Politico

President Joe Biden on Wednesday applauded Adm. Linda Fagan’s ascension to commandant of the Coast Guard, making her the first woman to lead a military service branch.

Biden, speaking at a change of command ceremony that saw outgoing commandant Adm. Karl Schultz relieved of duty, described Fagan as “part of a generation of pioneer women in the force.”

Fagan has served as vice commandant, the service’s No. 2 position, since last June, when she became the first female four-star admiral in the Coast Guard. Her promotion to commandant, Biden said, was “earned throughout a career of outstanding leadership and accomplishment.”

“Now, we need to keep working to make sure Admiral Fagan may be the first but not the only person,” Biden continued. “We need to see more women at the highest levels of command in the Coast Guard and across every service in the armed forces.”

Biden nominated Fagan to serve as commandant in April, and the Senate confirmed her for the role in May.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who presided over the change of command, called Fagan a “trailblazer” and acknowledged women’s “essential role” in the Coast Guard throughout the service’s more than 230-year history.

“Coast Guard women have helped shape the service and pioneered the role of women in the federal government and the nation,” Mayorkas said. “Now, the Coast Guard has its first woman commandant. Today is a historic day for the United States Coast Guard, a historic day for the United States.”

For the past several months, a White House-led team of economic specialists has marked each day in the same way: With a painstaking, state-by-state examination of gasoline prices and the intricate market forces pushing them relentlessly upward.

Senior officials and others close to President Joe Biden view those prices as the cost that most directly affects voters’ everyday lives, and therefore their perception of the economy as well. As such, Biden and his top advisers fixate on them with an intensity that some aides describe as obsessive. White House chief of staff Ron Klain has grown particularly absorbed by the issue, checking the average price of a gallon of gas every morning. He’s lamented that it’s the one item everyone knows the cost of because gas station billboards are so ubiquitous throughout the country.

“Could they advertise anything else?” Klain rhetorically, and ruefully, asked one recent visitor.

The White House’s focus on gas prices is bred from two sobering political conclusions top officials have made. The first is that they have little control over the problem. The second is that as prices rise at the pump, so do Democrats’ odds of a midterm wipeout — especially as the average U.S. gallon of gas hits fresh record highs.

“There really isn’t one silver bullet,” said one person familiar with the discussions. “It’s a really difficult issue to message around when you can’t deny the reality.”

In a frantic effort to try to slow gas prices that have risen by a dollar per gallon in just the last three months, Biden aides have internally debated a host of ideas. Led by the National Economic Council, the cross-government team filled with aides from Cabinet agencies like the Department of Energy, State Department and Treasury has weighed endorsing a federal gas tax holiday, restricting oil exports, relaxing certain environmental rules or leaning on the oil industry to restart closed refineries.

People familiar with the deliberations say they’ve snagged, in part, because each option comes with complicated tradeoffs and drawbacks that could prove politically painful and may not guarantee to make a dent in the price of gas.

The White House, for instance, has held off for months on backing a gas tax holiday, amid divisions within the Democratic Party and skepticism a roughly 18.4 cent-per-gallon discount would be passed on to consumers. Top aides are under increasing pressure from front-line members to embrace the idea, but Biden also was vice president when Barack Obama mocked a gas tax holiday as pure political gimmickry.

Another option pushed by some congressional Democrats — banning oil exports — would antagonize the industry, and risks backfiring by inflating the world oil prices that determine gas prices at the pump. A proposal to waive certain smog rules would similarly spark a backlash from climate groups.

Absent government action, Biden officials have pushed private industry to help. But they’ve so far struggled to convince domestic oil companies to rapidly fill the gap.

Adding to the dilemma, the administration already turned to its biggest tool in March: A record-setting release of oil from the nation’s strategic reserve. Officials had hoped that the extra million barrels a day would ease supply strains created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent sanctions imposed on the world’s third-largest producer. But the supply offered only temporary relief, with prices resuming their march upward within weeks.

“What they have is a whole bunch of 10-cent policies,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist and member of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers. “There’s a kind of defeatism.”

The predicament has vexed administration officials already battling rising costs on a number of other fronts, with inflation at a 40-year high and polls showing voters souring on Biden’s handling of the economy.

Publicly, the White House has continued to blame Russia for the record gas prices, attempting for months to brand the increase as “Putin’s price hike” in hopes of convincing people the issue is largely out of Biden’s hands. But with the war showing no signs of abating, some Democrats privately complain that the messaging is ineffective — and that the White House needs to make a bigger show of at least attempting to fix the problem.

For its part, the administration has sought recently to spotlight steps it’s already taken to rein in prices, most notably sending Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to Louisiana last week to tour one of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve sites that hold the nation’s emergency oil stockpile. The Environmental Protection Agency is allowing more ethanol into the fuel supply in a bid to ease the price crunch, and more recently officials began preparing for the possibility they’d need to tap emergency reserves to counter spiking prices for diesel in the Northeast.

Yet even Granholm, during her tour, allowed that the government has a limited arsenal left, telling CNN that “the president doesn’t control the price.”

A White House official echoed that view, arguing that the administration is doing as much as it can within its limited means.

“We’re going to take every action that we can that will make a meaningful difference,” the official said. “While understanding and dealing with the reality that global oil prices and gas prices are controlled by much greater forces than any one person.”

Biden allies inside and outside the administration have also grown increasingly frustrated with the oil industry, suggesting at times that the companies should bear more blame for their reluctance to drastically ramp up production.

Major oil companies have recorded windfall profits so far this year, as the war in Ukraine drove up global energy prices. But companies have so far taken only measured steps to boost production, for fear of getting caught with excess oil when global supply pressures ease.

In private meetings with senior Energy Department officials to discuss ideas for boosting supply and lowering prices, some industry representatives have instead used the sessions to push for longer-term priorities like building pipelines and easing environmental restrictions.

The White House is unlikely to take such industry-friendly steps, especially after vowing to make climate change a top priority. But, in a sign that the pain at the pump is affecting government policies elsewhere, officials have also resisted pressure from climate advocates to use the elevated prices as justification to push for a further acceleration away from fossil fuels.

Those constraints have left the administration with few attractive policy options save to hope that Biden’s earlier decision to release oil reserves will start paying off more visibly closer to November, especially as domestic companies pump out more of their own supply.

But the summer driving season is just beginning, American demand is high and if prices keep rising, others say Biden may soon be forced to pick the best of a bad set of options.

“There’s probably nothing that will get gas back close to $3 a gallon,” Sahm said. “But doing something is better than not doing something, because at least the president can say I’m trying.”

Jonathan Lemire contributed to this report.

President Joe Biden on Monday described inflation as his “top economic priority” and outlined a three-part plan to lower costs for Americans in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

“I ran for president because I was tired of the so-called trickle-down economy. We now have a chance to build on a historic recovery with an economy that works for working families,” Biden wrote. “The most important thing we can do now to transition from rapid recovery to stable, steady growth is to bring inflation down.”

The White House’s messaging push comes as Biden’s job approval rating among registered voters rests at roughly 42 percent, according to a recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, with large numbers of Americans frustrated by a record spike in inflation over the past year.

In response, Biden’s Journal op-ed marked the beginning of a monthlong economic campaign to try to “communicate on our accomplishments to date on the economy,” according to a White House official.

On Tuesday afternoon, Biden is scheduled to hold an Oval Office meeting with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, and on Friday, Biden will deliver remarks on the much-anticipated May jobs report.

The April jobs report showed that the United States added 428,000 jobs last month, keeping the unemployment rate at 3.6 percent — just above the lowest level in a half-century. The Labor Department also reported in April that inflation slowed last month after seven months of gains.

Still, the Federal Reserve moved to counter inflation this month by announcing its largest interest rate hike in more than two decades and laying out plans to shrink its massive bond holdings starting on June 1.

Meanwhile, the issue of inflation remains one of Democrats’ most significant political vulnerabilities ahead of the midterm elections in November, and voters have expressed similar anxieties about rising gas prices and an infant formula shortage.

Although the root causes for inflation are complex, Biden has sought to attribute the phenomenon in part to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which prompted the United States to ban Russian oil imports in March.

Biden also has attacked what he called “ultra-MAGA” Republicans and highlighted a plan by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, that would raise income taxes on low-income Americans.

NEWARK, Del. — President Joe Biden told graduates Saturday at his alma mater, the University of Delaware, that “now it’s your hour,” as he encouraged young people in the United States to help the country live up to its ideals.

Speaking to more than 6,000 graduates, and with the nation mourning victims of two mass shootings in as many weeks. Biden lamented the division and hatred in the country he governs. He bemoaned a “crisis of faith” in U.S. institutions and he pressed graduates to work to bind up the country’s wounds.

“Your generation, more than anyone else will have to answer the question, Who are we? What do we stand for? What do we believe? Who will we be?” Biden said. “You can make the difference, you can lift the country up, you can meet the challenges of our time.”

“There’s one message I hope you take from me today: This is no time to be on the sidelines,” he added. “We need all of you to get engaged in public life and the life of this nation.”

Biden told graduates to remember that “democracy is a human enterprise.”

“We do many things well,” the president said. “Sometimes we fall short. That’s true in our own lives. It’s true in the life of the nation. And yet democracy makes progress possible. And progress comes when we begin to see each other again not as enemies but as neighbors.’”

The president said this year’s graduates have a head start, representing a generation that “is the most generous, the most tolerant, the least prejudiced, the best educated” in American history.

“Keep the faith and take it back,” he exhorted. “Please. This is yours. Take it back. We need you.”

Biden also referred to the recent mass shootings: 19 children and two teachers were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, and on May 14, a gunman espousing racist hatred killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

“Too much violence. Too much fear. Too much grief,” Biden said in his graduation speech. “Let’s be clear: Evil came to that elementary school classroom in Texas, to that grocery store in New York, to far too many places where innocents have died.”

The president said that “we cannot outlaw tragedy, I know, but we can make America safer.” He called on “all Americans at this hour to join hands and make your voices heard, to work together to make this nation what it can and should be. ”

Biden was presented with the university’s medal of distinction before his remarks. He had previously received an honorary degree in 2004.

Biden, who graduated from the university in 1965 with a double major in history and political science, served as a senator in Delaware for more than 30 years before becoming vice president. It was his fifth commencement address at the university, where the school of public policy and administration bears his name. He also spoke to graduates in 1978, 1987, 2004 and 2014. His sister, Valerie Biden Owens, and his wife, first lady Jill Biden, also graduated from the university.

“It feels like coming home because this is home,” Biden said, reflecting that “Some of the best and most important years of my life were spent here.”

In the roughly 48 hours since yet another mass shooting, President Joe Biden has deliberately tried to stay out of the legislative and political scrum.

He’s refused to chastise Republicans explicitly for standing in the way of passing new gun laws and has given no outward indication of a type of bill he’d like to see pushed. Instead, he’s allowed Senate Democrats to set the tone of the public debate while he offers comfort to the families of victims and explores his options.

The approach has left some in the advocacy world nervous and wondering why the most powerful man in the country isn’t adequately using the bully pulpit on such an emotionally wrought issue.

“He can’t just be the ‘eulogizer in chief.’ He also needs to put the full force of his office into the legislative process. Otherwise it will seem like he’s lost hope.” said Peter Ambler, executive director for the gun safety group Giffords. “I think he can have an impact if he and the whole White House swing into action.”

White House aides and some close allies say the current posture won’t likely change soon. Publicly injecting himself into delicate gun-control negotiations in the Senate could backfire, since few across Washington expect such talks to seriously advance, they argue. So could taking matters into his own hands by immediately issuing executive actions to crack down on firearms, which risks sending Republican lawmakers otherwise open to negotiating back to their respective corners, people close to the talks relayed to POLITICO.

For now, the White House is prioritizing the confirmation of Steve Dettelbach, its nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to people who’ve spoken to the White House in the days since the New York and Texas shootings. On Wednesday, Biden urged the Senate to confirm Dettelbach “without delay, without excuse” and put a permanent director atop the ATF for the first time in seven years.

And while he’s urged Congress to move on gun laws, asking why the country is willing to live with mass shootings, Biden has framed the issue as a collective responsibility, rather than one he can substantively address with the power of the executive.

“We’re continuing to look at every tool we have to stop gun violence, with new urgency from the tragic shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo, including through additional executive actions,” said Mike Gwin, a White House spokesman. “But the president knows that’s not enough when innocent lives are being taken at schools, at grocery stores, and in shootings every day in communities across our country.”

For a president whose standing with the public has eroded to new lows, and whose top priorities have been snuffed out one by one by Republicans and renegade senators in his own party, the decision to keep a calculated distance from the gun law debates carries risk.

To many gun-safety activists tired of watching political foot dragging following every horrific mass shooting, Biden’s response has felt less strategic and more like a leadership vacuum. They also question the wisdom of waiting for Congress to act—pointing to Republican intransigence and past failed attempts at bipartisanship on gun legislation—and are perplexed as to why the White House would show so much deference to Capitol Hill on guns when the president has been willing to put himself out there on other high-profile issues.

“It’s been Biden offering platitudes without offering any solutions,” said Igor Volsky, executive director of the advocacy group Guns Down America. “Who came up with this strategy? It’s just bizarre.”

Biden is no stranger to these moments. As vice president he was tasked with handling the Obama administration’s response to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that resulted in the deaths of 20 6- and 7-year-olds and six adult staffers. That effort resulted in a slew of executive actions. But the legislative response was filibustered in the Senate. After the fact, Biden faced criticism for moving too slowly to propose ideas — letting the political impetus that came from the shooting dissipate in the name of fact finding and policy brainstorming.

In days following the shooting deaths of at least 31 people, including 19 children, in a Buffalo, N.Y., grocery store and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, gun safety advocates who’ve spoken directly with the White House say the administration continues to collect information and evaluate steps Biden could take unilaterally.

“We need a sense of urgency and we need somebody from the White House to take charge,” said Po Murray, chairwoman of the Newtown Action Alliance, formed after the Sandy Hook shooting. “I’m not quite sure they’re quite there yet.”

Murray’s organization has been pushing Biden to declare a national emergency over gun violence and create a federal office of gun violence prevention with a full time director.

“How many mass shootings have we had and how many times have we asked him to make that [emergency] declaration and to establish a federal office?” she said.

All this comes amid a spate of public polls showing broad support for action. Majorities of Americans feel gun violence, mass shootings, and hate crimes are a crisis or “major issue” of the moment, and nearly three-in-five want to see stronger gun laws, a new Navigator survey found.

Biden isn’t the only one under scrutiny. The decision by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y) to hold off on a vote on background checks risks losing momentum gathered by the collective grief of the nation. Though some operatives working on gun policy have viewed Schumer’s gambit as a sign that the space for a bipartisan deal might be there, Ambler and others worry that Republican senators will spend the next several weeks and even months debating minor points in the policies before backing away en masse.

“We have seen that playbook before. We need to put pressure on them and we need to see votes on this,” he said. “The public needs to know where they stand and the way we get there is by having a vote.”

White House officials stress that Biden is pursuing every avenue available to him and reprised a familiar rejoinder to his critics — that he’s pushed through more changes via executive action than any president over their first year in office.

They point to the dedicated team within the Domestic Policy Council working on gun safety, as well as to the more than $10 billion from the American Rescue Plan going to cities and states to combat crime. There also are their efforts to stem the flow of ghost guns, a proposed rule to tighten regulation of stabilizing braces for pistols and the Justice Department-led strike forces that are intercepting gun trafficking flows and seizing guns used in crimes.

Gwin said Biden plans to continue pressuring Congress to act, including by passing universal background checks, renewing the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and by confirming Dettelbach, a career prosecutor with support from across law enforcement, to lead ATF.

On Thursday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed the administration was not yet ready to move forward on executive actions and would defer to Congress on legislative solutions. She added that White House staff were in close contact with lawmakers.

“We leave the mechanics to Sen. Schumer,” said Jean-Pierre, referring to the majority leader’s plan to bring legislation to the floor. “We leave it to the Democratic leadership on how they’re going to move this forward.”

But Volksy said the times warrant immediate action.

“The longer you wait the less likely you are to have an outcome,” said Volsky, who finds himself in an awkward position. He began his advocacy work focused so extensively on Republican inaction — and now is increasingly venting frustrations with Democrats.

“This isn’t being framed as this is a tragedy and that we need to do what we can to honor the lives lost with immediate action. And it needs to be.”

President Joe Biden and the first lady are scheduled to travel to Uvalde, Texas, on Sunday, the White House said, to “grieve with the community” after a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school this week.

The president will meet with community leaders, religious leaders and victims’ families over the weekend, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during Thursday’s briefing.

“The president and first lady believe it is important to show their support for the community during this devastating time and to be there for the families of the victims,” she said.

Biden, who has lost two children, is often known for his empathy during tragedies. The president’s trip also comes as pressure builds on Washington to respond with concrete action to the latest string of mass shootings, “carnage” Biden has said he is “sick and tired” of.

It will be his second trip to a community rocked by gun violence in less than two weeks. Biden visited Buffalo on March 17 to visit the scene of a racist massacre at a grocery store.

Jean-Pierre said, as a parent, Tuesday’s shooting is “unfathomable” to her, and echoed the president’s calls for action this week.

“We cannot become numb to this. We will not accept this. A grocery store, a church, an elementary school, and this is just in the last few days,” she said. “It’s time for Congress to act.”

One of the Biden administration’s most outspoken proponents for taxing the rich to finance the president’s economic agenda is leaving the administration at the end of the week.

David Kamin, a former Obama administration tax and budget official, joined the National Economic Council as deputy director at the start of Joe Biden’s presidency and before that served on the campaign’s transition team. His last day is Friday.

“It has been a tremendous honor and a great job, but one with a timeline from the start,” Kamin told POLITICO. “And now it’s time for me to be back in NYC with my family.”

To fill Kamin’s role, the White House is tapping economist Aviva Aron-Dine, who is currently executive associate director of the Office of Management and Budget and an expert on health and budget policy.

Kamin, who is on leave as a professor from New York University Law School, was a chief architect of Biden’s plans to raise taxes on wealthy Americans to pay for his sweeping social spending plans, and wrote a widely circulated memo in 2015 on “How to Tax the Rich.”

But some of those efforts have failed to gain traction in Congress, including Biden’s proposal to end provisions in the code known as “stepped-up basis at death,” which can allow wealthy people to pass assets on to heirs tax-free.

Meanwhile, the president’s broader agenda has stalled amid disagreements with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), whose support Democrats need to advance a bill without Republican votes.

Kamin, who has been commuting from New York for the past two years, said he plans to return to his teaching job at NYU Law later this summer.

NEC Director Brian Deese, in a statement Thursday, said Kamin “has an unmatched combination of policy capability and selflessness, and has helped improve the lives of millions of Americans in service to his country. We will miss him dearly but are glad that he will be returning to his family and his passion for teaching.”

Aron-Dine, who will take over for Kamin starting next month, also worked at the NEC in the Obama administration as well as OMB and the Department of Health and Human Services and has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the Biden administration, she was the vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Deese said Aron-Dine will play a central role in helping advance the president’s economic agenda.

Jason Furman, who chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration, praised the pick.

Aron-Dine “manages to combine her brilliance with caring, strategic savvy and effectiveness, all of which will make her one of the only people that could have filled David Kamin’s very large shoes,” Furman said.

President Joe Biden will welcome BTS, the South Korean boy band and K-pop group, to the White House next week to “discuss Asian inclusion and representation,” as well as to “address anti-Asian hate crimes and discrimination.”

Biden and BTS “will also discuss the importance of diversity and inclusion and BTS’ platform as youth ambassadors who spread a message of hope and positivity across the world,” the White House said in a statement.

The visit by BTS, scheduled to take place on May 31, will come at the conclusion of Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. The group’s appearance alongside Biden will be the latest event orchestrated by the White House to mark the monthlong celebration.

Biden issued a presidential proclamation on April 29 about AANHPI Heritage Month, and he and Vice President Kamala Harris hosted a White House reception on May 17 that featured U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. Both Harris and Tai are the first Asian Americans to serve in their respective administration positions.

On May 19, the White House celebrated the passage of legislation to create a commission to study the potential creation of a National Museum of Asian Pacific American History and Culture. Harris also spoke at the AAPI Victory Power Fund Celebration on May 20 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

In its statement on Tuesday, the White House touted Biden’s “commitment to combating the surge of anti-Asian hate crimes” that escalated amid the coronavirus pandemic. Last May, Biden signed into law the COVID-⁠19 Hate Crimes Act, which established a position within the Justice Department focused on anti-Asian hate crimes and allocated resources to enhance state and local reporting.

President Joe Biden took office facing an historic convergence of crises. Since then, his list of challenges has only grown.

The mass killing of 19 children at a Texas school on Tuesday has become the latest test for a president facing a crucible like few of his predecessors have. Biden helms the nation that feels, at times, like it is tearing at the seams. It was personified this week as his first trip to Asia — designed to address competition with China, the foreign policy challenge deemed most pressing by the administration — was bookended by a pair of mass shootings that claimed the lives of people going about the most routine of American rituals, shopping for groceries and attending school.

“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” the president plaintively asked just minutes upon returning home. “Why do we keep letting this happen?”

Biden had prepared to take the presidency in the midst of chaos. He ran, in part, to return normalcy to a country polarized and rattled by the Trump years. In the days before his January 2021 inauguration, his team circulated a memo outlining a plan to combat what they saw as the “four crises” facing the country: Covid-19, the pandemic-fueled economic downturn, racial injustice and climate change. And as Biden took the oath of office that bitterly cold winter day, another challenge displayed on the building behind him — the U.S. Capitol still brandishing the wounds from the Jan. 6 assault on the nation’s democracy.

None of those hardships have been truly resolved.

And now Biden faces an expanding roster of national trials, including surging inflation, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the impending reversal of abortion rights and a pair of horrific shootings not even two weeks apart.

The White House argues that it not only bears little responsibility for creating the confluence of crises but that it doesn’t necessarily have the tools to resolve them either.

But the job of president means shouldering the burden. And the pressure on Biden to act has grown more acute as the nation barrels towards the midterm election and the potential 2024 return of the former president who sparked the insurrection.

Though each president is tested in unique ways, few have seen a set of concurrent challenges materialize so early in a presidency.

Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s attempted to rally the nation in the Great Depression and, just a few short years later, World War II. But Roosevelt also enjoyed massive Democratic majorities in Congress that helped push his agenda forward, something the current president does not have.

That absence has hampered Biden in several ways, including on gun policy, where efforts to address mass shootings and firearm deaths have failed to clear a Senate Republican filibuster.

The heartbreaking shooting at Robb Elementary in the town of Uvalde, Texas, now moves the issue — and those legislative dynamics — back to center stage for Biden.

Toting an automatic weapon, an 18-year-old suspect killed 21 people, with several more remaining hospitalized. He carried more firepower than the first officers who attempted to block him and was only stopped and slain when a police tactical unit arrived.

The motive for the killing, to this point, remains unknown. But coming on the heels of the mass shooting of 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., by a white supremacist, it has refocused the national debate on guns.

The White House will reexamine gun safety executive orders, but those would address the problem around the edges at best. A legislative vehicle would prove more consequential but Republicans all but uniformly oppose tougher gun restrictions and at least one Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), has already said he does not support altering the filibuster to address it.

Hurtling from one high stakes moment to another, the president learned of the latest tragedy — now the second deadliest school shooting in the nation’s history, behind the one in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 — while returning from Asia on Air Force One. His frustration was evident in his raw remarks, as he first offered words of compassion for the grieving families before flashing anger that another horrific shooting happened on his watch.

“Where in God’s name is our backbone?” Biden demanded to know.

For Biden, the summer ahead offers few signs of reprieve. Though he has received high marks for his response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war is likely to become a protracted affair wreaking havoc across the globe, with the resulting rising food and energy costs only adding to soaring global inflation.

Efforts to combat climate change remain stalled as Democrats continue to try to unify around the president’s agenda.

Republicans have, for the most part, continued to express fealty to Donald Trump and his election lies that caused the riot at the Capitol, with several proponents of the falsehood of a stolen election seeking critical offices this cycle.

The Supreme Court is likely to rule soon on the constitutionality of abortion rights, with the unauthorized disclosure of a draft opinion portending the possible overturn of Roe v. Wade.

The Covid-19 pandemic remains a scourge across the country more than two years on. While cases and hospitalizations have not yet approached those of previous spikes, health officials are increasingly worried about another, deadlier, surge this fall or winter and Congress seems uninclined to pass more funding.

Even the moments of triumphs come with asterisks. On Wednesday, Biden will announce a set of executive actions to reform policing, unveiled two years to the day that George Floyd, a Black man, was killed under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer. But the ceremony will also serve as a reminder of the crises he’s faced that remain unresolved. A broader police reform legislative package that seemed, for a time, to be a possible bipartisan achievement, fell apart, forcing him to substitute smaller executive orders.