Politico

The Jan. 6 select committee has not subpoenaed the phone records of any members of Congress but is likely to do so, multiple people familiar with the panel’s work told POLITICO.

Seizing lawmakers’ private communications would be a controversial decision, one that’s already sparked preemptive resistance from House Republicans, and investigators are proceeding carefully as they weigh their next steps. The panel is homing in on a limited number of GOP lawmakers with whom rally-goers claim to have communicated.

The committee has moved rapidly on a host of other targets, making its current inaction on lawmakers’ phone records notable. Exactly three months ago, the committee asked major phone companies to preserve call and text records of a host of people. CNN reported at the time that those people — whose identities have never been made public — included numerous congressional Republicans.

The prospect of a Democratic-created select panel subpoenaing GOP colleagues’ personal data sparked vocal criticism from the House GOP. Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), whom Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to place on the select committee, called efforts to seize members’ phone records “an authoritarian undertaking.” McCarthy himself said it would be illegal for phone companies to share those records.

“If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” McCarthy said in a statement after CNN’s August report. “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.”

In the months since, however, the committee hasn’t actually issued subpoenas ordering the phone companies to turn over any lawmakers’ records, according to two sources with knowledge of the panel’s work. Any decision will be informed by a host of considerations — including testimony from witnesses.

A spokesperson for the committee declined to comment.

Demanding members’ private records would be a major step, and would likely prompt retaliation from Republicans when they next win control of the House — which could come as soon as next year.

Even so, it’s not unprecedented for congressional probes to question members of Congress themselves. When the House Intelligence Committee investigated Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, investigators questioned Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). But both those members appeared voluntarily.

Committee investigators have signaled they’re focusing in particular on any discernible connection between members of Congress and the organizers of the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol, as well as communications between lawmakers and White House officials that day. The committee has asked the National Archives for any communications from the White House on Jan. 6 related to members of Congress and their staff.

Former President Donald Trump has sued to block the Archives from complying with the committee’s request (which also sought a host of other materials), and the case is being litigated.

A plan to speed Robert Califf’s nomination for FDA commissioner through the Senate next month is on hold after the Biden administration failed to submit the necessary paperwork to Congress in time, three people with knowledge of the matter told POLITICO.

The delay means that Califf is now unlikely to get a confirmation hearing until mid-December at the earliest, effectively ruling out the possibility of a full Senate floor vote on his appointment before the end of the year.

The Senate HELP Committee — which has jurisdiction over the nomination — had hoped to slate Califf’s hearing for the week of Dec. 6, the people with knowledge of the matter said. The proposed timeline would have then given the full chamber a narrow shot at voting to confirm the cardiologist and Obama-era FDA chief before it adjourned, filling President Joe Biden’s highest-profile health policy vacancy.

But that was contingent on the administration submitting required paperwork to the committee by Nov. 19. It missed that deadline, likely pushing Califf’s confirmation vote into January. The document submission is a formality in the confirmation process, but must be completed to ensure senators have all the materials they need to fully consider a nominee.

A Democratic Senate HELP Committee aide said that the panel received Califf’s paperwork on Monday, and was working “to schedule a hearing as soon as possible.”

The White House declined to comment.

The timing issue represents the latest complication in a monthslong effort to install a permanent leader atop an FDA that sits at the center of the Covid-19 response and vaccination campaign.

Even before Biden officially took office, his administration was eyeing longtime career FDA regulator Janet Woodcock to run the agency. But Woodcock ran into opposition from a handful of Senate Democrats over the FDA’s track record on opioid approvals and perceptions she was too close to the drug industry.

The White House spent the next several months seeking alternative candidates, approaching more than a dozen potential nominees before settling on Califf, who headed the FDA for a year in the Obama administration.

The drawn-out process has frustrated FDA staffers exhausted by two years of pandemic pressure and left in the dark on who would be their next permanent leader. It also puzzled some in the broader drug community, who have privately questioned why the administration took so long to find a nominee — only to pick one who was bound to face the same criticisms that were lobbed at Woodcock earlier this year.

Three Democratic senators have already expressed deep reservations about Califf’s candidacy over his connection to the FDA’s decision-making on opioids, as well as his work for a variety of pharmaceutical companies.

Still, the White House is counting on Califf winning some Republican support in the evenly divided Senate, as well as the vast majority of Democrats. HELP Chair Patty Murray has already endorsed his candidacy.

Murray is scheduled to meet virtually with Califf on Dec. 1, the HELP Committee aide said.

After months of watching hundreds of new nuclear missile silos being dug in the dirt northwest of Beijing, it is welcome news that President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping seemingly agreed at last week’s summit on the need for strategic stability talks. Strategic stability — the idea that nuclear-armed countries should not be able to gain decisive advantage over one another — has taken on new importance as China expands and modernizes its nuclear arsenal.

China is expected to quadruple its number of warheads in the next decade, and is upgrading its nuclear capabilities with new missiles, submarines and bombers. Over the summer, it reportedly fired a missile from a hypersonic glide vehicle while testing its fractional orbital bombardment system (FOBS) — a technical advance that, if true, means the Chinese can attack targets from space with nuclear weapons. Although China insists it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons, this claim has less credence than in the past, when the country’s nuclear force was much smaller.

The last thing we want to do is to repeat the experience of the Cold War, when the United States built over 32,000 warheads and the USSR over 40,000. We created a nuclear impasse that was expensive and destabilizing. It almost ended in nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, with new technologies once again driving the risk of escalation, we could end up in a similarly dangerous situation with China.

The United States and Russia have been working together since Cuba to avert new nuclear crises. The world’s first nuclear arms race offers two important lessons for how to prevent a second: First, the US and China should avoid trying to limit new technologies and focus on ensuring mutual nuclear predictability. Second, they should be prepared for a long road, since agreeing to joint measures to foster that predictability is far from straightforward. Luckily, both countries have more experience with nuclear diplomacy than the U.S. and the USSR did, which offers reason to be hopeful.

Realistically, both the U.S. and China are likely to evade any restrictions made on new nuclear technologies. The U.S. and USSR learned this the hard way in the 1970s, when the first strategic arms limitation agreement, SALT I, froze deployment of new strategic intercontinental missiles. The USSR got out from under that freeze by deploying additional warheads on top of ground-launched missiles — multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs. This violated the spirit of SALT I, if not the letter, and undermined strategic stability by giving Russia an edge.

Although many in the United States cried foul, before too long the U.S. had deployed its own MIRVs on highly accurate submarine-launched missiles. Now, in theory, the United States had the upper hand in the nuclear stability contest, since its missiles, hidden underwater, could survive and retaliate against a surprise Russian attack.

It became clear that limiting technologies, such as new types of missiles, would be difficult. Instead, the U.S. and USSR came around to the notion that weapons themselves should be controlled and reduced. Hardware items can be monitored or destroyed during an arms reduction process, but the technology that goes into them cannot.

Yet as the two sides learned, “controlling” arms can mean many different things in an arms control negotiation. It can be operational, such as constraining where weapons are deployed, or numerical, such as setting caps on missiles and warheads. It also has an element of verification to it; indeed, the Russian word for verification is “Контроль” — ensuring that measures agreed to are being implemented.

Which leads us to the second lesson for the U.S.-China strategic stability process: Patience will be key. Control and reduction may sound straightforward, but it took the U.S. and USSR more than a decade to agree to that course. Verification involving on-site inspection was always difficult for the Soviet Union, which did not like the idea of foreign inspectors poking around sensitive nuclear deployment sites. Reductions, while more straightforward, were not very popular in either the Russian General Staff or the Pentagon. It was not until President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met at Reykjavík in 1986 that our two countries began to take deep reductions in nuclear weapons seriously.

When the U.S.-China talks do kick off, American negotiators should be prepared to hear some longstanding complaints about how the U.S. is undermining strategic stability, through missile defenses that undermine the Chinese nuclear deterrent or highly accurate conventional missiles that are capable of destroying Chinese nuclear targets. The U.S. side, in turn, will want to hear clear explanations for China’s multifaceted nuclear developments.

Both sides will have to deal with these complaints, but fortunately, it will not require the years of effort that it took in the Cold War. The United States has enough experience with nuclear diplomacy, including with the Chinese, to avoid that outcome. After all, the Obama administration carried on multiple strategic stability tracks with Beijing, including at the military-to-military level.

China, though a relative newcomer as a nuclear competitor, also brings valuable experience to bear, having participated in talks with the U.S. and in international regimes such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The nuclear weapons states under the NPT — France, the United Kingdom, the United States, China and Russia — regularly get together to discuss stability; they will do so again in Paris in early December. In other words, it should be possible to make faster progress with China than in the old days with the Soviet Union.

Russia can help by holding its own stability discussions with the Chinese. It will not be possible, nor particularly desirable, to put all three countries in a room together: America’s separate nuclear agenda with Russia is far more advanced, despite the countries’ troubled relationship, with a working group already in train to pursue a follow-on treaty to New START.

The relationship with China is not as mature, nor do the Chinese have the nuclear parity that the U.S. and Russia have. We should therefore not expect them to jump into nuclear reduction negotiations. U.S. officials reportedly acknowledged that fact after the Biden-Xi conversation, saying a formal arms control negotiation is not a realistic goal “because Beijing wouldn’t accept limits on its nuclear arsenal unless it was closer to parity with Washington and Moscow.”

Instead, based on my discussions with Chinese experts, I expect a broad-ranging stability agenda, including discussions of traditional nuclear strategy, doctrine and force posture. Just as the 1970s and 80s brought more clarity about the USSR’s nuclear intentions, we need to understand more about China’s objectives in its nuclear modernization — while also being willing to talk frankly about our own. Our top goal must be to avoid an arms race.

One opportunity to make progress more quickly than the U.S. and USSR did might be in sharing information and eliminating misperceptions around new technology, rather than moving to limit it. For instance, the two sides could discuss the danger of cyberattacks on nuclear command and control; missile defense modernization; or the implications of hypersonic missiles. China might also be willing to engage early in areas where it has more equality of capability, such as space-based assets. Progress in this area would be especially timely, given the Chinese FOBS test in the summer and the Russian anti-satellite test just last week.

Of course, we do not yet know how seriously the Chinese will take this process. At times in the past, the stability dialogues with Beijing seemed to add up to all talk and no results. If the Chinese are serious, both countries may gain in predictability and security. If they are not, the U.S. will have more reason to see malign intent in their actions.

While China’s nuclear push is worrisome, there is no need to panic. The United States has more than 4,000 nuclear warheads; even if the Chinese do quadruple their force, they will only have a quarter of that. We have time to understand each other’s nuclear strategy and force posture.

In the end, the most important development is that Biden and Xi have taken ownership of the strategic stability dialogue. That will motivate their governments to end the current nuclear silence between Washington and Beijing. If we succeed in launching a good discussion and the Russians help, we will be on the road to avoiding a new arms race. Thankfully, history shows this outcome to be eminently possible, if we work hard at it.

Around 95 percent of the 3.5 million federal employees covered by President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for government workers have complied with the requirement ahead of its Monday deadline, according to the White House.

The Biden administration said it considers any federal worker who is in the process of getting vaccinated or requesting an exemption as “in compliance” with the mandate, according to a senior administration official, despite its requirement that federal workers be fully vaccinated by Nov. 22.

More than 90 percent of federal employees “have had at least one shot, with the vast majority of those employees being fully vaccinated,” the official said. And 95 percent have received at least their first vaccination dose or have “a pending or approved exception or extension request.”

Federal workers had to receive their last dose of the vaccine no later than Nov. 8 to meet the deadline Monday, according to guidance from the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force.

Data on how many federal workers are fully vaccinated — which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines as two weeks after a second dose of Pfizer or Moderna or a single dose of Johnson and Johnson — will not be available until a later date, a senior administration official said.

What’s next: For federal workers who haven’t complied with the mandate, agencies are offering “an education and counseling process,” the official said, “followed by additional enforcement steps over time if needed.”

The White House stressed that there would be no interruptions to government services and touted the efficacy of its vaccine mandate ahead of looming deadlines for private businesses and government contractors to ensure their employees are vaccinated. The administration is fighting numerous lawsuits to halt the mandate for private businesses, and it was recently stayed by a federal court.

“As the progress across the Federal government has shown, these requirements work,” the senior administration official said, “and we hope that our implementation can serve as an example for other businesses of every size to move forward with similar measures that will protect their workforce, protect their customers and protect our communities.”

Background: Federal employees have until the end of the day Monday to comply with a September executive order requiring that all federal employees receive a Covid-19 vaccine without the ability to opt out by taking weekly tests for the virus.

That’s separate from forthcoming requirements for federal contractors and private business employing more than 100 workers. Private employees can opt out by submitting to testing.

In the weeds: Agency-specific data on their staff’s compliance with the mandate will be released on Wednesday by the Office of Management and Budget, the senior administration official said.

The White House announced that President Joe Biden will temporarily transfer power on Friday to Vice President Kamala Harris while he undergoes a colonoscopy under anesthesia during his annual physical.

Harris will work from her West Wing office at the White House while the president undergoes his colonoscopy, press secretary Jen Psaki said.

Biden traveled to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Friday morning for a physical, one day before his 79th birthday. The oldest person ever elected to the White House, Biden has been subject to questions of his mental acuity that have tugged away at his approval ratings.

Psaki said the White House would release a summary of the president’s physical later Friday.

Harris will follow protocols used twice during the presidency of George W. Bush when he had the same procedure, Psaki said in her statement. Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, also served as acting president in 1985 while President Ronald Reagan had surgery to treat colon cancer.

Presidents throughout U.S. history have grappled with the desire to maintain some level of medical privacy — including sometimes dramatically obfuscating their condition — with the public’s right to know about the health of its leader.

Former White House press secretary and chief of staff to the first lady Stephanie Grisham hinted earlier this year that in 2019 then-President Donald Trump received a colonoscopy that was never revealed to the public while in office.

The book also speculates that the former president did not undergo aesthesia so he would not have hand over power, even temporarily, to his vice president and kept the procedure under wraps so as not to be fodder for jokes at Trump’s expense.

The decision would be soon. Then, it was “imminent.” At one point, it was slated to come in four days. Now, it’ll be by Thanksgiving. Maybe.

President Joe Biden has been wrestling for weeks with whether to reappoint the current Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, or replace him with Lael Brainard, a Democrat and economist who has served on the Fed board since 2014. The process has resembled a tortured morass of indecision. Forever the senator, Biden has engaged in an extended debate, soliciting opinions and facts far and wide as he looks to fill a vital post at a time of deep economic uncertainty and political peril.

The deliberativeness around naming the next Fed chair has been a feature, not a bug, of Biden’s presidency. The president can at times be famously stubborn once his mind is made up — he was, for instance, committed for years to ending the war in Afghanistan and stood steadfast even in the tumultuous days of this summer’s withdrawal. But in other instances, much to the dismay of some aides, his decision-making can seem endless, creating a vacuum quickly filled by Beltway guessing games and runaway narratives.

Biden’s approach, honed over a 36-year career in the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” can cut both ways. His defenders believe that the commitment to conversation and consensus allowed competing factions time to reach an agreement that led to the eventual adoption of the bipartisan infrastructure deal this past week. But his critics are convinced that the delays allowed the dominant storyline to be the bitter, sluggish pace of negotiations and not the real-world benefits of a transformative $1.2 trillion bill, with $550 billion in new spending.

The effects are visible at the granular level too. Inside the White House, deliberations can be glacial. Even the scheduling of the president’s day can be a painstaking process, with Biden habitually running late from meeting to meeting due to lengthy deliberations. The deliberations over the Fed chair, the person responsible for setting the nation’s monetary policy amid the highest inflation in a generation, has cast a fresh light on this Biden characteristic.

Sources close to the process say the president is still deciding between reappointing Powell, a Republican elevated to the role by former President Donald Trump, or putting his own stamp on the Fed by going with Brainard. Most members of Biden’s economic team and lawmakers in both parties have pushed for a Powell second term. But some progressive Democrats, who speak frequently to White House chief of staff Ron Klain, have resisted, declaring they want a Fed leader more committed to toughening financial regulation and addressing climate change.

Biden has continued to let the argument play out, according to three administration officials not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations. Among his considerations: how a choice could complicate the passage of his $1.75 trillion social services package, the officials said. A change atop the fiscal team could cause some senators to pump the brakes on signing off the bill for fear that it could flood the economy with more government cash amid the inflation fears.

Last week, the White House suggested that the pick would come within days, a timetable that Biden himself updated Tuesday when promoting the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill in New Hampshire.

“Yes, as my grandfather would say, with the grace of God and the goodwill of the neighbors, you’re gonna hear that in about four days,” Biden said.

But that fresh timeline held for only about 24 hours.

“What I can say is that the president will likely make a decision before Thanksgiving and he continues to engage with his senior economic team,” deputy White House press secretary Chris Meagher said while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Michigan on Wednesday.

Some West Wing aides have argued that a delay would be helpful, since either pick could potentially alienate lawmakers right as they’re casting votes on the reconciliation package. Biden needs to maintain the support of every Democrat in the Senate — and virtually every Democratic in the House — against unified Republican opposition. But others have argued that markets could begin to get rattled by the uncertainty, since Biden’s political fortunes may be tied to how the next Fed chair responds to a period of high inflation that is lasting longer than the central bank or the White House anticipated.

Fed officials will have to decide whether or when to raise interest rates to restrain inflation. If they move too little or too slowly, they run the risk of letting inflation get worse or last longer. But if they move too much or too soon, there is a risk of causing an economic downturn.

“It’s hard to imagine a more critical time to have the right Fed Chair,” said Steven Rattner, a senior economic adviser in President Barack Obama’s administration, who has been critical of the Biden team’s approach to inflation. “You have accelerating inflation in an economy that is still recovering. It is vital to have the right hand on the wheel.”

Going slow can be the Biden way.

In the Senate and as vice president, he would hold long deliberations with aides before coming to a decision. He famously wavered for months about running for president in 2016 before ultimately deciding against doing so. Before launching his 2020 campaign, he again hemmed and hawed before announcing his candidacy, which meant some possible staffers had already taken jobs with rivals.

But even some political opponents see the wisdom in a process that, while lengthy, allows both sides to have time to honestly size up each other.

“Biden’s chief virtue as a negotiator is the understanding that ‘Look, you have politics on your side, I have politics on my side, we both have to live within our political constraints,’” said Rohit Kumar, former deputy chief of staff to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was in the room when Biden, as vice president, held lengthy negotiations with GOP leaders.

Biden’s pitch, Kumar added, is often simple: “‘I know there are certain things you can’t do and I am not going to make them deal breakers. We have to get a deal I can sell, a deal you can sell.’”

As president, Biden is known to pepper his advisers with questions, demanding extra calls with policy experts and academics. He seeks out minutia but loathes jargon, flashing anger at aides who don’t deliver information in methods easily translatable for voters. His “Socratic journey,” as some aides call it, can wreak havoc on the West Wing schedule, with decisions stretching weeks beyond their due date.

Meetings with health experts around vaccine distributions and mandates ran hours past their allotment. Preparations for his June summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin stretched into multiple sessions in the Situation Room. As he pushed his two-part legislative agenda through Congress, he has been overly deferential to lawmakers on the Hill, allowing them to run point on negotiations. Biden even made two trips to the U.S. Capitol without making a demand for the Democratic caucus to vote on his infrastructure proposal.

Some members of his own party — including Michigan Reps. Debbie Dingell and Elissa Slotkin — both went on TV to call for Biden directly to play more of an assertive role in getting a deal. But the White House and other Biden allies have continued extolling the mantra that the end result, no matter how messy the process, is all that matters. And that the same thing will be true once the Fed chair decision is made.

“This is not indecisiveness. This is deliberateness,” said Adrienne Elrod, a senior aide on Biden’s transition team and aide to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. “He took the time necessary to get to the best outcome. He didn’t rush the process, he took the time to have conversations with key lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.”

Vice President Kamala Harris denied Thursday that she felt her political potential and policy expertise were being wasted by the White House, rebutting several days of negative media reports about her office and broader role in the Biden administration.

Those remarks from Harris came in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” when host George Stephanopoulos asked her whether she considered herself “misused or underused” as vice president.

“No, I don’t,” Harris replied. “I am very, very excited about the work that we have accomplished. But I am also absolutely, absolutely clear-eyed that there is a lot more to do. And we’re going to get it done.”

Multiple news stories over the past week have depicted the vice president’s office as a dysfunctional work environment and Harris herself as a talented politician often relegated to tackling intractable assignments across the federal government — ranging from voting rights to the root causes of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The reports have prompted public pushback from top administration officials and prominent aides to President Joe Biden, who have argued Harris remains a valuable partner to the president.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki went further in her defense of Harris, telling POLITICO she believed recent criticism of the vice president is rooted in part in Harris being the first woman and person of color to hold the office.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday didn’t hesitate to say “yes” when asked whether Vice President Kamala Harris was receiving more criticism because she is the first woman and woman of color to hold the office.

“I think there’s no question that the type of attacks — the attacks on her that certainly, being the first she is many times over, is part of that,” Psaki said in an interview with POLITICO’s senior editor for standards and ethics, Anita Kumar, as part of its inaugural Women Rule Exchange.

Harris has received unflattering coverage in recent months and weeks, with a CNN story over the weekend reporting that the vice president is “struggling with a rocky relationship with some parts of the White House,” and that there’s “entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus” in her office. There was negative press during her third foreign trip, to Paris, with a Los Angeles Times column over the weekend calling her “the incredible disappearing vice president” — criticizing her absence from Washington as Congress passed the administration’s infrastructure bill.

Psaki jumped to Harris’ defense on Twitter on Sunday, posting that the vice president is a “vital partner” to President Joe Biden, who has taken on “important challenges facing the country,” from voting rights to the crisis at the border.

“What I would note, though, and one of the things I really admire about the vice president: She is the first African American woman, woman of color, Indian American woman to serve in this job. Woman. I mean, so many firsts, right? It’s a lot to have on your shoulders,” Psaki said on Wednesday. “She is somebody who, at a much higher level than the rest of us, but who wants to be seen as the talented, experienced, you know, expert, substantive policy person, partner to the president, that she is. But I do think there have been some attacks that are beyond because of her identity.”

Psaki also talked with POLITICO about her tenure and the environment for women in the White House. She said she hadn’t decided whether she would hold on to her job as the administration’s top spokesperson past the one-year timeline she planned.

While the press secretary said she expected to leave the post sometime next year, she hasn’t determined whether it will be before or after next year’s midterm elections.

“I have two little kids, as you know, 3 and 6,” Psaki said. “I also think this is a job that’s the honor of a lifetime — working for this president at this moment in history — but I’m a believer in lifting people up and having new faces and new voices out there, and I think that’s an important part of my role too.”

She also joked about the 400 pieces of paper piled up on her desk she has to work through.

“I’m focused on every day here,” Psaki said.

The press secretary said in the spring that she intended to serve in the role for a year, before moving on to spend more time with her husband, Gregory Mecher, and their two children.

Psaki, who worked on the communications team in the Obama White House until 2011, also talked about how nervous she was when the White House chief of staff at the time, Denis McDonough, asked her to return to the White House as communications director during President Barack Obama’s second term. She was pregnant with her first child at the time.

“And I said, ‘Well, I don’t know if you know that I’m pregnant.’ He was like, ‘Well, that’s great. We’ll figure that out,’” Psaki said. “But I didn’t know other people to look to, who had had a senior job in the White House, who were pregnant. I didn’t know of anyone. Probably there were some, but I didn’t know of any at the time. And now I think it’s different.”

Psaki’s part of an all-women communications team, with six of them mothers of young kids. She said being parents is part of what they talk about on a daily basis.

“I hope if any of my team members decide to have kids that they’ll know we will be excited about it and we’ll figure it out,” she said. “And that is not a part of what should exclude anyone from being at the table or being in the room. That’s what you have to work around to have the talent you need. That has changed, and that I think is part of, you know, having so many women with little kids who have legitimate, real seats at the table.”

The gasoline price spike feeding Americans’ inflation anxiety has the White House scrambling to show voters it’s got a plan to ease their pain at the pump.

Biden aides, including National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and top economic adviser Brian Deese, as well as the Senior Adviser for Energy Security, Amos Hochstein and White House National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy and her top aide, Ali Zaidi, met on Friday at the White House to consider actions the administration could take to cool off energy prices, according to three people familiar with the meeting. They considered several options, those sources said, ranging from releasing oil from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve to ease gasoline prices, curbing crude oil and gas exports, and even softening biofuel blending rules for refineries.

Consumer sentiment has plunged in recent weeks as inflation climbed to the highest levels in more than a generation. Those rising prices are especially evident in the gasoline market, where drivers have seen the per gallon price jump to the highest levels in seven years. On top of that, homeowners are bracing for expensive heating bills this winter, with natural gas costs more than twice the year-ago level.

That energy price surge is badly timed for the Biden administration, which just a few days earlier was playing a leading role in the U.N. climate negotiations in Glasgow and as Democrats try to pass their $1.75 trillion bill that contains the biggest ever effort to tackle climate change by boosting renewable fuels over oil, natural gas and coal.

That’s handed Republicans an easy attack line to highlight the sharp differences in the two parties’ energy policies.

“The people of America will pay dearly for the energy that we are not producing in the United States, because what Joe Biden did in Glasgow was beg OPEC+ to sell more energy and produce more oil for the United States to buy,” Sen. John Barrasso said at a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday.

The inflationary pressure has helped drive Biden’s approval polls to just 41 percent, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week. About half of respondents put the blame for rising inflation on the White House — not the supply chain issues related to the pandemic recovery that most economists say is most responsible for driving up prices.

Republicans have also pointed to Biden’s January move to cancel the Keystone XL oil pipeline project and later pause auctions of federal land for oil drilling as the culprit, though energy experts have said those actions have had no near-term effect on supply levels or prices.

The White House, which did not comment for this story, has recently stressed that is was looking closely at the situation.

“The message to Americans is that we’re not just closely and directly monitoring the situation — which, of course, we’ve been doing — but we’re looking at every tool in our arsenal,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said on Friday. “Our view is that the rise in gas prices over the long term makes it an even stronger case for doubling down our investment and our focus on clean energy options so that we are not relying on the fluctuations and OPEC and their willingness to put more supply and meet the demands in the market.”

Democrats have been split on one of the executive branch’s easiest tools to wield: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The Energy Department currently holds more than 600 million barrels of crude oil in its storage facilities, which Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has said could be tapped to lower prices.

The oil industry objects to using those barrels to control prices, arguing the stockpile is designed to be tapped only in the event of a supply crunch, like when DOE released some oil in September because of the disruptions that occurred after Hurricane Ida crippled producers’ Gulf of Mexico operations.

Even Democrats are split on its use, with Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer calling over the weekend for Biden to order a release of oil, a move that House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said on Tuesday he opposed.

In the meantime, energy market experts say the rise in global oil prices has yet to spur oil companies and state-owned producers around the world to ramp up their drilling. Even in the U.S., oil producers have so far been wary of spending money to increase production, fearful of another economic shock like the 2020 crash that decimated their balance sheets and sent dozens of oil drillers into bankruptcy.

That’s left the Biden administration to call on OPEC nations and Russia to open the taps to ease the price pressure, a move derided by Republicans as average gas prices hover near $3.40 a gallon, 60 percent higher than a year ago.

“Inflation is what’s on everybody’s mind and you’re seeing it across the board, but nowhere does it have a more direct impact on middle class voters than at the gas pump,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said in an interview. “Biden saying we just need to get Russia and Saudi Arabia to pump more oil is just a bad joke.”

“Feeling pain at the pump? Biden doesn’t care,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel posted on Twitter last week.

Energy market specialists agree that tactics that were on the Friday agenda at the White House meeting — or any actions from any administration — have little influence on short term fuel prices.

And some of those discussions would likely backfire on Democrats, especially any effort to reduce ethanol blending levels in the nation’s gasoline pool, a program that the agricultural interests and farm-state lawmakers aggressively defend. Even the possibility of examining the Renewable Fuel Standard that governs biofuels drew a preemptive rebuke from the industry.

Geoff Cooper, head of the Renewable Fuels Association, a lobby group, said in a letter to Biden on Tuesday that they “were shocked to learn that one of the potential actions reportedly being discussed by the White House” concerned lowering ethanol blending requirements. In fact, he noted, the 1.1 billion barrels per day of biofuels that are blended into motor fuels were actually lowering the prices at the pump.

While the White House isn’t likely to start a political fight with the powerful agricultural industry or its Congressional backers any time soon, the surging levels of U.S. exports could be a ripe target, particularly natural gas.

Barely a blip in the market five years ago, exports of liquefied natural gas, the super-chilled form of the fuel that is shipped by tanker around the globe, now account for more than 10 percent of the U.S. production. Shipping the fuel to buyers in Asia and Europe, where prices are far higher than they are even at the elevated levels customers are paying in the U.S., means less fuel to tamp down inflation, senators at a hearing on energy prices noted on Tuesday.

“We are exporting our principal advantage in the world economy,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said at an Energy Committee hearing. “We are literally subsidizing Chinese manufacturing by sending them natural gas.”

“I wholeheartedly agree,” Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) seconded.

CLIMATE THREAT

Still, Republicans aren’t shying away from using the high prices to attack the Biden administration’s renewable energy support, as well as Democrats’ $1.75 trillion social spending and climate bill, which contains $320 billion in tax breaks for energy sources like wind and solar power to help displace fossil fuels.

The Biden administration has focused its public messaging so strongly on climate change and the switch to renewable energy that it’s made itself an open target for Republicans on the issue, said Mark Jones, political science professor at Rice University in Houston. With mid-term elections less than a year away, voter anger over high prices could cost Democrats control of the House and Senate — and any hopes for more ambitious climate legislation.

“It is consistent to focus in the short term on fossil fuels while in the long term you’re trying to transition away from them, but the messaging is difficult,” Jones said. “On one hand you’re saying fossil fuels are destroying the planet; on the other hand you want to boost the production of fossil fuels in the short term to help people’s pocket books.”

While the messaging may be difficult, there appear to be few people in the White House skilled in delivering that message, some of the administration’s allies said. The White House lacks the sort of deep experience with fossil fuel markets to go before the public and convincingly explain why fuel prices are at heights last seen nearly a decade ago and that investments in renewable energy will insulate the country from future market swings, said David Goldwyn, analyst at the Atlantic Council and a former official in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

“It’s not politically astute to make the public do a Google search to figure out the nuances of your position,” Goldwyn said. “They’re taking some avoidable hits and they’re not punching back the way they should.”

High fuel costs also pose a danger to Democrats’ climate priorities, said Kevin Book, director of energy consulting firm ClearView Energy. The party can say their infrastructure package and budget bill contain transformative provisions, including a ban on drilling in most federal offshore waters. But rising fuel prices may mean they don’t get many more big bites at that apple any time soon, he said.

“The energy transition depends on technology and capital, but it also depends on political continuity and voter buy-in,” Book said. “High prices undermine that buy-in, and they could affect political continuity, too.”