The House is in a committee work week again this week, and will reconvene next Tuesday, May 11th at 6:30 p.m. for votes.
The Senate is in recess this week, and will convene at 12:45 p.m. today for a brief pro forma session. The Senate will reconvene next Monday, May 10th at 3:00 p.m.
While President Joe Biden embarks on a trip to Virginia today to sell his infrastructure package, Vice President Kamala Harris will ceremonially swear in Bill Nelson as NASA administrator and will also swear in Samantha Power as USAID administrator.
The President and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden will visit Yorktown Elementary School in Yorktown, VA where he is expected to tout efforts around school reopening and his proposed “American Families Plan,” a $1.8 trillion package focused on education, child care and paid family leave. The proposal includes a $200 billion universal pre-K program for 3- and 4-year-olds and a $109 billion program that would pay for two years of community college. The President and First lady will then visit an HVAC workshop at Tidewater Community College.
Later this week, President Biden will travel to Lake Charles and New Orleans, Louisiana, on Thursday and Vice President Kamala Harris heads to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday.
As Congress continues to work on negotiating an infrastructure bill and President Biden touts his American Jobs Plan, Republican senators emphasized the potential for a bipartisan deal on Sunday. Across the Sunday shows, Republican Senators John Barrasso, Bill Cassidy, and Susan Collins all emphasized that any bipartisan deal can only focus on the roads and bridges that make up a typical surface transportation reauthorization bill. They say the price tag, and any tax increase, are non-starters. Biden’s planning to host top congressional leaders from each party at the White House on May 12th, something that he didn’t do for the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that passed with no Republican support. Whether a bipartisan deal can be done on a portion of his plans may hinge on whether the GOP abandons the comprehensive obstructionist model it used against former President Barack Obama. Any bipartisan deal would likely be limited to spending items, with Republicans widely rejecting the tax increases the White House has pushed for companies and wealthy Americans. Republican members haven’t proposed any specific funding measures yet.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will propose a rule today aimed at sharply cutting the use and production of a class of powerful greenhouse gases used widely in refrigeration and air conditioning. The proposal marks the first time President Biden’s administration has used the power of the federal government to mandate a cut in climate pollution. The EPA is proposing its first rule under the American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act of 2020 to phase down the production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), highly potent greenhouse gases commonly used in refrigeration and air conditioning. The AIM Act directs EPA to sharply reduce production and consumption of these harmful pollutants by using an allowance allocation and trading program. This phasedown will decrease the production and import of HFCs in the United States by 85% over the next 15 years. A global HFC phasedown is expected to avoid up to 0.5 °C of global warming by 2100. The new rule lays out a system for how the agency would provide allowances for the production and use of HFCs for 2022 and 2023, with those amounts shrinking in the years to come. Last month, EPA finalized a list of new refrigerant options that could be used as substitutes. The EPA’s new rule is born out of a rare bipartisan deal in Congress in which Senate Republicans bucked former President Trump to join Democrats in passing legislation to tame the potent greenhouse gases. That compromise came after both business and green groups pushed Trump to support the Kigali Amendment, which the EPA rule closely mirrors.
