the “covert” investigation.

She was interviewed under caution by police after the dossier was handed to officers by Newcastle United. Officers took just two hours to inform her that she had not committed any crime, but the club sanctioned her and she lost an appeal against it.

Newcastle United began prying into the personal life of Ms Smith, who lives in Newcastle and runs a tea shop with her mother, after receiving a complaint from a fan who said they supported LGBTQ+ organisations and accused her of discrimination against trans people.

The complainant included screenshots of tweets Ms Smith had posted in which she said that trans ideology is “based off a Nazi right” and suggested that some transgender people were suffering from mental illness.

The complainant said: “If I were trans, I would feel extremely unsafe… had I had to share a space with someone so openly transphobic.”

Internal emails discussing her case – which Ms Smith obtained by submitting a subject access request to the club – detailed a four-month investigation that culminated in her being banned.

Toby Young, general secretary of the Free Speech Union which is representing Ms Smith, who has complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office, said: “It doesn’t surprise me that the stadium Stasi was presided over by Helen MacNamara. The woke mind virus escaped from a policy lab in Whitehall and is now infecting every part of our society.”

The union said “we believe that hundreds – perhaps thousands – of fans of Premier League clubs have also been investigated by this shadowy intelligence agency” for potential “wrongthink”.

The Premier League and Ms MacNamara have been contacted for comment.

[Vesper 29,143]

Florida man bludgeons father to death after learning he got 'the vaccine:' Investigators

https://wchstv.com/news/nation-world/florida-man-bludgeons-father-to-death-after-learning-he-got-the-vaccine-investigators-brian-mcgann-jr-first-degree-murder-911-caller-drugs-conspiracy-theorist-beating-wellington-palm-beach-county

WELLINGTON, Fla. (WPEC) — A Florida man accused of brutally beating and killing his father was upset after learning his dad received "the vaccine," investigators say.

The 911 caller, who is a friend of the family, described the suspect, Brian Mcgann Jr., as a "delusional conspiracy theorist."

WPEC asked the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office (PBSO) what type of vaccine caused the 44-year-old man to become upset with his father.

The caller told investigators Mcgann Jr. had also recently started "using cocaine."

According to the arrest report, the woman who placed the 911 call said she could hear the suspect's father, Brian Mcgann Sr., screaming "Stop you are killing me."

The report from PBSO said the call came in around 11:15 p.m. Sunday when deputies responded to the report of a domestic disturbance on Golden Rod Road.

Deputies arrived to find Mcgann Sr. had been attacked and was lying unresponsive on the floor of the living room. The elder Mcgann's face was extremely swollen, battered, and bruised had suffered significant injuries to his face, deputies reported, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.

Deputies tracked down the suspect, Mcgann Jr., after following a blood trail from a rear window of the home to a fence, which led them to conclude he had jumped into a neighbor's yard to avoid arrest.

The suspect's hands were swollen, and he was covered in blood, the report stated, leading investigators to conclude he was the man who killed his father.

PBSO interviewed the woman who made the 911 call and told deputies that she had been a family friend of the Mcgann's for years, the sheriff's office said.

She told deputies the younger Mcgann appeared to be intoxicated and paranoid.

The caller said Mcgann Jr. called her at around 12:58 p.m. and they had a three-hour phone conversation, according to the complaint.

The woman said Mcgann Jr. called her back at 10:30 p.m. and asked her to pack her belongings and leave the residence because "He was going to be dead." The arrest report said she found the request strange because she lives in Middleburg, Florida.

At 11:07 p.m. Mcgann Jr. placed another phone call to the woman who said he was pulling into his father's residence, the report said.

The woman claimed Mcgann Jr. called her again at 11:10 p.m. and she could hear him screaming at his father. The report continues, that the altercation continued to get extremely violent and chaotic.

She heard Mcgann say, "He is under my foot."

In the report, the caller said she immediately dialed 911.

[Fernando 6,496]

Another reason why people won't vote for Biden and will for Trump: 

 

Men these elections are playing right into Trump hand with the immigration. Sigh. 

It sucks because many migrants that come here are good hard working people. Just a few bad rotten apple that are there. Should not penalize the whole community for these rotten apples. 

[Vesper 29,143]

8 hours ago, Fernando said:

Another reason why people won't vote for Biden and will for Trump: 

 

Men these elections are playing right into Trump hand with the immigration. Sigh. 

It sucks because many migrants that come here are good hard working people. Just a few bad rotten apple that are there. Should not penalize the whole community for these rotten apples. 

The Republicans are the ultimate hypocrites.

They had complete control (Senate, House, and POTUS) for half of Trump's terms and passed fuckall for immigration.

As soon as Biden gets in, they double, treble down with the attacks:

They rant and scream that the border is out of control, that it is all Biden's fault, and that it is endangering Americans and rupturing national security.

 

Well, they appoint some of the most hardcore RW Republican Senators to negotiate a bill.

And the Democrats caved in and  basically gave the RW almsot EVERYTHING thery wanted.

It is the most hardcore immigration crackdown in 50 years.

Some of the farthest left Dems hate it, BUT enough to pass it were willing to support it.

Biden said he will use his new powers from the bill to close down the border in all the key areas starting the minute he signs it into law.

 

So....... what happens?

Trump tells the House and the Senate to vote it down, because he wants the issue to continue so he can bash Biden and the Dems with it, plus use it to deflect from his 91 criminal indictments.

In other words (and using THE REPUBS' OWN WORDS)... they are willing to absolutely put the American people and national security completely at risk just to deflect from Trump's massive leagal issues and also to use the immigration issue to smashup Biden and the Dems with.

They do not actually give a shit about the border, they just want it as a poltical weapon to power grab with.

Rank (and dangerous) hypocrisy.

They also (because the funding for it was in the bill) are fucking over Ukraine (the Putin-loving wing of the Repubs love that) and and Israel (the Israel blocking of funding part does not piss me off at all, I vehemently oppose giving them billions for their genocidal attempts) funding of those 2 wars.

 

Edited February 8, 2024 by Vesper

[Vesper 29,143]

‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything

The term describes the slow decay of online platforms such as Facebook. But what if we’ve entered the ‘enshittocene’?

https://archive.li/KCElF

Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist.

The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

 

So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.

 

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

 

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. (It’s an English word. We don’t have ein Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free-for-all. Go nuts, meine Kerle.) But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works.

 

It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.

---

 

Let’s do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

 

Facebook arose from a website developed to rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that. When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and K-12.us addresses.

 

But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It effectively told them: Yes, I know you’re all using MySpace. But MySpace is owned by a billionaire who spies on you with every hour that God sends. Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world.

 

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end users. Those end users proceeded to lock themselves into Facebook. Facebook, like most tech businesses, had network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it.

 

You joined Facebook because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But Facebook didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

 

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. So Facebook’s end users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then Facebook exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers and publishers.

 

To the advertisers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? Well, we do. And we will sell you access to that data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.

 

To the publishers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? Ha! Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link and we will cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetise as you please. And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too.

 

Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in. Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

 

For the users, that meant dialling down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen.

 

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation.

 

When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA:

“I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

 

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders. (This continued last week, when the company announced a quarterly dividend of 50 cents per share and that it would increase share buybacks by $50bn. The stock jumped.)

 

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit?” is razor-thin.

 

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then Facebook discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword. If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go. That’s terminal enshittification.

 

This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech euphemistically calls “pivoting”. Which is how we get pivots such as: In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called the “metaverse”.

 

That’s the procession of enshittification. But that doesn’t tell you why everything is enshittifying right now and, without those details, we can’t know what to do about it. What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP)? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants?

 

Is Mercury in retrograde?

 

Nope.

 

 

The period of free Fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google’s enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company’s AI panic — excuse me, AI pivot. And it can’t be Mercury in retrograde, because I’m a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don’t believe in astrology.

 

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that’s a sign that the environment has changed, and that’s what happened to tech. Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

 

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honourable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

 

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses:

 

Competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

 

Regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

 

Self-help. Computers are extremely flexible and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-Complete Von Neumann Machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

 

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company’s shareholders. Think of a boardroom table where someone says, “I’ve calculated that making our ads 20 per cent more invasive will net us 2 per cent more revenue per user.”

 

In a digital world, someone else might well say, “Yes, but if we do that, 20 per cent of our users will install ad blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, for ever.” This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory manoeuvre will prompt their users to google, “How do I disenshittify this?”

 

And, finally, workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn’t mean that tech workers don’t have labour power. The historical “talent shortage” of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another, better job.

 

They knew it and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures to be.

 

That’s why mottoes such as Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered; they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It’s what the American academic Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe” or Elon Musk calls being “extremely hardcore”.

 

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn’t flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines. So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical “campuses”, with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered, rather than being made to work like government mules.

 

For bosses, there’s a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission. Namely, your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage and threaten to quit. Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification.

 

The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power. So what happened?

---

 

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition between companies. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modelled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

 

But starting in the 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called “consumer welfare”, which essentially held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant that was the best store, selling the best product — not that anyone was cheating.

Executives weren’t better before. They were constrained . . . by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power

And so, all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed smaller companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

 

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with “predatory pricing” that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold. When Diapers.com refused Amazon’s acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100mn on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar.

 

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, an AT&T telephone operator who’d do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

 

Today’s giants are not constrained by competition. They don’t care. They don’t have to. They’re Google.

 

That’s the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint — regulation — was also doomed.

 

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can’t agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can’t even agree on how to cater a meeting where they’d discuss the matter.

 

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel. Five companies, or four, or three, or two or just one company can easily converge on a single message for their regulators, and without “wasteful competition” eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

 

This is why competition matters: it’s not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers; it’s because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

 

Now, there are plenty of things we don’t want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse and that’s a good thing. They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies.

 

We don’t want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

 

But: Google and Facebook have been unscathed by European privacy law. That’s not because they don’t violate the GDPR. It’s because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU’s most notorious corporate crime havens. And Ireland competes with the EU’s other crime havens — Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and, sometimes, the Netherlands — to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment.

 

The Irish Data Protection Commission rules on very few cases, and more than two-thirds of its rulings are overturned by the EU courts, even though Ireland is the nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent. So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app.

 

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would surely come in handy. If you don’t want your privacy violated, you don’t need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad blocker.

 

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each other’s throats, unable to capture their regulators. Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn’t just the ability to flout regulation, it’s also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

 

Today’s tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling MySpace users they needed to escape Murdoch’s crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, “Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here.” It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your MySpace username and password, and it would login to MySpace and pretend to be you, scraping everything waiting in your inbox and copying it to your Facebook inbox.

When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, it was progress. If you try to do it to them, it’s piracy

When Microsoft was choking off Apple’s market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac in the 1990s — so that offices were throwing away their designers’ Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — Steve Jobs didn’t beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

 

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

 

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: “Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?”

 

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that’s piracy.

 

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they’ll say you violated US laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive. Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple’s media stores and they’d bomb you until the rubble bounced. Try to scrape all of Google and they’ll nuke you until you glow.

 

Tech’s regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001. It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work — things such as ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone — with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offence.

 

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations. Here’s how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90 per cent of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on its platform sell with Amazon’s “digital rights management”, which locks it to Amazon’s apps.

 

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90 per cent of the market. If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon’s encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a five-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offence.

 

That’s a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it’s also harsher than the punishment you’d get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck stop. It’s harsher than the sentence you’d get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

 

Think of our ad blockers again. Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers.

 

Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.)

 

So when someone in a boardroom says, “Let’s make our ads 20 per cent more obnoxious and get a 2 per cent revenue increase,” no one objects that this might prompt users to google, “How do I block ads?” After all, the answer is, you can’t. Indeed, it’s more likely that someone in that boardroom will say, “Let’s make our ads 100 per cent more obnoxious and get a 10 per cent revenue increase.” (This is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website.)

 

There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”.

 

IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”.

 

We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.

---

 

What about that fourth constraint: workers? For decades, tech workers’ bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators. Even after “felony contempt of business model” and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers’ sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

 

Remember when tech workers dreamt of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over? That dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake start-up, get “acqui-hired” by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion. Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

 

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire you, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year, eight months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

 

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses’ worst impulses. Today, the response to “I refuse to make this product worse” is “turn in your badge and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out”.

 

I get that this is all a little depressing. OK, really depressing. But hear me out! We’ve identified the disease. We’ve identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

 

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labour. To reverse enshittification and guard against its re-emergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

 

On competition, it’s actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They’re blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics. Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this; we just stopped enforcing them.

 

I’ve been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I’ve never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

My big hope here is that Stein’s Law will take hold: anything that can’t go on for ever will eventually stop

Now, the enshittifiers aren’t taking this lying down. Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has run more than 80 pieces trashing Khan, insisting that she’s an ineffectual ideologue who can’t get anything done. Sure, that’s why you ran 80 editorials about her. Because she can’t get anything done.

 

Reagan and Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 1980s. But it’s awake, it’s back and it’s pissed off.

 

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding “with an app” to escape enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they’re starting to figure it out. Recently, the main body of the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in places like Ireland.

In the US, they might finally get a digital privacy law.

 

You probably have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988. The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a rightwing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren’t even all that embarrassing.

 

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn’t confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulent loudmouth who served as Nixon’s solicitor-general. Still, Congress got the idea that their own video records might be next, freaked out and passed the VPPA. That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law.

 

And the thing is, there are a lot of people who are angry about it. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a QAnon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing Gen Z into quoting Osama bin Laden?

 

Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?

 

Or that red state attorneys-general are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

 

Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?

 

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

 

Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action — which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy — would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There’s a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

 

What about self-help? That’s a lot farther away, alas. The EU’s DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You’ll be able to use WhatsApp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

 

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU’s got nothing for you. This is an area ripe for improvement. My big hope here is that Stein’s Law will take hold: anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.

 

Finally, there’s labour. Here in Europe, there’s much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the recent salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy. But even in the US, there’s a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers have realised they’re not founders-in-waiting. In Seattle, Amazon’s tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon’s warehouse workers, because they’re all workers.

 

We’re seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labour, with self-help bringing up the rear. It’s not a moment too soon, because the bad news is enshittification is coming to every industry. If it’s got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying: “It’s OK, we did it with an app.”

 

From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.

 

There’s a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification. Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive. It’s unstoppable.

---

 

The cynics among you might be sceptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn’t “enshittification” the same as “capitalism”? Well, no.

I’m not going to cape for capitalism. I’m hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy.

 

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavoured views could find each other, offer mutual aid and organise. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crap gadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names and cryptocurrency scams.

 

The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it’s joined.

 

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device. We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to co-ordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, save our planet and our species.

 

Martin Luther King said: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”

 

And it may be true that the law can’t force corporations to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation. But it can make them fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity — even if they don’t think you deserve it.

Edited February 8, 2024 by Vesper

[robsblubot 3,555]

☝️"Enshittification" is the Social Media version of (IT protocol) ossification.

On 08/02/2024 at 12:58, Vesper said:

The Republicans are the ultimate hypocrites.

They had complete control (Senate, House, and POTUS) for half of Trump's terms and passed fuckall for immigration.

As soon as Biden gets in, they double, treble down with the attacks:

They rant and scream that the border is out of control, that it is all Biden's fault, and that it is endangering Americans and rupturing national security.

 

Well, they appoint some of the most hardcore RW Republican Senators to negotiate a bill.

And the Democrats caved in and  basically gave the RW almsot EVERYTHING thery wanted.

It is the most hardcore immigration crackdown in 50 years.

Some of the farthest left Dems hate it, BUT enough to pass it were willing to support it.

Biden said he will use his new powers from the bill to close down the border in all the key areas starting the minute he signs it into law.

 

So....... what happens?

Trump tells the House and the Senate to vote it down, because he wants the issue to continue so he can bash Biden and the Dems with it, plus use it to deflect from his 91 criminal indictments.

In other words (and using THE REPUBS' OWN WORDS)... they are willing to absolutely put the American people and national security completely at risk just to deflect from Trump's massive leagal issues and also to use the immigration issue to smashup Biden and the Dems with.

They do not actually give a shit about the border, they just want it as a poltical weapon to power grab with.

Rank (and dangerous) hypocrisy.

They also (because the funding for it was in the bill) are fucking over Ukraine (the Putin-loving wing of the Repubs love that) and and Israel (the Israel blocking of funding part does not piss me off at all, I vehemently oppose giving them billions for their genocidal attempts) funding of those 2 wars.

 

While everything you wrote is true, and frankly hardly surprising, it will work politically because Biden does not do a thing, which makes him appear weak.

Edited February 10, 2024 by robsblubot

[Vesper 29,143]

1 hour ago, robsblubot said:

☝️It's the Social Media version of (IT protocol) ossification. 

While everything you wrote is true, and frankly, hardly surprising, it will work politically because Biden does not do a thing, which makes him appear weak.

Doesn't do a thing?

At the moment the US has the strongest economy in the world, it has quashed inflation (prices for some things are still too high due to corporate profit-taking on the margins and greed) without going into a recession (as I predicted the infationary pressures were transitory) and the stock markets are at all time highs.

Some more things:

Two strongest years of job growth in history
More than 40 million borrowers stand to benefit from student debt relief
Nearly 11 million jobs created since 2021
Taken over 100 actions to lower household energy costs by $100 per year
Helped bring gas prices down more than $1.60 from their summer 2022 peak
Signed the most significant gun violence prevention legislation in nearly 30 years
Increased the maximum value of Pell Grants by $900
3.5% unemployment rate — the lowest in 50 years
750,000 new manufacturing jobs
Near a record low unemployment rate for Hispanics
Near a record low unemployment rate for African-Americans
Record low unemployment rate for people with disabilities
Millions of Americans are saving $800 per year on health insurance coverage
$15 minimum wage for Federal workers and contractors
Fully vaccinated 79% of American adults against COVID-19
Led the world in a historic release of strategic reserves
Infrastructure investments in all 50 states, D.C., territories, and throughout Tribal nations
Over 16 million households receiving lower cost or free high-speed internet through the Affordable Connectivity Program

30 Things Joe Biden Did as President You Might Have Missed

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/02/joe-biden-30-policy-things-you-might-have-missed-00139046

 

LABOR

Expanded overtime guarantees for millions

President Barack Obama late in his second term oversaw a regulation that called for workers making up to $47,476 to be automatically entitled to time-and-a-half overtime pay. The move infuriated businesses and Republicans, who sought to block the rule in both Congress and the courts. Donald Trump’s election and a Texas judge’s ruling in 2016 led the Labor Department to revisit the matter and set a significantly lower threshold of $35,568.

The move: Biden’s Department of Labor reopened the issue and proposed a rule at the end of August that would push up that cutoff by nearly $20,000 — to $55,000. The draft regulation, which still needs to be finalized, would also include a mechanism to automatically adjust that level every three years by yoking it to the 35th percentile of annual income.

The impact: The proposed rule would pave the way for roughly 3.6 million additional workers to be eligible for time-and-a-half overtime pay than were eligible under the 2019 policy, according to the Labor Department. It stands to be one of the most concrete policies to boost workers’ wages under Biden’s term, as other ambitious proposals like raising the minimum wage have been bottled up in Congress.

The upshot: The Biden administration is aiming to finalize the rule in April, but the agency will have to figure out a way to defend it against legal arguments similar to the ones that stymied the similar Obama rule. Additionally, any internal delays could expose the regulation to being later overturned by lawmakers using the Congressional Review Act, a tool that was successfully used in recent years to undo rules issued under both Obama and Trump.

HEALTH CARE

First over-the-counter birth control pill to hit U.S. stores in 2024

The push to make an oral contraceptive available without a prescription predates Biden’s presidency. But the issue took on fresh urgency when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, particularly as conservatives openly questioned the legal precedent establishing the right to privacy for birth control access. Within weeks of the ruling, a contraceptive maker, which had spent more than six years studying consumers’ ability to use the product correctly without a doctor’s supervision, applied to the FDA for over-the-counter approval.

The move: Despite concerns from FDA scientists about consumers’ comprehension of the drug’s proper use and risks, in July 2023 the agency endorsed making the pill available over the counter.

The impact: CVS and Walgreens, two of the country’s biggest retail pharmacies, have pledged to carry the contraceptive, called Opill, once it’s available in early 2024. Reproductive rights advocates say an OTC oral contraceptive will help make birth control access more equitable by reaching people who can’t afford or easily visit a health care provider for a prescription.

The upshot: Opill’s success will come down to its retail price and whether public and private insurers opt to cover it. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health plans to cover contraception at no cost to consumers, but insurers generally don’t cover OTC medications unless they’re prescribed. Advocates for greater contraception access say those policies create a barrier for the uninsured, teenagers and people of color. But mandating no cost-sharing could create challenges at the point of sale for pharmacists and insurance plans. The Biden administration is considering requiring no-cost coverage of OTC items like Opill without a prescription by most commercial plans.

SCHOOL SAFETY

Gun violence prevention and gun safety get a boost

After the 2022 massacre of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the Biden administration called for stricter gun legislation. Uvalde spurred the first significant gun safety law in 30 years, which Biden signed in June of 2022, and the president took further action on his own.

The move: Biden established the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and in 2023 schools were awarded $286 million in federal dollars to support student wellness and school mental health professionals.

The impact: Biden proclaimed that kids’ safety from gun violence is “on the ballot” when he announced the creation of the new office — and that proclamation has seeped into official White House business and his reelection campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris has taken the lead on mobilizing young Americans concerned about gun violence, visiting schools around the nation and touting new money awarded from the gun safety bill.

The upshot: Schools will continue to receive millions of dollars over the next five years to address youth mental health and student wellness as the remaining cash from the legislation’s $1 billion in funding is distributed.

CLIMATE

Renewable power is the No. 2 source of electricity in the U.S. — and climbing

Biden entered the White House putting climate change and job creation from the expansion of a clean energy economy at the top of his agenda — an about-face from energy policy during the Trump administration. At the time, renewable energy sources were already on the rise and the industry was optimistic about its future, especially buoyed by promises from the new president to invest trillions of dollars into clean energy development and research, and the global trend toward cleaner forms of power.

The move: Across the Biden administration, agencies and officials have made the transition to green energy a central tenet, reinvigorating programs left dormant under Trump and accelerating approval of renewable energy projects, like offshore wind. And Democratic lawmakers passed landmark legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — to reduce greenhouse gases that are driving climate change and provide support for green power sources. That legislation included billions for new programs and lucrative tax incentives to boost technologies, like solar and wind, as well as next-generation sources like green hydrogen.

The impact: Renewable energy growth has ramped up across the United States. Electricity generation from renewable energy sources — including wind, solar and hydropower — surpassed coal-fired generation in the electric power sector for the first time in 2022, making it the second-biggest source behind natural gas generation. Renewables also passed nuclear power generation for the first time in 2021 and widened that gap the next year. The IRA also spurring a wave of private sector investment in U.S. clean energy manufacturing facilities for solar, wind and electric vehicle parts, the majority of which will be located in Republican congressional districts represented by lawmakers who voted against the bill.

The upshot: The Biden administration is continuing to roll out policies and programs focused on the energy transition, including detailing provisions under the Inflation Reduction Act that will help clarify the law so that new investments in the U.S. can move forward.

 

HOUSING

Preventing discriminatory mortgage lending

In 1977, Congress passed a law to combat a practice known as redlining, where for decades the government had discouraged lenders from extending mortgage loans to borrowers in Black neighborhoods. The law requires banks to lend to creditworthy lower-income people in the same neighborhoods where they have branches that take deposits. But the growth of the internet and mobile banking have made those rules increasingly obsolete. Banks, in effect, had a major presence in many neighborhoods where they had no branches.

The move: The Federal Reserve and its fellow independent bank regulators drafted a new anti-redlining framework, which will go into effect starting in January 2026. It requires banks to lend to lower-income communities in areas where they have a concentration of mortgage and small-business loans, rather than just where they have physical branches.

The impact: While the update hasn’t taken effect yet, the hope is that it will quickly begin to direct more dollars into areas where banks haven’t previously faced obligations to lend more equitably.

The upshot: Financial agencies are still trying to figure out the best way to ensure access to credit within poorer communities nearly 50 years after the Community Reinvestment Act was passed. Indeed, the racial homeownership gap is actually wider now than it was in 1968, when redlining was still legal.

CONSUMER BANKING

A sweeping crackdown on “junk fees” and overdraft charges

Biden touted his campaign to eliminate so-called junk fees — the hidden charges that often come as a surprise to the consumer, taking aim at the fees levied by airlines, cable companies, concert ticket-sellers and hotels, among other businesses. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2022 launched an initiative to expand the crackdown to target financial fees, training its scrutiny in particular on credit card late charges and the insufficient-fund fees that banks impose.

The move: The CFPB in January released a long-awaited proposal to cut the fees that large banks and credit unions can charge consumers for overdrawing their accounts. The proposal would allow banks to charge fees to cover the cost and losses associated with courtesy overdrafts — either a “breakeven” fee based on the bank’s own calculation or a benchmark fee — both of which would be lower than the punitive $30 or $40 fees that many banks impose now. The CFPB proposed several options for the benchmark fee, ranging from $3 to $14. The agency is also expected to finalize a proposal cutting credit card late fees to $8.

The impact: The CFPB expects its overdraft rule to save consumers up to $3.5 billion a year. While large banks have already dramatically pared back overdraft fees in recent years, they remain a source of significant income for many smaller banks and the financial services industry is gearing up for a major fight over the proposed rule. Lenders argue that unlike hidden resort or concert charges, the fees they impose are disclosed and serve a purpose by deterring poor financial behavior.

The upshot: Republicans have already pushed back on the proposals, arguing they will reduce access to credit and raise the cost of banking for all consumers, including those who make prompt credit card payments and don’t overdraw their bank accounts. A GOP administration would likely try to roll back both rules.

WALL STREET

Forcing Chinese companies to open their books

Since the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the U.S. has allowed companies to publicly list their stocks only if they agree to let federal watchdogs review their auditors’ work. Yet for years, Beijing authorities, citing national security concerns, refused to allow U.S. inspectors to examine the books of China- and Hong Kong-based companies. Biden’s regulators finally forced their hand with the help of Congress and even former President Donald Trump.

The move: Washington negotiators secured a landmark deal in August 2022 that would give American inspectors at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the top U.S. accounting watchdog, unprecedented access to the audits of Chinese and Hong Kong-based firms trading on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The deal was reached after passage of a 2020 bill, which Trump signed into law in his administration’s waning days, that would have given the noncompliant companies the boot if they didn’t acquiesce.

The impact: China has held up its end of the deal. Four months after the agreement, the PCAOB confirmed it was able to fully review the Chinese companies’ audits. The inspections eventually resulted in $7.9 million in fines and sanctions against three China-based firms and four individuals. SEC Chair Gary Gensler, whose agency oversees the PCAOB, has touted the deal as a success that has better protected American investors.

The upshot: Whether China’s cooperation continues is still a concern for U.S. regulators — and will likely linger no matter who is president come 2025. Trump’s first time in office paved the way for the eventual deal struck by Biden’s regulators, suggesting that the SEC and PCAOB will probably keep the pressure on Beijing.

ELECTIONS

Preventing another Jan. 6

Trump and his supporters caused chaos throughout the certification of the 2020 election in Congress, pushing slates of “fake electors,” pressuring then-Vice President Mike Pence to toss out the votes from legitimate electors, and even after the counting of electoral votes was interrupted by insurrectionists, pro-Trump Republicans in both chambers voted to object to the results. When it was over, there was a sense that the holes in our election certification process needed to be plugged.

The move: A bipartisan group in Congress worked to reform the Electoral Count Act, a byzantine 19th century law that governs how Electoral College votes are tallied. The changes include making clear that the vice president’s role is “solely ministerial,” requiring that electors in states are picked “in accordance with the laws of the State enacted prior to election day” and raising the threshold for how many members of Congress are needed to object to a state’s slate. The act also allows for the “apparent successful candidate” to more easily receive funding from the government to build a transition office, after Trump officials dragged their feet for weeks in providing the funds Biden needed for his transition work.

The impact: The law will make it harder for Trump, or any other presidential candidate, to pressure state and local election officials — or Congress — to overturn elections.

The upshot: The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act did address significant weaknesses that Trump exploited in his last-gasp attempts to hold on to power. However, Biden had committed to passing broader voting rights legislation to forestall other types of election misdeeds and fell short. His administration went all-in on passing various iterations of a bill that would have dramatically remade American elections, but those efforts were rebuffed in the Senate by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) who refused to gut the filibuster to do so. Meanwhile, Republicans were furious after Biden accused them of presiding over “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

DEFENSE

Building armies of drones to counter China

Defense officials have for years talked about how drones will play a central role in future wars, but other than fiddling at the margins, little has been done to build a large, AI-enabled network of military uncrewed vehicles. The worry in Washington has been that Beijing is ahead of the United States in developing the military use of drones and its growing drone fleets could swarm and confuse the radars and air defenses of U.S. warships, and critical bases in Guam and Japan.

The move: Biden’s Pentagon unveiled the Replicator program, an effort to build thousands of relatively cheap and quickly replaceable drones that can work together to attack, swarm and bedevil enemy defenses. The goal is to have the drones up and flying within two years. The program, which Pentagon officials say is more reliant on AI software installed on existing drones than actually buying new systems, would be a game-changer for the normally slow, risk-averse Pentagon procurement bureaucracy.

The impact: Once implemented, the U.S. would potentially be positioned to assume real leadership in uncrewed and AI-enabled technology, an area where it has always been strong but where other countries have started moving faster.

The upshot: Tech firms and lawmakers still want more specifics on how this is all supposed to work. But if things go as planned, the success of the program would be a major win for the White House, which has been eager to display American technological and industrial might.

CLIMATE

The nation’s farms get big bucks to go “climate-smart”

Agriculture produces about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, and it’s been a priority of Biden’s climate plan to nudge the nation’s farmers and ranchers toward greener, less carbon-intensive ways of producing food.

The move: The Democrats used their marquee climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, to authorize funding to jump-start the transition of American agriculture toward less carbon-intensive practices. In total, the IRA aims to spend roughly $20 billion on climate smart agriculture over the next eight years, and will also target $300 million to develop more reliable and accurate standards for measuring, monitoring, reporting and verifying greenhouse gas emissions reductions in agriculture.

The impact: The money will bankroll farmers’ transition to practices the USDA deems climate-smart, like planting cover crops, reducing tilling and rotating cattle grazing zones, all of which can reduce and sequester emissions of atmosphere-warming carbon, nitrous oxide and methane.

The upshot: Biden’s climate agenda for agriculture relies heavily on a voluntary transition prodded along by large-scale incentives like the ones found in the IRA. The approach has been highly popular with farm groups, who prefer incentive-based approaches over punitive regulations. However, some climate advocates are skeptical of the program’s real potential to reduce emissions; once the USDA develops clearer measuring standards, both climate advocates and investors looking to green their supply chains may be granted more certainty. Meanwhile, the IRA money faces a more existential threat from congressional Republicans who hope to tap some of it to fund other priorities in the next farm bill, which is slated to be reauthorized later this year.

AIR FORCE ONE

Biden scraps Trump’s paint scheme for Air Force One

Trump got personally involved in negotiations for Boeing’s Air Force One replacement soon after he took office, bragging on Twitter that he had successfully reduced the price of the contract with Boeing by “over $1 billion.” Soon after, Boeing agreed to a $3.9 billion contract with the Air Force stipulating the company would be responsible for any cost overruns on the planes. But Trump’s involvement in the project didn’t stop there. In 2019, he told ABC News he wanted a new red, white and blue paint scheme, which bore a striking resemblance to his private 757. When Biden took office, he was faced with a decision on whether to keep Trump’s paint scheme, or go back to the traditional colors.

The move: Biden opted not to go with Trump’s darker paint scheme, after a study showed it could drive up the cost of the planes, POLITICO scooped in June 2022.

The impact: Biden got to scrap a personal Trump project, while taking credit for saving taxpayer dollars. It’s also one less headache for Boeing to worry about. Trump’s plan called for dark blue paint covering the plane’s underbelly and engines, which could have contributed to excessive temperatures on the aircraft — so the company would have had to pay out-of-pocket for the extra cooling costs.

The upshot: The new Air Force One fleet, when it arrives later this decade, will keep its iconic JFK-era light blue-and-white look.

ENVIRONMENT

The Biden administration helps broker a deal to save the Colorado River

Climate change and decades of overuse have shrunk the Colorado River and are forcing the seven states that use the river to negotiate how to divvy up cuts or risk it going dry. At stake is the water for 40 million people from Wyoming to the U.S.-Mexico border as well as powerhouse farming operations that irrigate some of the country’s most productive farmland.

The move: The Bureau of Reclamation, led by a Biden appointee, issued an ultimatum last summer, when reservoir levels were careening toward crisis points, and put legal teeth behind a threat to intervene unilaterally. That forced recalcitrant negotiators to the table. The Biden administration and Congress also successfully muscled through a $4 billion pot of money to help pay for conservation efforts.

The impact: Last spring, the states agreed to a short-term deal to head off the crisis for a couple years, a pact sweetened by the federal cash. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton has been on a PR spree across the West to promote the administration’s deals with water agencies in key swing states like Arizona.

The upshot: Negotiators are now starting to figure out what to do after the deal runs out in 2026. They face a spring deadline to agree on how to share the Colorado River’s dwindling flows over the next 20 years. But the federal government will not likely face any big decisions until after the presidential election.

AGRICULTURE

Giving smaller food producers a boost

Soaring food prices and supply chain crunches for meat and other staples during the Covid-19 pandemic drew attention to the highly consolidated agriculture sector, in which key sectors like meatpacking are dominated by a handful of “Big Ag” behemoths. Biden entered office promising to crack down on food monopolies and support small and midsize U.S. farmers, whose numbers have cratered in recent decades.

The move: In 2021, Biden signed an executive order directing agencies across the government to promote competition and take on monopolies. That included reviving a set of USDA regulations, first proposed during the Obama administration, to promote fairness and increase transparency in meat and poultry markets. In addition, legislation negotiated by the Biden administration is providing billions for rural communities, including at least $1 billion to help small and midsize meatpackers compete in a highly consolidated market. The laws also provide millions in debt relief for farmers who have faced discrimination, funded record increases in farm conservation efforts and boosted programs that help shorten supply chains, directing food from local farms to nearby schools and food banks.

The impact: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s stump speech outlines a vision for bolstering rural economies by promoting two “companion” systems for producing food: small producers who have multiple revenue streams from high-value products, conservation practices and local buyers, and larger producers who earn money from exports and efficiency. Billions of dollars have now gone toward building this vision. USDA has also introduced new regulations to bolster organic markets and build transparency for consumers, which supporters say will help American farmers command premium prices.

The upshot: Despite record government money pouring into rural communities, critics say the Biden administration has not turned things around for small farmers. For one, USDA has yet to propose a key regulation intended to make agriculture markets more competitive. If it isn’t finalized soon — and a Republican president takes power — some farmers fear that much of the Biden administration’s anti-monopoly legacy in the agriculture sector could be temporary.

CANNABIS

Biden recommends loosening federal restrictions on marijuana

Since the Nixon administration, marijuana has been classified in federal law in the same category as LSD and heroin — drugs categorized as having a high propensity for addiction and no known medical value. In October 2022, as more and more states have moved to legalize cannabis, Biden issued an executive order directing the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a review of all available cannabis science and recommend whether the classification of marijuana should be changed.

The move: HHS issued its recommendation in August 2023 that marijuana should be moved from the most prohibitive level on the Controlled Substances Act (Schedule I) to a middle category (Schedule III). Schedule III drugs — which include ketamine and testosterone — have “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” It’s now up to the Drug Enforcement Administration to make a final determination about the proper classification of cannabis, with a decision expected sometime in 2024.

The impact: A move to Schedule III would be the biggest change in U.S. drug policy in more than half a century. It would make marijuana much easier for researchers to study — which could give politicians and regulators a better idea of how best to write laws concerning cannabis. It would also lift arduous tax burdens on the cannabis industry that apply only to the more severe Schedule I and II drug categories. If that tax burden is lifted, there is a strong possibility the struggling weed industry suddenly would see its financial prospects brighten. Changing the classification of cannabis, however, would not have any impact on federal illegality.

The upshot: Despite more and more states legalizing and regulating cannabis in recent years, federal law has remained unaltered for decades. A reschedule of cannabis would be a seismic shift in America’s drug laws, changing the perception of the drug, the trajectory of the industry and the potential for Congress to act in the future.

EDUCATION

A penalty for college programs that trap students in debt

For decades, the federal government has gone back and forth on the best way to solve the problem of workers who struggle to earn a living after graduating from the country’s for-profit colleges or career training programs. The Obama administration first laid out specific metrics requiring schools who want access to a lucrative stream of government funds to prove that its graduates are prepared for “gainful employment” and don’t end up with lots of student debt relative to their income. But Obama’s team never fully implemented its rules after lengthy legal fights. The Trump administration eventually scrapped the effort. Then Biden won office, and revived Obama’s plan — with a twist.

The move: Starting in July 2024, career training programs could lose federal funding if their graduates leave with lots of student debt relative to their earnings — or if the typical graduate earns roughly less than $25,000. A similar concept would also apply to many colleges and universities that receive federal aid: Schools would have to warn students if they fail Biden’s new debt and earnings metrics — though only low-rated career programs would face a loss of funding.

The impact: The Education Department has estimated that nearly 1,700 programs would fail to meet the administration’s new standards. Another 400 graduate programs at nonprofit and public universities would also be forced to notify their students that they failed. More than 800,000 students are collectively enrolled in these programs. The department also estimates the policy will save federal taxpayers nearly $14 billion over the next decade by reducing defaults on federally backed student loans.

The upshot: Cosmetology schools, truck-driving programs and top-flight graduate institutions could soon be held publicly accountable for how their students fare in the workforce. But angry conservatives and for-profit colleges despise this looming Biden administration policy, and could launch a legal challenge to stop the rule from taking effect.

TECHNOLOGY

Biden moves to bring microchip production home

The Covid pandemic sharpened bipartisan fears in Washington about U.S. reliance on microchips produced overseas — primarily in China or Taiwan. As factories shut down in Asia and supply chains snarled, U.S. automakers and other manufacturers were unable to get the chips they needed, idling their plants and spiking prices for cars and other goods. That led the Biden administration and lawmakers from both parties to consider policies to bring production of the most advanced microchips back to the U.S.

The move: The administration and a bipartisan group of lawmakers coalesced around legislation that became known as the CHIPS and Science Act, which offered more than $50 billion to subsidize the construction of new microchip facilities in the U.S. and boost research and development across a series of national research facilities. After two years of debate, lawmakers passed it in July 2022 with solid bipartisan majorities. It was a remarkable endorsement of industrial policy — government support for selected industries — that U.S. lawmakers had largely shunned for decades.

The impact: The expectation of new subsidies has led major chipmakers to announce plans for new semiconductor plants in the U.S. — like an Intel campus near Columbus, Ohio, and a facility from Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC in Arizona. More than a dozen new tech research hubs are also planned based on the CHIPS Act’s funding. And the administration recently announced its first actual CHIPS Act grant — $35 million to defense contractor BAE to expand a facility that supplies Air Force fighter jets.

The upshot: The CHIPS Act was a landmark move for Biden’s new industrial policies that sought to decrease U.S. reliance on China and boost manufacturing at home. Its passage showed that lawmakers in both parties are now willing to spend huge sums to ensure the manufacturing of essential goods like microchips happens in the U.S. — and certainly not in China. The administration is set to continue rolling out CHIPS Act grants in 2024 in an attempt to gain electoral advantage from the subsidy package. But it remains to be seen if the effects of the law — like new jobs from plants coming online — will come quickly enough to be felt by voters in swing states.

TRADE

Tech firms face new international restrictions on data and privacy

The rapid growth of e-commerce in recent decades has been accompanied by an increase in digital trade barriers. Those include requirements for companies to store their data in the country where it is collected or to hand over their source code to a joint venture partner in order to do business in a particular market. Until now, the United States has been a leading voice on the international stage pushing back against such provisions, which it argued not only hurt big tech companies but small and medium-size companies that increasingly rely on the internet to do business.

The move: With the support of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and some other progressive Democrats, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative withdrew longtime bipartisan positions on data flows and source code in digital trade talks among 90 members of the World Trade Organization. The Biden administration said withdrawing the proposals would allow “policy space” for Congress, as well as other WTO members, to legislate and regulate in the tech space without bumping into trade commitments.

The impact: The move represents a significant shift in the U.S. stance on global tech policy as the motives and actions of big tech companies come under increasing scrutiny. Key members of Congress, including the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Digital Trade Caucus, harshly criticized the move, which they said would hurt U.S. competitiveness and give China and Russia more scope to craft harmful digital trade rules. It also signaled a broader retreat on the issues in U.S.-led trade talks, including the administration’s proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework with 13 other countries in the region.

The upshot: The decision aligns the Biden administration’s trade policy with its antitrust actions against big U.S. tech firms. However, it also has triggered a debate that could play out in future administrations over whether the U.S. will continue to defend the interests of its own domestic tech industry in foreign markets as part of future trade agreements.

 

AFRICA

Preventing a cobalt crisis in Congo

Rebels in eastern Congo and the Congolese army have been fighting since the 1990s. The fighting escalated in 2022 as Rwanda-backed rebels, known as M23, invaded and took over several villages. The violence escalated further last summer when M23 moved closer to the area near Goma, one of the largest cities in the region. A war between Congo and Rwanda would not only be a humanitarian disaster, but it would upend the administration’s efforts to get into the cobalt market — a key component for electric vehicle batteries. Congo is home to about 70 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves, and China, one of Washington’s biggest trade competitors, is its main producer and is supporting M23 with drones.

The move: The president dispatched one of his top intelligence officials to the region last year to broker a pause in fighting. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines met with the presidents of Congo and Rwanda and laid out a plan for deescalation, including that Rwanda move its military back from the frontlines and Congo ground its drones. Leaders agreed to the broad strokes of the deal.

The impact: Hostilities continue but have quieted some, despite a national election last year that was marred by logistical problems.

The upshot: A direct conflict between Rwanda and Congo would likely spill over into other countries in the region and would also force the U.S. into an indirect confrontation with China at a time when Washington is trying to reset relations with Beijing.

CYBERSECURITY

Cracking down on cyberattacks

During Biden’s first six months in office, government agencies and critical companies were beset by cyberattacks. These incidents included the SolarWinds hack, which involved Russian government hackers infiltrating around a dozen agencies for at least a year. Ransomware attacks were also a major source of concern, with the administration forced to reckon with Colonial Pipeline, the source of almost half of the East Coast’s fuel supply, shutting down operations in May 2021. In the years since, cybersecurity concerns have only increased, including a Chinese-linked breach last year that impacted email accounts at the Commerce and State departments, skyrocketing new vulnerabilities opened up by the use of artificial intelligence technologies, and new geopolitical-linked targeting of critical systems.

The move: In March 2023, the White House released a national cyber strategy, the first since 2018. The strategy has five pillars including strengthening international cyber diplomacy efforts, securing emerging critical technologies and taking more aggressive steps to disrupt hacking groups. The strategy also made clear that the Biden administration intends to take a strong approach to issuing new regulations for critical sectors, for example health care or electricity.

The impact: The strategy outlined the goals and established a path for the federal government to reduce the threat of cyberattacks; when paired with an implementation plan for the strategy released in July, there are now firm agenda items for enhancing security.

The upshot: While cyberattacks have not slowed down since the release of the strategy, the federal government now has a solid road map for the years to come on how to respond to attacks. However, if Biden is not reelected next year, a new administration may seek to change the goals of the strategy, or even put out a new one.

INDO-PACIFIC

Countering China with a new alliance between Japan and South Korea

South Korea and Japan have a mutual antipathy that goes back decades, linked to Japan’s brutal colonial rule of Korea from 1910-1945 as well as long-simmering territorial disputes in the East China Sea. That has fueled such acrimony in South Korea that until relatively recently public opinion polls in the country have rated Japanese leaders only slightly more popular than North Korea’s.

The move: Biden devoted significant diplomatic capital to courting both Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol with an eye to easing that mutual hostility. Those efforts allowed Biden to broker the first-ever trilateral summit between the three countries aimed at unifying the two countries in an alliance implicitly aimed at countering China’s rising diplomatic, economic and military power in the Indo-Pacific.

The impact: Japan and South Korea committed to allying against China using a language of cooperation that would have been impossible just two years ago. The two countries have aligned their foreign policies and agreed to a significant expansion of bilateral security cooperation to offset China’s perceived regional threat. The two countries have also committed to defense spending increases aimed at addressing Beijing’s dramatic expansion of its military forces.

The upshot: Biden’s diplomacy has — for now at least — created a narrative for regional support for his “rules-based international order” that has persuaded two key allies that border China to transition from reflexive hostility to (fragile) harmony.

 

HEALTH CARE

Reinvigorating cancer research to lower death rates

As vice president, Biden launched an accelerated cancer research effort that was known as the “cancer moonshot” after his son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. In 2022, he reignited it as president. Biden set a lofty goal for Moonshot 2.0: reducing the cancer death rate by half over 25 years. A National Cancer Institute assessment last year found that’s within the realm of possibility — if scientists and public health officials find ways to drive down cancer rates faster and develop new treatments and testing tools.

The move: The White House has announced dozens of federal and private moonshot programs, including several that rely on the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, an agency Biden created to take on high-risk, high-reward research. The White House has tasked ARPA-H with building a national clinical trial network and partnering with the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute to create a biomedical data toolbox for cancer research. ARPA-H is also putting an additional $240 million from its budget toward cancer-related research. Those commitments come on top of a series of cancer-related awards and programs ARPA-H funded last year, such as researching the use of bacteria to target tumor cells, developing an implant to better dose cancer medicine, harnessing mRNA technology and honing surgical tools.

The impact: Evaluating whether the new moonshot programs can make a dent in the cancer death rate will take time. However, the fruits from ARPA-H’s investment will come long before 2047. The agency’s mission is to pivot quickly if its research fails and to get innovative treatments and technologies to patients within years, not decades. In the meantime, the United States has made serious progress on cancer, with the death rate falling 33 percent over the past three decades.

The upshot: While cancer research has historically enjoyed bipartisan support, Republicans have proposed budget cuts for health agencies this year. Meanwhile, the moonshot’s original funding has run out and Congress has not authorized new funds.

HEALTH CARE

Making medication more accessible through telemedicine

During the Covid public health emergency, the federal government took several steps to make it easier to access health care via telemedicine. Most of those measures have ended. But one of the regulations that Biden held in place allows many controlled substances like Adderall for ADHD treatment, testosterone for gender-affirming care and buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder to be prescribed without first having an in-person visit. In-person-visit requirements have traditionally been used to prevent fraud and abuse.

The move: Ahead of the emergency’s end in May, the Drug Enforcement Administration proposed requiring that patients see a doctor in person after an initial 30-day supply of medication obtained virtually for buprenorphine, testosterone and ketamine for depression, and requiring in-person visits for Adderall to be prescribed. That sparked a firestorm of criticism from treatment advocates and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The DEA has now extended the eased prescribing rules through the end of 2024. It plans to issue final regulations this year.

The impact: Treatment advocates say that prescribing addiction treatments via telehealth offers improved access to care, especially for hard-to-reach patients like those with opioid addiction, and removes barriers associated with travel. After several years, many patients have become accustomed to receiving such care virtually. But some startups have drawn DEA scrutiny after allegedly overprescribing powerful stimulants like Adderall.

The upshot: Telehealth has become a booming industry since the pandemic, with telehealth usage about 30 times higher than before the pandemic. The DEA says it hopes to balance expanding access to treatment with avoiding misuse.

LABOR

Union-busting gets riskier

Federal labor law has been essentially frozen since the Taft-Hartley Act passed over President Harry Truman’s veto in 1947, leaving Republicans and Democrats to engage in decadeslong trench warfare at the National Labor Relations Board to nudge legal precedents and enforcement standards in their preferred direction. The result has been an ever-escalating series of policy shifts when the balance of power in Washington flips from one party to the other that puts the fate of disputes between employers and workers in the balance.

The move: Soon after taking office, Biden ousted the Trump-appointed chief prosecutor at the NLRB and, with the help of Senate Democrats, installed union-friendly allies on the board who have adopted positions that boost workers in confrontations with businesses. In August, the Democratic board majority issued a landmark ruling known as the Cemex decision that puts a tight leash on employers in cases where agency officials determine they broke labor law during a union representation vote. It also shortened the timeline to bargaining in such cases, removing a previous standard that allowed for tainted union elections to be rerun.

The impact: The new framework significantly raises the risk that an employer could be hit with a bargaining order for even a single transgression if it interferes with an election. The NLRB also put the onus on employers to petition the agency for an election shortly after a majority of employees seek union representation — or be forced to bargain with the union without an election at all.

The upshot: The heightened threat of bargaining orders has already prompted employers to adapt to the new requirements and, combined with other pro-worker changes, emboldened unions seeking to organize workplaces by chipping away at management’s leverage. Biden styles himself the most labor-friendly president in history, and actions like the Cemex decision have given him a chance to demonstrate those bona fides. It’s something he’s sure to tout in his reelection campaign as he courts union members’ votes and stokes their political organizing skills.

TECHNOLOGY

Biden inks blueprint to fix 5G chaos

Biden inherited messy interagency fights jeopardizing U.S. leadership in 5G wireless technology, which imperiled the government’s ability to auction off valuable spectrum ranges used for commercial wireless technology. Agencies feuded over how to use different chunks of these airwaves during the Trump administration, often pitting the Federal Communications Commission against the Pentagon, Transportation Department and other departments who have their own increasing demands for spectrum to operate military radars, aviation equipment and other systems. These fights continued into Biden’s term, fueling anxiety over U.S. economic competitiveness and its ability to vie against global rivals like China, which is seeking to dominate the wireless ecosystem and subsidizing telecom giants like Huawei.

The move: The White House issued a national spectrum strategy and presidential memorandum, which created a system empowering both his Commerce Department and, when necessary, White House officials, to settle interagency spats. The administration says the strategy puts the U.S. on firmer global standing, particularly with new generations of technology like 6G wireless on the horizon, and sets goals for how the government allocates spectrum.

The impact: When fully implemented, the strategy aims to allocate more spectrum for the commercial sector, drive more R&D into spectrum technologies, lead to a better-equipped workforce and better allocate bandwidth for government agencies to use.

The upshot: Spectrum is a limited resource that’s never been more important to business and government, and Biden’s plan creates a system to better manage how government agencies and private industries compete for frequencies. But much will depend on how exactly the administration implements it, and those details won’t come out until later this year. Some Republicans are concerned the strategy doesn’t mandate the free-up of spectrum for the commercial sector but simply initiates studies into whether that would be possible — an issue that could drive a future Republican White House to take a more aggressive approach.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Biden empowers federal agencies to monitor AI

Artificial intelligence has gone mainstream. As U.S. tech companies have raced to release shockingly powerful large language models, public reaction ran the gamut from rapture to horror. Policymakers from Washington to Beijing realized quickly that generative AI — and successive AI breakthroughs — would crown new market leaders, hand more decisions to machines, put cyberattacks on steroids and fundamentally alter people’s trust in what they see, read or hear. Biden has taken a keen interest in understanding the inner workings of large language models and how the U.S. could turn AI into a lasting economic advantage.

The move: Biden’s White House issued a highly technical but far-reaching AI executive order last year that surprised even close observers with its ambition. The order mobilizes a wide range of government powers to tackle the potential risks of AI, in areas from discrimination to national security. It also sets new guidelines for safety, including standards for new models and marking synthetic content.

The impact: Biden’s executive order starts the clock for more than a dozen federal agencies to figure out what the gold standard for “safe, secure and trustworthy” AI handling should be for their own operations — and in the case of the Commerce Department, for the private sector as well.

The upshot: The sprawling AI executive order sets the federal government up to keep tabs on tech companies who are developing highly capable AI models. The impending regulatory scrutiny is already chafing Washington’s tech lobby. Additionally, whether federal agencies will have the resources to execute the Biden administration’s ambitious vision for an AI-savvy public sector will depend heavily on whether Congress delivers on the president’s budget request.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Fixing bridges, building tunnels and expanding broadband

Sccessive presidents tried for so many years to pass infrastructure legislation that it became a running joke in Washington. Maybe that’s one reason polls show that voters don’t know that Biden finally broke that logjam, and did it with support from lawmakers of both political parties. It was the kind of historic investment — following years of deferred needs — that previous presidents had tried and failed to achieve.

The move: In his first year as president, Biden clinched an infrastructure deal that opened the spigot for $1.2 trillion of investment into the nation’s roads, waterlines, broadband networks, airports and much more. Two years later, projects that had been languishing for years — like replacing a 110-year-old Amtrak tunnel that’s become a chokepoint into New York City or an outdated and congested bridge between Kentucky and Ohio — are finally moving forward.

The impact: Those projects will take years to complete. Of the 40,000-plus projects that have gotten underway since the law was signed, a very small handful have had ribbon-cuttings. The new Amtrak tunnel isn’t scheduled to open until 2035. The administration is putting signs on as many projects as possible declaring they were “funded by President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law” while they’re under construction, but that’s not the same as people connecting that money to things that improve their everyday life. Still, the law is having economic impact: The construction industry has added 670,000 jobs since Biden took office.

The upshot: Republicans say massive government spending in the infrastructure law and other big Biden bills are to blame for stoking inflation. But during this year’s political campaign season, both parties stand to benefit from taking credit, and voters may finally start hearing about it — from both sides.

OIL

The U.S. is producing more oil than anytime in history

Biden came into office after having promised to slash oil production on public land. Canceling the Keystone XL pipeline during his first week in office seemed to confirm the image of him as a president who would happily throttle the country’s oil industry while showering the renewable energy industry with government dollars. But things turned out a little differently.

The move: Biden has been happy to use government largess to stimulate the renewables industry — but he’s also done little to check the short-term growth of oil. After the Covid-led economic downturn and Russian invasion of Ukraine caused a supply shock in the crude markets that drove U.S. gasoline prices up in 2022, the White House made an uneasy, but real, embrace of the oil industry to help bring down gasoline prices.

The impact: U.S. oil production is at record levels and is expected to go even higher next year. U.S. production is humming along at more than 13 million barrels per day and growing. That’s a gusher that’s topped levels that then-President Trump and GOP backers used to boast about. Exports are also on the rise as domestic fuel consumption has slowly come off the highs experienced a decade ago, meaning that every new barrel of oil produced in the United States is more likely to head overseas. Gasoline is now below $3 a gallon in many parts of the country.

The upshot: Demanding an “all of the above” policy that includes all forms of energy has become cliche among lawmakers. Under Biden, that may have become a reality few politicians will want to publicly discuss. Democrats don’t want to alienate their green backers on the left who’ve accused the administration of abandoning its climate focus, while Republicans are loath to admit that Biden’s oil boom is bigger than Trump’s.

CHINA

Strengthening military ties to Asian allies

Biden came into office with the goal of countering China by rebuilding military alliances with Asian allies. In late 2022, a top Pentagon official promised to accelerate that effort, vowing that “2023 is likely to stand as the most transformative year in U.S. force posture in the [Pacific] region in a generation.”

The move: The Biden administration inked new defense partnerships with the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, and deepened ties with India and Australia. The Pentagon also announced it would forward-deploy a Marine littoral regiment, an upgraded unit equipped with anti-ship missiles and advanced intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities, in Okinawa, Japan. In addition, during his first year as president, Biden announced a new working group with Britain and Australia to support Canberra’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines and share other advanced technologies, a pact now known as AUKUS.

The impact: All of the moves are aimed at building up the United States’ military partnerships in the Pacific — and countering China. The Pentagon said China is continuing to steadily expand its nuclear arsenal and could have 1,500 warheads by 2035, in addition to its growing fleet of warships and aircraft.

The upshot: The jury is still out on whether the administration has transformed the country’s posture in Asia, but DOD undeniably made some key moves that are sure to please partners in the region who worry about China’s mounting aggression.

CYBERSECURITY

A new agency to investigate cyberattacks

Organizations that fall victim to hacks often keep tight-lipped about what happened due to fear of legal liability or brand damage. But cybersecurity experts have long warned that the country will never break free from an endless cycle of computer breaches unless companies and government agencies become more transparent about how they got infiltrated. The danger was underscored in 2020 when a sophisticated Russian hack breached nine federal agencies.

The move: In 2021, Biden stood up the Cyber Safety Review Board, a government review panel charged with investigating the most significant computer security breaches that have affected the country. Just as the National Transportation Safety Board investigates transportation incidents, the new DHS-led panel is tasked with identifying the root cause of significant hacks and offering guidance to ensure they never happen again. The Board has 15 members hailing from both the private sector and the U.S. government.

The impact: The CSRB has received strong positive feedback from the cybersecurity industry for its first two investigations: one into a software vulnerability that had the government bracing for digital crisis and a second involving a group of hackers who developed a playbook to slip the defenses at some of the country’s highest profile companies, among them Uber and Microsoft. It’s unclear how much impact the board has really had, however, given that companies are not obligated to follow its guidance. It has also received criticism for appearing to avoid investigations that could make individual companies or the government look bad — a charge the CSRB denies.

The upshot: The Biden administration is hoping Congress will make the CSRB a permanent fixture of the federal government’s cybersecurity landscape. It has sent lawmakers draft legislation to codify the panel into law, enhance its budget and give it greater legal authorities to compel the production of evidence from breach victims. But Congress hasn’t yet acted, leaving the future of the board an open question.

TRANSPORTATION

Making airlines pay up when flights are delayed or canceled

Never mind luxury travel, now some airline passengers pay extra just for the basics. But getting your money back when a flight gets canceled or significantly delayed is one effort the Biden’s administration’s Transportation Department has tried to address as part of a new tough stance on the airline industry, especially after multiple instances of air travel gone awry.

The move: The Department of Transportation has introduced a series of proposals to help strengthen consumer protections for airline passengers, including a requirement that airlines give a cash refund after a flight is canceled instead of providing vouchers for a future flight. This would also apply to flights canceled because of events outside the airline’s control such as weather. Other rules proposed during the Biden administration include giving passengers more clarity about fees added on to the price of a flight before purchasing a ticket, and urging airlines to seat families together without extra fees.

The impact: Some airlines have responded to the increasing pressure by proactively canceling overscheduled flights, building in more buffer room to better handle hiccups, making it easier for passengers to change their plans and committing to meal or hotel voucher plans. The Transportation Department also created a dashboard, acting as a consumer “cheat sheet” as a way to force airlines to answer directly exactly what services they offer — which customers can then compare — when a flight is canceled or delayed. Separately, DOT is investigating several airlines for potentially engaging in unrealistic scheduling practices that have led to cascading problems that impact travelers.

The upshot: The Biden administration has taken some significant steps to compensate passengers when flights get disrupted. But preventing those disruptions in the first place remains problematic.

[robsblubot 3,555]

24 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Doesn't do a thing?

At the moment the US has the strongest economy in the world, it has quashed inflation (prices for some things are still too high due to corporate profit-taking on the margins and greed) without going into a recession (as I predicted the infationary pressures were transitory) and the stock markets are at all time highs.

Some more things:

Two strongest years of job growth in history
More than 40 million borrowers stand to benefit from student debt relief
Nearly 11 million jobs created since 2021
Taken over 100 actions to lower household energy costs by $100 per year
Helped bring gas prices down more than $1.60 from their summer 2022 peak
Signed the most significant gun violence prevention legislation in nearly 30 years
Increased the maximum value of Pell Grants by $900
3.5% unemployment rate — the lowest in 50 years
750,000 new manufacturing jobs
Near a record low unemployment rate for Hispanics
Near a record low unemployment rate for African-Americans
Record low unemployment rate for people with disabilities
Millions of Americans are saving $800 per year on health insurance coverage
$15 minimum wage for Federal workers and contractors
Fully vaccinated 79% of American adults against COVID-19
Led the world in a historic release of strategic reserves
Infrastructure investments in all 50 states, D.C., territories, and throughout Tribal nations
Over 16 million households receiving lower cost or free high-speed internet through the Affordable Connectivity Program

30 Things Joe Biden Did as President You Might Have Missed

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/02/joe-biden-30-policy-things-you-might-have-missed-00139046

 

LABOR

Expanded overtime guarantees for millions

President Barack Obama late in his second term oversaw a regulation that called for workers making up to $47,476 to be automatically entitled to time-and-a-half overtime pay. The move infuriated businesses and Republicans, who sought to block the rule in both Congress and the courts. Donald Trump’s election and a Texas judge’s ruling in 2016 led the Labor Department to revisit the matter and set a significantly lower threshold of $35,568.

The move: Biden’s Department of Labor reopened the issue and proposed a rule at the end of August that would push up that cutoff by nearly $20,000 — to $55,000. The draft regulation, which still needs to be finalized, would also include a mechanism to automatically adjust that level every three years by yoking it to the 35th percentile of annual income.

The impact: The proposed rule would pave the way for roughly 3.6 million additional workers to be eligible for time-and-a-half overtime pay than were eligible under the 2019 policy, according to the Labor Department. It stands to be one of the most concrete policies to boost workers’ wages under Biden’s term, as other ambitious proposals like raising the minimum wage have been bottled up in Congress.

The upshot: The Biden administration is aiming to finalize the rule in April, but the agency will have to figure out a way to defend it against legal arguments similar to the ones that stymied the similar Obama rule. Additionally, any internal delays could expose the regulation to being later overturned by lawmakers using the Congressional Review Act, a tool that was successfully used in recent years to undo rules issued under both Obama and Trump.

HEALTH CARE

First over-the-counter birth control pill to hit U.S. stores in 2024

The push to make an oral contraceptive available without a prescription predates Biden’s presidency. But the issue took on fresh urgency when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, particularly as conservatives openly questioned the legal precedent establishing the right to privacy for birth control access. Within weeks of the ruling, a contraceptive maker, which had spent more than six years studying consumers’ ability to use the product correctly without a doctor’s supervision, applied to the FDA for over-the-counter approval.

The move: Despite concerns from FDA scientists about consumers’ comprehension of the drug’s proper use and risks, in July 2023 the agency endorsed making the pill available over the counter.

The impact: CVS and Walgreens, two of the country’s biggest retail pharmacies, have pledged to carry the contraceptive, called Opill, once it’s available in early 2024. Reproductive rights advocates say an OTC oral contraceptive will help make birth control access more equitable by reaching people who can’t afford or easily visit a health care provider for a prescription.

The upshot: Opill’s success will come down to its retail price and whether public and private insurers opt to cover it. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health plans to cover contraception at no cost to consumers, but insurers generally don’t cover OTC medications unless they’re prescribed. Advocates for greater contraception access say those policies create a barrier for the uninsured, teenagers and people of color. But mandating no cost-sharing could create challenges at the point of sale for pharmacists and insurance plans. The Biden administration is considering requiring no-cost coverage of OTC items like Opill without a prescription by most commercial plans.

SCHOOL SAFETY

Gun violence prevention and gun safety get a boost

After the 2022 massacre of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the Biden administration called for stricter gun legislation. Uvalde spurred the first significant gun safety law in 30 years, which Biden signed in June of 2022, and the president took further action on his own.

The move: Biden established the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and in 2023 schools were awarded $286 million in federal dollars to support student wellness and school mental health professionals.

The impact: Biden proclaimed that kids’ safety from gun violence is “on the ballot” when he announced the creation of the new office — and that proclamation has seeped into official White House business and his reelection campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris has taken the lead on mobilizing young Americans concerned about gun violence, visiting schools around the nation and touting new money awarded from the gun safety bill.

The upshot: Schools will continue to receive millions of dollars over the next five years to address youth mental health and student wellness as the remaining cash from the legislation’s $1 billion in funding is distributed.

CLIMATE

Renewable power is the No. 2 source of electricity in the U.S. — and climbing

Biden entered the White House putting climate change and job creation from the expansion of a clean energy economy at the top of his agenda — an about-face from energy policy during the Trump administration. At the time, renewable energy sources were already on the rise and the industry was optimistic about its future, especially buoyed by promises from the new president to invest trillions of dollars into clean energy development and research, and the global trend toward cleaner forms of power.

The move: Across the Biden administration, agencies and officials have made the transition to green energy a central tenet, reinvigorating programs left dormant under Trump and accelerating approval of renewable energy projects, like offshore wind. And Democratic lawmakers passed landmark legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — to reduce greenhouse gases that are driving climate change and provide support for green power sources. That legislation included billions for new programs and lucrative tax incentives to boost technologies, like solar and wind, as well as next-generation sources like green hydrogen.

The impact: Renewable energy growth has ramped up across the United States. Electricity generation from renewable energy sources — including wind, solar and hydropower — surpassed coal-fired generation in the electric power sector for the first time in 2022, making it the second-biggest source behind natural gas generation. Renewables also passed nuclear power generation for the first time in 2021 and widened that gap the next year. The IRA also spurring a wave of private sector investment in U.S. clean energy manufacturing facilities for solar, wind and electric vehicle parts, the majority of which will be located in Republican congressional districts represented by lawmakers who voted against the bill.

The upshot: The Biden administration is continuing to roll out policies and programs focused on the energy transition, including detailing provisions under the Inflation Reduction Act that will help clarify the law so that new investments in the U.S. can move forward.

 

HOUSING

Preventing discriminatory mortgage lending

In 1977, Congress passed a law to combat a practice known as redlining, where for decades the government had discouraged lenders from extending mortgage loans to borrowers in Black neighborhoods. The law requires banks to lend to creditworthy lower-income people in the same neighborhoods where they have branches that take deposits. But the growth of the internet and mobile banking have made those rules increasingly obsolete. Banks, in effect, had a major presence in many neighborhoods where they had no branches.

The move: The Federal Reserve and its fellow independent bank regulators drafted a new anti-redlining framework, which will go into effect starting in January 2026. It requires banks to lend to lower-income communities in areas where they have a concentration of mortgage and small-business loans, rather than just where they have physical branches.

The impact: While the update hasn’t taken effect yet, the hope is that it will quickly begin to direct more dollars into areas where banks haven’t previously faced obligations to lend more equitably.

The upshot: Financial agencies are still trying to figure out the best way to ensure access to credit within poorer communities nearly 50 years after the Community Reinvestment Act was passed. Indeed, the racial homeownership gap is actually wider now than it was in 1968, when redlining was still legal.

CONSUMER BANKING

A sweeping crackdown on “junk fees” and overdraft charges

Biden touted his campaign to eliminate so-called junk fees — the hidden charges that often come as a surprise to the consumer, taking aim at the fees levied by airlines, cable companies, concert ticket-sellers and hotels, among other businesses. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2022 launched an initiative to expand the crackdown to target financial fees, training its scrutiny in particular on credit card late charges and the insufficient-fund fees that banks impose.

The move: The CFPB in January released a long-awaited proposal to cut the fees that large banks and credit unions can charge consumers for overdrawing their accounts. The proposal would allow banks to charge fees to cover the cost and losses associated with courtesy overdrafts — either a “breakeven” fee based on the bank’s own calculation or a benchmark fee — both of which would be lower than the punitive $30 or $40 fees that many banks impose now. The CFPB proposed several options for the benchmark fee, ranging from $3 to $14. The agency is also expected to finalize a proposal cutting credit card late fees to $8.

The impact: The CFPB expects its overdraft rule to save consumers up to $3.5 billion a year. While large banks have already dramatically pared back overdraft fees in recent years, they remain a source of significant income for many smaller banks and the financial services industry is gearing up for a major fight over the proposed rule. Lenders argue that unlike hidden resort or concert charges, the fees they impose are disclosed and serve a purpose by deterring poor financial behavior.

The upshot: Republicans have already pushed back on the proposals, arguing they will reduce access to credit and raise the cost of banking for all consumers, including those who make prompt credit card payments and don’t overdraw their bank accounts. A GOP administration would likely try to roll back both rules.

WALL STREET

Forcing Chinese companies to open their books

Since the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the U.S. has allowed companies to publicly list their stocks only if they agree to let federal watchdogs review their auditors’ work. Yet for years, Beijing authorities, citing national security concerns, refused to allow U.S. inspectors to examine the books of China- and Hong Kong-based companies. Biden’s regulators finally forced their hand with the help of Congress and even former President Donald Trump.

The move: Washington negotiators secured a landmark deal in August 2022 that would give American inspectors at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the top U.S. accounting watchdog, unprecedented access to the audits of Chinese and Hong Kong-based firms trading on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The deal was reached after passage of a 2020 bill, which Trump signed into law in his administration’s waning days, that would have given the noncompliant companies the boot if they didn’t acquiesce.

The impact: China has held up its end of the deal. Four months after the agreement, the PCAOB confirmed it was able to fully review the Chinese companies’ audits. The inspections eventually resulted in $7.9 million in fines and sanctions against three China-based firms and four individuals. SEC Chair Gary Gensler, whose agency oversees the PCAOB, has touted the deal as a success that has better protected American investors.

The upshot: Whether China’s cooperation continues is still a concern for U.S. regulators — and will likely linger no matter who is president come 2025. Trump’s first time in office paved the way for the eventual deal struck by Biden’s regulators, suggesting that the SEC and PCAOB will probably keep the pressure on Beijing.

ELECTIONS

Preventing another Jan. 6

Trump and his supporters caused chaos throughout the certification of the 2020 election in Congress, pushing slates of “fake electors,” pressuring then-Vice President Mike Pence to toss out the votes from legitimate electors, and even after the counting of electoral votes was interrupted by insurrectionists, pro-Trump Republicans in both chambers voted to object to the results. When it was over, there was a sense that the holes in our election certification process needed to be plugged.

The move: A bipartisan group in Congress worked to reform the Electoral Count Act, a byzantine 19th century law that governs how Electoral College votes are tallied. The changes include making clear that the vice president’s role is “solely ministerial,” requiring that electors in states are picked “in accordance with the laws of the State enacted prior to election day” and raising the threshold for how many members of Congress are needed to object to a state’s slate. The act also allows for the “apparent successful candidate” to more easily receive funding from the government to build a transition office, after Trump officials dragged their feet for weeks in providing the funds Biden needed for his transition work.

The impact: The law will make it harder for Trump, or any other presidential candidate, to pressure state and local election officials — or Congress — to overturn elections.

The upshot: The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act did address significant weaknesses that Trump exploited in his last-gasp attempts to hold on to power. However, Biden had committed to passing broader voting rights legislation to forestall other types of election misdeeds and fell short. His administration went all-in on passing various iterations of a bill that would have dramatically remade American elections, but those efforts were rebuffed in the Senate by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) who refused to gut the filibuster to do so. Meanwhile, Republicans were furious after Biden accused them of presiding over “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

DEFENSE

Building armies of drones to counter China

Defense officials have for years talked about how drones will play a central role in future wars, but other than fiddling at the margins, little has been done to build a large, AI-enabled network of military uncrewed vehicles. The worry in Washington has been that Beijing is ahead of the United States in developing the military use of drones and its growing drone fleets could swarm and confuse the radars and air defenses of U.S. warships, and critical bases in Guam and Japan.

The move: Biden’s Pentagon unveiled the Replicator program, an effort to build thousands of relatively cheap and quickly replaceable drones that can work together to attack, swarm and bedevil enemy defenses. The goal is to have the drones up and flying within two years. The program, which Pentagon officials say is more reliant on AI software installed on existing drones than actually buying new systems, would be a game-changer for the normally slow, risk-averse Pentagon procurement bureaucracy.

The impact: Once implemented, the U.S. would potentially be positioned to assume real leadership in uncrewed and AI-enabled technology, an area where it has always been strong but where other countries have started moving faster.

The upshot: Tech firms and lawmakers still want more specifics on how this is all supposed to work. But if things go as planned, the success of the program would be a major win for the White House, which has been eager to display American technological and industrial might.

CLIMATE

The nation’s farms get big bucks to go “climate-smart”

Agriculture produces about 10 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, and it’s been a priority of Biden’s climate plan to nudge the nation’s farmers and ranchers toward greener, less carbon-intensive ways of producing food.

The move: The Democrats used their marquee climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, to authorize funding to jump-start the transition of American agriculture toward less carbon-intensive practices. In total, the IRA aims to spend roughly $20 billion on climate smart agriculture over the next eight years, and will also target $300 million to develop more reliable and accurate standards for measuring, monitoring, reporting and verifying greenhouse gas emissions reductions in agriculture.

The impact: The money will bankroll farmers’ transition to practices the USDA deems climate-smart, like planting cover crops, reducing tilling and rotating cattle grazing zones, all of which can reduce and sequester emissions of atmosphere-warming carbon, nitrous oxide and methane.

The upshot: Biden’s climate agenda for agriculture relies heavily on a voluntary transition prodded along by large-scale incentives like the ones found in the IRA. The approach has been highly popular with farm groups, who prefer incentive-based approaches over punitive regulations. However, some climate advocates are skeptical of the program’s real potential to reduce emissions; once the USDA develops clearer measuring standards, both climate advocates and investors looking to green their supply chains may be granted more certainty. Meanwhile, the IRA money faces a more existential threat from congressional Republicans who hope to tap some of it to fund other priorities in the next farm bill, which is slated to be reauthorized later this year.

AIR FORCE ONE

Biden scraps Trump’s paint scheme for Air Force One

Trump got personally involved in negotiations for Boeing’s Air Force One replacement soon after he took office, bragging on Twitter that he had successfully reduced the price of the contract with Boeing by “over $1 billion.” Soon after, Boeing agreed to a $3.9 billion contract with the Air Force stipulating the company would be responsible for any cost overruns on the planes. But Trump’s involvement in the project didn’t stop there. In 2019, he told ABC News he wanted a new red, white and blue paint scheme, which bore a striking resemblance to his private 757. When Biden took office, he was faced with a decision on whether to keep Trump’s paint scheme, or go back to the traditional colors.

The move: Biden opted not to go with Trump’s darker paint scheme, after a study showed it could drive up the cost of the planes, POLITICO scooped in June 2022.

The impact: Biden got to scrap a personal Trump project, while taking credit for saving taxpayer dollars. It’s also one less headache for Boeing to worry about. Trump’s plan called for dark blue paint covering the plane’s underbelly and engines, which could have contributed to excessive temperatures on the aircraft — so the company would have had to pay out-of-pocket for the extra cooling costs.

The upshot: The new Air Force One fleet, when it arrives later this decade, will keep its iconic JFK-era light blue-and-white look.

ENVIRONMENT

The Biden administration helps broker a deal to save the Colorado River

Climate change and decades of overuse have shrunk the Colorado River and are forcing the seven states that use the river to negotiate how to divvy up cuts or risk it going dry. At stake is the water for 40 million people from Wyoming to the U.S.-Mexico border as well as powerhouse farming operations that irrigate some of the country’s most productive farmland.

The move: The Bureau of Reclamation, led by a Biden appointee, issued an ultimatum last summer, when reservoir levels were careening toward crisis points, and put legal teeth behind a threat to intervene unilaterally. That forced recalcitrant negotiators to the table. The Biden administration and Congress also successfully muscled through a $4 billion pot of money to help pay for conservation efforts.

The impact: Last spring, the states agreed to a short-term deal to head off the crisis for a couple years, a pact sweetened by the federal cash. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton has been on a PR spree across the West to promote the administration’s deals with water agencies in key swing states like Arizona.

The upshot: Negotiators are now starting to figure out what to do after the deal runs out in 2026. They face a spring deadline to agree on how to share the Colorado River’s dwindling flows over the next 20 years. But the federal government will not likely face any big decisions until after the presidential election.

AGRICULTURE

Giving smaller food producers a boost

Soaring food prices and supply chain crunches for meat and other staples during the Covid-19 pandemic drew attention to the highly consolidated agriculture sector, in which key sectors like meatpacking are dominated by a handful of “Big Ag” behemoths. Biden entered office promising to crack down on food monopolies and support small and midsize U.S. farmers, whose numbers have cratered in recent decades.

The move: In 2021, Biden signed an executive order directing agencies across the government to promote competition and take on monopolies. That included reviving a set of USDA regulations, first proposed during the Obama administration, to promote fairness and increase transparency in meat and poultry markets. In addition, legislation negotiated by the Biden administration is providing billions for rural communities, including at least $1 billion to help small and midsize meatpackers compete in a highly consolidated market. The laws also provide millions in debt relief for farmers who have faced discrimination, funded record increases in farm conservation efforts and boosted programs that help shorten supply chains, directing food from local farms to nearby schools and food banks.

The impact: Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s stump speech outlines a vision for bolstering rural economies by promoting two “companion” systems for producing food: small producers who have multiple revenue streams from high-value products, conservation practices and local buyers, and larger producers who earn money from exports and efficiency. Billions of dollars have now gone toward building this vision. USDA has also introduced new regulations to bolster organic markets and build transparency for consumers, which supporters say will help American farmers command premium prices.

The upshot: Despite record government money pouring into rural communities, critics say the Biden administration has not turned things around for small farmers. For one, USDA has yet to propose a key regulation intended to make agriculture markets more competitive. If it isn’t finalized soon — and a Republican president takes power — some farmers fear that much of the Biden administration’s anti-monopoly legacy in the agriculture sector could be temporary.

CANNABIS

Biden recommends loosening federal restrictions on marijuana

Since the Nixon administration, marijuana has been classified in federal law in the same category as LSD and heroin — drugs categorized as having a high propensity for addiction and no known medical value. In October 2022, as more and more states have moved to legalize cannabis, Biden issued an executive order directing the Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a review of all available cannabis science and recommend whether the classification of marijuana should be changed.

The move: HHS issued its recommendation in August 2023 that marijuana should be moved from the most prohibitive level on the Controlled Substances Act (Schedule I) to a middle category (Schedule III). Schedule III drugs — which include ketamine and testosterone — have “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” It’s now up to the Drug Enforcement Administration to make a final determination about the proper classification of cannabis, with a decision expected sometime in 2024.

The impact: A move to Schedule III would be the biggest change in U.S. drug policy in more than half a century. It would make marijuana much easier for researchers to study — which could give politicians and regulators a better idea of how best to write laws concerning cannabis. It would also lift arduous tax burdens on the cannabis industry that apply only to the more severe Schedule I and II drug categories. If that tax burden is lifted, there is a strong possibility the struggling weed industry suddenly would see its financial prospects brighten. Changing the classification of cannabis, however, would not have any impact on federal illegality.

The upshot: Despite more and more states legalizing and regulating cannabis in recent years, federal law has remained unaltered for decades. A reschedule of cannabis would be a seismic shift in America’s drug laws, changing the perception of the drug, the trajectory of the industry and the potential for Congress to act in the future.

EDUCATION

A penalty for college programs that trap students in debt

For decades, the federal government has gone back and forth on the best way to solve the problem of workers who struggle to earn a living after graduating from the country’s for-profit colleges or career training programs. The Obama administration first laid out specific metrics requiring schools who want access to a lucrative stream of government funds to prove that its graduates are prepared for “gainful employment” and don’t end up with lots of student debt relative to their income. But Obama’s team never fully implemented its rules after lengthy legal fights. The Trump administration eventually scrapped the effort. Then Biden won office, and revived Obama’s plan — with a twist.

The move: Starting in July 2024, career training programs could lose federal funding if their graduates leave with lots of student debt relative to their earnings — or if the typical graduate earns roughly less than $25,000. A similar concept would also apply to many colleges and universities that receive federal aid: Schools would have to warn students if they fail Biden’s new debt and earnings metrics — though only low-rated career programs would face a loss of funding.

The impact: The Education Department has estimated that nearly 1,700 programs would fail to meet the administration’s new standards. Another 400 graduate programs at nonprofit and public universities would also be forced to notify their students that they failed. More than 800,000 students are collectively enrolled in these programs. The department also estimates the policy will save federal taxpayers nearly $14 billion over the next decade by reducing defaults on federally backed student loans.

The upshot: Cosmetology schools, truck-driving programs and top-flight graduate institutions could soon be held publicly accountable for how their students fare in the workforce. But angry conservatives and for-profit colleges despise this looming Biden administration policy, and could launch a legal challenge to stop the rule from taking effect.

TECHNOLOGY

Biden moves to bring microchip production home

The Covid pandemic sharpened bipartisan fears in Washington about U.S. reliance on microchips produced overseas — primarily in China or Taiwan. As factories shut down in Asia and supply chains snarled, U.S. automakers and other manufacturers were unable to get the chips they needed, idling their plants and spiking prices for cars and other goods. That led the Biden administration and lawmakers from both parties to consider policies to bring production of the most advanced microchips back to the U.S.

The move: The administration and a bipartisan group of lawmakers coalesced around legislation that became known as the CHIPS and Science Act, which offered more than $50 billion to subsidize the construction of new microchip facilities in the U.S. and boost research and development across a series of national research facilities. After two years of debate, lawmakers passed it in July 2022 with solid bipartisan majorities. It was a remarkable endorsement of industrial policy — government support for selected industries — that U.S. lawmakers had largely shunned for decades.

The impact: The expectation of new subsidies has led major chipmakers to announce plans for new semiconductor plants in the U.S. — like an Intel campus near Columbus, Ohio, and a facility from Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC in Arizona. More than a dozen new tech research hubs are also planned based on the CHIPS Act’s funding. And the administration recently announced its first actual CHIPS Act grant — $35 million to defense contractor BAE to expand a facility that supplies Air Force fighter jets.

The upshot: The CHIPS Act was a landmark move for Biden’s new industrial policies that sought to decrease U.S. reliance on China and boost manufacturing at home. Its passage showed that lawmakers in both parties are now willing to spend huge sums to ensure the manufacturing of essential goods like microchips happens in the U.S. — and certainly not in China. The administration is set to continue rolling out CHIPS Act grants in 2024 in an attempt to gain electoral advantage from the subsidy package. But it remains to be seen if the effects of the law — like new jobs from plants coming online — will come quickly enough to be felt by voters in swing states.

TRADE

Tech firms face new international restrictions on data and privacy

The rapid growth of e-commerce in recent decades has been accompanied by an increase in digital trade barriers. Those include requirements for companies to store their data in the country where it is collected or to hand over their source code to a joint venture partner in order to do business in a particular market. Until now, the United States has been a leading voice on the international stage pushing back against such provisions, which it argued not only hurt big tech companies but small and medium-size companies that increasingly rely on the internet to do business.

The move: With the support of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and some other progressive Democrats, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative withdrew longtime bipartisan positions on data flows and source code in digital trade talks among 90 members of the World Trade Organization. The Biden administration said withdrawing the proposals would allow “policy space” for Congress, as well as other WTO members, to legislate and regulate in the tech space without bumping into trade commitments.

The impact: The move represents a significant shift in the U.S. stance on global tech policy as the motives and actions of big tech companies come under increasing scrutiny. Key members of Congress, including the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Finance Committee and the House Digital Trade Caucus, harshly criticized the move, which they said would hurt U.S. competitiveness and give China and Russia more scope to craft harmful digital trade rules. It also signaled a broader retreat on the issues in U.S.-led trade talks, including the administration’s proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework with 13 other countries in the region.

The upshot: The decision aligns the Biden administration’s trade policy with its antitrust actions against big U.S. tech firms. However, it also has triggered a debate that could play out in future administrations over whether the U.S. will continue to defend the interests of its own domestic tech industry in foreign markets as part of future trade agreements.

 

AFRICA

Preventing a cobalt crisis in Congo

Rebels in eastern Congo and the Congolese army have been fighting since the 1990s. The fighting escalated in 2022 as Rwanda-backed rebels, known as M23, invaded and took over several villages. The violence escalated further last summer when M23 moved closer to the area near Goma, one of the largest cities in the region. A war between Congo and Rwanda would not only be a humanitarian disaster, but it would upend the administration’s efforts to get into the cobalt market — a key component for electric vehicle batteries. Congo is home to about 70 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves, and China, one of Washington’s biggest trade competitors, is its main producer and is supporting M23 with drones.

The move: The president dispatched one of his top intelligence officials to the region last year to broker a pause in fighting. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines met with the presidents of Congo and Rwanda and laid out a plan for deescalation, including that Rwanda move its military back from the frontlines and Congo ground its drones. Leaders agreed to the broad strokes of the deal.

The impact: Hostilities continue but have quieted some, despite a national election last year that was marred by logistical problems.

The upshot: A direct conflict between Rwanda and Congo would likely spill over into other countries in the region and would also force the U.S. into an indirect confrontation with China at a time when Washington is trying to reset relations with Beijing.

CYBERSECURITY

Cracking down on cyberattacks

During Biden’s first six months in office, government agencies and critical companies were beset by cyberattacks. These incidents included the SolarWinds hack, which involved Russian government hackers infiltrating around a dozen agencies for at least a year. Ransomware attacks were also a major source of concern, with the administration forced to reckon with Colonial Pipeline, the source of almost half of the East Coast’s fuel supply, shutting down operations in May 2021. In the years since, cybersecurity concerns have only increased, including a Chinese-linked breach last year that impacted email accounts at the Commerce and State departments, skyrocketing new vulnerabilities opened up by the use of artificial intelligence technologies, and new geopolitical-linked targeting of critical systems.

The move: In March 2023, the White House released a national cyber strategy, the first since 2018. The strategy has five pillars including strengthening international cyber diplomacy efforts, securing emerging critical technologies and taking more aggressive steps to disrupt hacking groups. The strategy also made clear that the Biden administration intends to take a strong approach to issuing new regulations for critical sectors, for example health care or electricity.

The impact: The strategy outlined the goals and established a path for the federal government to reduce the threat of cyberattacks; when paired with an implementation plan for the strategy released in July, there are now firm agenda items for enhancing security.

The upshot: While cyberattacks have not slowed down since the release of the strategy, the federal government now has a solid road map for the years to come on how to respond to attacks. However, if Biden is not reelected next year, a new administration may seek to change the goals of the strategy, or even put out a new one.

INDO-PACIFIC

Countering China with a new alliance between Japan and South Korea

South Korea and Japan have a mutual antipathy that goes back decades, linked to Japan’s brutal colonial rule of Korea from 1910-1945 as well as long-simmering territorial disputes in the East China Sea. That has fueled such acrimony in South Korea that until relatively recently public opinion polls in the country have rated Japanese leaders only slightly more popular than North Korea’s.

The move: Biden devoted significant diplomatic capital to courting both Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol with an eye to easing that mutual hostility. Those efforts allowed Biden to broker the first-ever trilateral summit between the three countries aimed at unifying the two countries in an alliance implicitly aimed at countering China’s rising diplomatic, economic and military power in the Indo-Pacific.

The impact: Japan and South Korea committed to allying against China using a language of cooperation that would have been impossible just two years ago. The two countries have aligned their foreign policies and agreed to a significant expansion of bilateral security cooperation to offset China’s perceived regional threat. The two countries have also committed to defense spending increases aimed at addressing Beijing’s dramatic expansion of its military forces.

The upshot: Biden’s diplomacy has — for now at least — created a narrative for regional support for his “rules-based international order” that has persuaded two key allies that border China to transition from reflexive hostility to (fragile) harmony.

 

HEALTH CARE

Reinvigorating cancer research to lower death rates

As vice president, Biden launched an accelerated cancer research effort that was known as the “cancer moonshot” after his son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015. In 2022, he reignited it as president. Biden set a lofty goal for Moonshot 2.0: reducing the cancer death rate by half over 25 years. A National Cancer Institute assessment last year found that’s within the realm of possibility — if scientists and public health officials find ways to drive down cancer rates faster and develop new treatments and testing tools.

The move: The White House has announced dozens of federal and private moonshot programs, including several that rely on the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, an agency Biden created to take on high-risk, high-reward research. The White House has tasked ARPA-H with building a national clinical trial network and partnering with the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute to create a biomedical data toolbox for cancer research. ARPA-H is also putting an additional $240 million from its budget toward cancer-related research. Those commitments come on top of a series of cancer-related awards and programs ARPA-H funded last year, such as researching the use of bacteria to target tumor cells, developing an implant to better dose cancer medicine, harnessing mRNA technology and honing surgical tools.

The impact: Evaluating whether the new moonshot programs can make a dent in the cancer death rate will take time. However, the fruits from ARPA-H’s investment will come long before 2047. The agency’s mission is to pivot quickly if its research fails and to get innovative treatments and technologies to patients within years, not decades. In the meantime, the United States has made serious progress on cancer, with the death rate falling 33 percent over the past three decades.

The upshot: While cancer research has historically enjoyed bipartisan support, Republicans have proposed budget cuts for health agencies this year. Meanwhile, the moonshot’s original funding has run out and Congress has not authorized new funds.

HEALTH CARE

Making medication more accessible through telemedicine

During the Covid public health emergency, the federal government took several steps to make it easier to access health care via telemedicine. Most of those measures have ended. But one of the regulations that Biden held in place allows many controlled substances like Adderall for ADHD treatment, testosterone for gender-affirming care and buprenorphine to treat opioid use disorder to be prescribed without first having an in-person visit. In-person-visit requirements have traditionally been used to prevent fraud and abuse.

The move: Ahead of the emergency’s end in May, the Drug Enforcement Administration proposed requiring that patients see a doctor in person after an initial 30-day supply of medication obtained virtually for buprenorphine, testosterone and ketamine for depression, and requiring in-person visits for Adderall to be prescribed. That sparked a firestorm of criticism from treatment advocates and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. The DEA has now extended the eased prescribing rules through the end of 2024. It plans to issue final regulations this year.

The impact: Treatment advocates say that prescribing addiction treatments via telehealth offers improved access to care, especially for hard-to-reach patients like those with opioid addiction, and removes barriers associated with travel. After several years, many patients have become accustomed to receiving such care virtually. But some startups have drawn DEA scrutiny after allegedly overprescribing powerful stimulants like Adderall.

The upshot: Telehealth has become a booming industry since the pandemic, with telehealth usage about 30 times higher than before the pandemic. The DEA says it hopes to balance expanding access to treatment with avoiding misuse.

LABOR

Union-busting gets riskier

Federal labor law has been essentially frozen since the Taft-Hartley Act passed over President Harry Truman’s veto in 1947, leaving Republicans and Democrats to engage in decadeslong trench warfare at the National Labor Relations Board to nudge legal precedents and enforcement standards in their preferred direction. The result has been an ever-escalating series of policy shifts when the balance of power in Washington flips from one party to the other that puts the fate of disputes between employers and workers in the balance.

The move: Soon after taking office, Biden ousted the Trump-appointed chief prosecutor at the NLRB and, with the help of Senate Democrats, installed union-friendly allies on the board who have adopted positions that boost workers in confrontations with businesses. In August, the Democratic board majority issued a landmark ruling known as the Cemex decision that puts a tight leash on employers in cases where agency officials determine they broke labor law during a union representation vote. It also shortened the timeline to bargaining in such cases, removing a previous standard that allowed for tainted union elections to be rerun.

The impact: The new framework significantly raises the risk that an employer could be hit with a bargaining order for even a single transgression if it interferes with an election. The NLRB also put the onus on employers to petition the agency for an election shortly after a majority of employees seek union representation — or be forced to bargain with the union without an election at all.

The upshot: The heightened threat of bargaining orders has already prompted employers to adapt to the new requirements and, combined with other pro-worker changes, emboldened unions seeking to organize workplaces by chipping away at management’s leverage. Biden styles himself the most labor-friendly president in history, and actions like the Cemex decision have given him a chance to demonstrate those bona fides. It’s something he’s sure to tout in his reelection campaign as he courts union members’ votes and stokes their political organizing skills.

TECHNOLOGY

Biden inks blueprint to fix 5G chaos

Biden inherited messy interagency fights jeopardizing U.S. leadership in 5G wireless technology, which imperiled the government’s ability to auction off valuable spectrum ranges used for commercial wireless technology. Agencies feuded over how to use different chunks of these airwaves during the Trump administration, often pitting the Federal Communications Commission against the Pentagon, Transportation Department and other departments who have their own increasing demands for spectrum to operate military radars, aviation equipment and other systems. These fights continued into Biden’s term, fueling anxiety over U.S. economic competitiveness and its ability to vie against global rivals like China, which is seeking to dominate the wireless ecosystem and subsidizing telecom giants like Huawei.

The move: The White House issued a national spectrum strategy and presidential memorandum, which created a system empowering both his Commerce Department and, when necessary, White House officials, to settle interagency spats. The administration says the strategy puts the U.S. on firmer global standing, particularly with new generations of technology like 6G wireless on the horizon, and sets goals for how the government allocates spectrum.

The impact: When fully implemented, the strategy aims to allocate more spectrum for the commercial sector, drive more R&D into spectrum technologies, lead to a better-equipped workforce and better allocate bandwidth for government agencies to use.

The upshot: Spectrum is a limited resource that’s never been more important to business and government, and Biden’s plan creates a system to better manage how government agencies and private industries compete for frequencies. But much will depend on how exactly the administration implements it, and those details won’t come out until later this year. Some Republicans are concerned the strategy doesn’t mandate the free-up of spectrum for the commercial sector but simply initiates studies into whether that would be possible — an issue that could drive a future Republican White House to take a more aggressive approach.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Biden empowers federal agencies to monitor AI

Artificial intelligence has gone mainstream. As U.S. tech companies have raced to release shockingly powerful large language models, public reaction ran the gamut from rapture to horror. Policymakers from Washington to Beijing realized quickly that generative AI — and successive AI breakthroughs — would crown new market leaders, hand more decisions to machines, put cyberattacks on steroids and fundamentally alter people’s trust in what they see, read or hear. Biden has taken a keen interest in understanding the inner workings of large language models and how the U.S. could turn AI into a lasting economic advantage.

The move: Biden’s White House issued a highly technical but far-reaching AI executive order last year that surprised even close observers with its ambition. The order mobilizes a wide range of government powers to tackle the potential risks of AI, in areas from discrimination to national security. It also sets new guidelines for safety, including standards for new models and marking synthetic content.

The impact: Biden’s executive order starts the clock for more than a dozen federal agencies to figure out what the gold standard for “safe, secure and trustworthy” AI handling should be for their own operations — and in the case of the Commerce Department, for the private sector as well.

The upshot: The sprawling AI executive order sets the federal government up to keep tabs on tech companies who are developing highly capable AI models. The impending regulatory scrutiny is already chafing Washington’s tech lobby. Additionally, whether federal agencies will have the resources to execute the Biden administration’s ambitious vision for an AI-savvy public sector will depend heavily on whether Congress delivers on the president’s budget request.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Fixing bridges, building tunnels and expanding broadband

Sccessive presidents tried for so many years to pass infrastructure legislation that it became a running joke in Washington. Maybe that’s one reason polls show that voters don’t know that Biden finally broke that logjam, and did it with support from lawmakers of both political parties. It was the kind of historic investment — following years of deferred needs — that previous presidents had tried and failed to achieve.

The move: In his first year as president, Biden clinched an infrastructure deal that opened the spigot for $1.2 trillion of investment into the nation’s roads, waterlines, broadband networks, airports and much more. Two years later, projects that had been languishing for years — like replacing a 110-year-old Amtrak tunnel that’s become a chokepoint into New York City or an outdated and congested bridge between Kentucky and Ohio — are finally moving forward.

The impact: Those projects will take years to complete. Of the 40,000-plus projects that have gotten underway since the law was signed, a very small handful have had ribbon-cuttings. The new Amtrak tunnel isn’t scheduled to open until 2035. The administration is putting signs on as many projects as possible declaring they were “funded by President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law” while they’re under construction, but that’s not the same as people connecting that money to things that improve their everyday life. Still, the law is having economic impact: The construction industry has added 670,000 jobs since Biden took office.

The upshot: Republicans say massive government spending in the infrastructure law and other big Biden bills are to blame for stoking inflation. But during this year’s political campaign season, both parties stand to benefit from taking credit, and voters may finally start hearing about it — from both sides.

OIL

The U.S. is producing more oil than anytime in history

Biden came into office after having promised to slash oil production on public land. Canceling the Keystone XL pipeline during his first week in office seemed to confirm the image of him as a president who would happily throttle the country’s oil industry while showering the renewable energy industry with government dollars. But things turned out a little differently.

The move: Biden has been happy to use government largess to stimulate the renewables industry — but he’s also done little to check the short-term growth of oil. After the Covid-led economic downturn and Russian invasion of Ukraine caused a supply shock in the crude markets that drove U.S. gasoline prices up in 2022, the White House made an uneasy, but real, embrace of the oil industry to help bring down gasoline prices.

The impact: U.S. oil production is at record levels and is expected to go even higher next year. U.S. production is humming along at more than 13 million barrels per day and growing. That’s a gusher that’s topped levels that then-President Trump and GOP backers used to boast about. Exports are also on the rise as domestic fuel consumption has slowly come off the highs experienced a decade ago, meaning that every new barrel of oil produced in the United States is more likely to head overseas. Gasoline is now below $3 a gallon in many parts of the country.

The upshot: Demanding an “all of the above” policy that includes all forms of energy has become cliche among lawmakers. Under Biden, that may have become a reality few politicians will want to publicly discuss. Democrats don’t want to alienate their green backers on the left who’ve accused the administration of abandoning its climate focus, while Republicans are loath to admit that Biden’s oil boom is bigger than Trump’s.

CHINA

Strengthening military ties to Asian allies

Biden came into office with the goal of countering China by rebuilding military alliances with Asian allies. In late 2022, a top Pentagon official promised to accelerate that effort, vowing that “2023 is likely to stand as the most transformative year in U.S. force posture in the [Pacific] region in a generation.”

The move: The Biden administration inked new defense partnerships with the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, and deepened ties with India and Australia. The Pentagon also announced it would forward-deploy a Marine littoral regiment, an upgraded unit equipped with anti-ship missiles and advanced intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities, in Okinawa, Japan. In addition, during his first year as president, Biden announced a new working group with Britain and Australia to support Canberra’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines and share other advanced technologies, a pact now known as AUKUS.

The impact: All of the moves are aimed at building up the United States’ military partnerships in the Pacific — and countering China. The Pentagon said China is continuing to steadily expand its nuclear arsenal and could have 1,500 warheads by 2035, in addition to its growing fleet of warships and aircraft.

The upshot: The jury is still out on whether the administration has transformed the country’s posture in Asia, but DOD undeniably made some key moves that are sure to please partners in the region who worry about China’s mounting aggression.

CYBERSECURITY

A new agency to investigate cyberattacks

Organizations that fall victim to hacks often keep tight-lipped about what happened due to fear of legal liability or brand damage. But cybersecurity experts have long warned that the country will never break free from an endless cycle of computer breaches unless companies and government agencies become more transparent about how they got infiltrated. The danger was underscored in 2020 when a sophisticated Russian hack breached nine federal agencies.

The move: In 2021, Biden stood up the Cyber Safety Review Board, a government review panel charged with investigating the most significant computer security breaches that have affected the country. Just as the National Transportation Safety Board investigates transportation incidents, the new DHS-led panel is tasked with identifying the root cause of significant hacks and offering guidance to ensure they never happen again. The Board has 15 members hailing from both the private sector and the U.S. government.

The impact: The CSRB has received strong positive feedback from the cybersecurity industry for its first two investigations: one into a software vulnerability that had the government bracing for digital crisis and a second involving a group of hackers who developed a playbook to slip the defenses at some of the country’s highest profile companies, among them Uber and Microsoft. It’s unclear how much impact the board has really had, however, given that companies are not obligated to follow its guidance. It has also received criticism for appearing to avoid investigations that could make individual companies or the government look bad — a charge the CSRB denies.

The upshot: The Biden administration is hoping Congress will make the CSRB a permanent fixture of the federal government’s cybersecurity landscape. It has sent lawmakers draft legislation to codify the panel into law, enhance its budget and give it greater legal authorities to compel the production of evidence from breach victims. But Congress hasn’t yet acted, leaving the future of the board an open question.

TRANSPORTATION

Making airlines pay up when flights are delayed or canceled

Never mind luxury travel, now some airline passengers pay extra just for the basics. But getting your money back when a flight gets canceled or significantly delayed is one effort the Biden’s administration’s Transportation Department has tried to address as part of a new tough stance on the airline industry, especially after multiple instances of air travel gone awry.

The move: The Department of Transportation has introduced a series of proposals to help strengthen consumer protections for airline passengers, including a requirement that airlines give a cash refund after a flight is canceled instead of providing vouchers for a future flight. This would also apply to flights canceled because of events outside the airline’s control such as weather. Other rules proposed during the Biden administration include giving passengers more clarity about fees added on to the price of a flight before purchasing a ticket, and urging airlines to seat families together without extra fees.

The impact: Some airlines have responded to the increasing pressure by proactively canceling overscheduled flights, building in more buffer room to better handle hiccups, making it easier for passengers to change their plans and committing to meal or hotel voucher plans. The Transportation Department also created a dashboard, acting as a consumer “cheat sheet” as a way to force airlines to answer directly exactly what services they offer — which customers can then compare — when a flight is canceled or delayed. Separately, DOT is investigating several airlines for potentially engaging in unrealistic scheduling practices that have led to cascading problems that impact travelers.

The upshot: The Biden administration has taken some significant steps to compensate passengers when flights get disrupted. But preventing those disruptions in the first place remains problematic.

I was speaking about immigration--in reply of your post about immigration, and specifically about political appearance. My point remains, what you wrote will count as a loss for Biden as he *appears* weak on immigration.

Personally, I think these lists of accomplishments give way too much credit to whoever is holding the presidential office.

Edited February 10, 2024 by robsblubot

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1 hour ago, robsblubot said:

I was speaking about immigration--in reply of your post about immigration, and specifically about political appearance. My point remains, what you wrote will count as a loss for Biden as he *appears* weak on immigration.

Personally, I think these lists of accomplishments give way too much credit to whoever is holding the presidential office.

Biden vows to ‘shut down the border’ if Senate immigration bill is passed

But the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said deal involving border security and aid to Ukraine is ‘dead on arrival’ in its current form

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/27/biden-border-deal-senate

Joe Biden said on Friday that the border deal being negotiated in the US Senate was the “toughest and fairest” set of reforms possible and vowed to “shut down the border” the day he signs the bill.

 

The bipartisan talks have hit a critical point amid mounting Republican opposition. Some Republicans have set a deal on border security as a condition for further Ukraine aid.

Earlier in the day, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, said the deal is “dead on arrival” in its current form, according to a letter to Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives reviewed by Reuters.

Biden, a Democrat seeking another term in the 5 November elections, has grappled with record numbers of migrants caught illegally crossing the US-Mexico border during his presidency. Republicans contend Biden should have kept the restrictive policies of the Republican former president Donald Trump, the frontrunner for his party’s nomination.

“What’s been negotiated would – if passed into law – be the toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country,” Biden said in a statement.

“It would give me, as President, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”

The White House has agreed to new limits on asylum at the border, including the creation of an expulsion power that would allow migrants who cross the US-Mexico border illegally to be rapidly returned to Mexico if migrant encounters surpass 4,000 per day, three sources familiar with the matter said.

If encounters pass 5,000 per day, the use of the expulsion authority would become mandatory, according to the sources who requested anonymity to discuss details of the private negotiations.

In December, encounters averaged more than 9,500 per day, according to US government statistics released on Friday.

The sweeping authority would be comparable to the Covid-era Title 42 policy put in place under Trump during the pandemic and which ended under Biden in May 2023.

Migrants trying to claim asylum would still be able to do so at legal border crossings if the expulsion power was in effect, one of the sources said.

The US would be required to allow at least 1,400 migrants per day to approach legal crossings to claim asylum if the expulsions were in effect, the source added.

The bill aims to resolve asylum claims in six months without detaining migrants, the source said, faster than the current process, which can take years.

Trump, however, took to social media last week to warn against any deal that fails to deliver everything Republicans want to shut down border crossings.

Biden also urged Congress on Friday to provide the funding he asked for in October to secure the border.

“This includes an additional 1,300 border patrol agents, 375 immigration judges, 1,600 asylum officers, and over 100 cutting-edge inspection machines to help detect and stop fentanyl at our south-west border,” the president said.

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Rishi Sunak paid effective tax rate of 23% on £2.2m income last year
Low capital gains rate and US location of funds mean tax bill of £508,000 much less than under top income rate of 45%

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/09/rishi-sunak-paid-effective-tax-rate-of-23-on-22m-income-last-year