The House will reconvene tomorrow from its two week committee work week period while the Senate will reconvene at 3 p.m. today. The Senate will resume consideration of the nomination of Andrea Joan Palm, to be Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services.
As a new week starts for the Biden Administration, Sixty-three percent of Americans now approve of President Joe Biden’s overall job performance, according to a new poll, which also finds an uptick in the percentage of those who think the country is on the right track. President Biden is scheduled to deliver remarks on the economy this afternoon from the White House after speaking virtually at a meeting of the eastern flank NATO allies known as the Bucharest Nine. The remarks on the economy will come after a disappointing April jobs report released last week and come as a critical week for the President’s infrastructure proposal gets underway. The U.S. economy added only 266,000 jobs last month, way off the 1 million forecasters had predicted. It’s a major setback for the hopes of a speedy labor-market recovery alongside America’s great pandemic reopening. While the labor force grew significantly, the unemployment rate ticked higher to 6.1 percent. In today’s remarks, President Biden is set to announce efforts to make it easier for employers to hire new workers and to help more people take jobs.
Later this week on Wednesday, Biden plans to host his first meeting with top congressional leaders from both parties as well as another meeting with lawmakers focused on his jobs and infrastructure plan. Biden has said he would like to forge a bipartisan path to pass the sweeping legislation and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested on Sunday that he would support an infrastructure package that costs as much as $800 billion, a price tag that’s higher than the existing counteroffer from his fellow GOP lawmakers. Today, the President will meet with Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Delaware), who leads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee with jurisdiction over transportation policy, as well as Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-West Virginia), a critical swing Democratic vote who has shown some distance from Biden’s $4 trillion jobs and infrastructure package.
Earlier today, the Biden Administration also reversed a Trump-era policy that said the Affordable Care Act’s protections did not apply to transgender people. The Biden administration is reversing a policy introduced under former President Donald Trump that limited protections for transgender people in health care, the Department of Health and Human Services announced on Monday. In a victory for LGBTQ advocates, the change will bar health care providers and other health-related organizations who receive federal funding from discriminating based on someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation.
