Politico

Democrats are haggling over whether to drop two of the most popular elements of their social spending bill as negotiations reach the zero hour, according to a half-dozen sources close to the discussions.

While high-level talks on the $1 trillion-plus package are ongoing, lawmakers, staffers, advocates and lobbyists said that a plan to expand Medicare with dental, vision and hearing benefits for tens of millions of seniors — as well as a pitch to guarantee paid family and medical leave to all U.S. workers — is now in danger of getting cut from the bill entirely.

Democratic sources addressed the current status of the talks candidly on condition of anonymity, amid conflicting reports from those involved that speak to the closely guarded and sensitive nature of the back-and-forth as the party pushes for a deal in the next few days. President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders are racing to lock in centrist Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) without alienating other major players, including Medicare-expansion proponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

One senior Democratic aide said discussions on Medicare and paid leave were “in flux” as negotiations continued through the weekend. The White House and Senate leadership aides, meanwhile, denied that the provisions were on their way out. “This is untrue, on both counts,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson.

The threat to these two centerpieces of the bill comes as Democrats push for an agreement on a framework for the broader social spending measure as soon as possible. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have said they want a deal by the end of this week, though Manchin and the White House still don’t see eye to eye on a topline number for the bill; Manchin has consistently said he supports $1.5 trillion.

Paid leave and Medicare expansion may not fit in a package that conforms to Manchin’s preferred price tag.

On the health care front, the party had originally pushed for scaled-down versions of all its priorities — including temporary expansions of Medicaid, Medicare benefits and Obamacare subsidies — after resistance from centrists in the House and Senate had forced the cutting of more than $1 trillion from the package.

The proposed new Medicare benefits have always been vulnerable, given their $350 billion price tag and a wave of lobbying against them from the health care industry. Those lobbying against the Sanders-backed expansion include private insurance companies and dentists whose profits would take a hit if more seniors enrolled in traditional Medicare and didn’t have to buy supplemental private plans to cover their dentures, hearing aids and glasses.

Many Democrats also saw the Medicare benefits as a threat to the effort to expand Medicaid to millions of uninsured low-income people in conservative states, given that the two provisions were competing for the same limited dollars.

In recent weeks, Biden had pitched lawmakers on converting the dental benefit — by far the most expensive and logistically challenging of the three Medicare expansions eyed for the bill — into an $800 annual voucher for care. Progressives, who have fought for decades against conservative efforts to convert Medicare into a voucher program, were critical of that idea but acknowledged it could be a way to get aid to seniors sooner, given that the original House legislation would not have rolled out the dental benefit until 2028.

Some lawmakers also floated ditching dental and focusing solely on vision and hearing care, while others argued for just a few years of all three, confident that the benefits would prove so popular that a future Congress would be forced to extend them.

Yet even those scaled-back versions have yet to garner enough support from centrist holdouts in the Senate, bolstering projections that the entire Medicare-expansion plank could get axed entirely.

Sanders insisted to POLITICO on Saturday that the benefits are “not coming out.”

“The expansion of Medicare to cover dental, hearing and vision is one of the most popular and important provisions in the entire bill,” he said. “It’s what the American people want.”

Sanders and other progressives already saw the benefits expansion as a significant concession, given they had originally pushed to lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60. Now, they say dropping the expansion entirely risks losing their votes for the broader bill.

“We obviously want vision, dental and hearing to be covered,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) told reporters Friday. “My biggest worry is that we’ve had our set of five priorities and we’ve always said we will support a package that has these five priorities. Once you start taking away some of the priorities, then things get a little dicey.”

As for paid leave, the White House informed lawmakers last weekend that it wanted to drastically pare down those provisions in Democrats’ party-line social spending package. Though the administration first proposed 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave for all workers funded at $225 billion, the president is now supportive of four weeks of paid leave for lower-income workers funded at $100 billion, five sources familiar with the conversations said Friday.

That’s nearly one-fifth of what the House approved for paid leave earlier this year: $494 billion. It’s even less than what the Senate has been pushing since this summer: $300 billion.

The benefits, disbursed on an income-based scale, would expire after an estimated three to four years, one source said — a nonstarter for most paid leave advocates, who say that the benefit’s permanence is critical to encouraging employers and states to participate in the program.

“A temporary paid leave program is insufficient,” said Molly Day, executive director of Paid Leave for the United States. “It is imperative that the final bill meets the desperate needs of working families with a permanent federal framework.”

The U.S. is the only wealthy nation without a national paid leave policy. Just 23 percent of private-sector workers have access to paid family leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Seventy-seven percent have access to paid sick leave.

The White House said Friday morning that it was considering cutting paid leave from the package, one source familiar with the conversations said.

Now, paid leave advocates are up in arms over what they see as an unwillingness by the White House to fight hard enough for even the slashed version of a reform that Biden campaigned heavily on, particularly as the U.S. recovers from a public health crisis that disparately affected women.

“It is inconceivable and unconscionable to me that there is any risk for a paid leave being on the chopping block, considering the ongoing pandemic, the women’s jobs crisis, the care tsunami, the birth rate issues — all of the combined and overlapping crises deepening racial and gender inequality,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, director of Paid Leave for All. “The fact that something this administration has run on and Congress has championed would not be a priority to me is unbelievable.”

The White House has mostly deferred the blame for the paid leave cutbacks to Manchin, one source familiar with the conversations on the Hill said. Manchin himself has yet to go on record about whether the policy is a priority for him.

“I want to know whether [Biden] is putting his weight behind [paid leave] when he’s behind closed doors with Sen. Manchin and others that he’s negotiating with,” said Vicki Shabo, who studies paid leave at New America.

A spokesperson for Manchin did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misidentified the state that Rep. Ilhan Omar represents. She is a representative from Minnesota.

The U.S. is nearing a formalized agreement with Pakistan to use its airspace to conduct operations in Afghanistan, according to a CNN report Saturday.

Though the U.S. military already uses Pakistan’s airspace for intelligence-gathering operations, a formalized agreement would be significant in guaranteeing that this access would continue. A classified briefing with members of Congress took place on Friday morning, at which the Biden administration told lawmakers the U.S. was nearing the agreement, CNN reported, citing three sources familiar.

The Biden administration is facing the reality of carrying out counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrew from the country recently following a 20-year military presence.

In August, after a deadly attack on U.S. service members by ISIS militants outside the Kabul airport, President Joe Biden struck a hardline tone, saying the U.S. would respond with “force and precision” to the terrorists.

“To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay,” Biden said at the time. “I will defend our interests and our people with every measure at my command.”

Following the fall of Kabul, counterterrorism experts have expressed concerns about the presence of terrorist groups like ISIS-K in Afghanistan. In a September hearing, Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said it could take al Qaeda six to 36 months to reconstitute in Afghanistan.

Pakistan “expressed a desire” to sign a Memorandum of Understanding in exchange for help with its counterterrorism efforts with India, though negotiations are ongoing, CNN reported on Saturday.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan released a statement on Saturday in response to inquiries about the report “alluding to formalization of an agreement for the use of Pakistan’s airspace by the United States to conduct military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan,” asserting that “no such understanding was in place.”

“Pakistan and the U.S. have longstanding cooperation on regional security and counter-terrorism and the two sides remain engaged in regular consultations,” the Ministry added.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

President Joe Biden on Thursday didn’t hesitate when asked whether the U.S. would come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacked.

“Yes, we have a commitment to do that,” Biden said during a CNN town hall in Baltimore.

But the White House later clarified the president’s comments, telling POLITICO that there had been no change in policy.

“The U.S. defense relationship with Taiwan is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act,” a White House spokesperson said. “We will uphold our commitment under the Act, we will continue to support Taiwan’s self-defense, and we will continue to oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo.”

Biden made a similar comment in August during an interview with ABC News. After the president suggested that the U.S. would defend the island if there were an attack, a deviation from the United States’ long-held position, the White House said the president misspoke.

While Washington is required by the Taiwan Relations Act to provide the country with defense resources, it has followed a policy of “strategic ambiguity” when it comes to military intervention to protect Taiwan if China attacks.

The White House in recent weeks has projected the message that the U.S. commitment to Taiwan is “rock solid” as tensions rise between the country and China. Earlier this month, China sent dozens of war planes over Taiwan’s air defense zone. Taiwan has condemned the incursions as part of Beijing’s increasing military harassment.

China has defended the actions as “just” and necessary for maintaining stability in the region. Beijing still sees Taiwan as part of its own territory, though the countries split in 1949.

The U.S. does not formally recognize Taiwan, but it maintains an unofficial relationship and supports its democratic government.

A top Taiwanese security official said this week that the chances of war with China in the next year were “very low,” according to Reuters.

“I think, generally, within one year, the probability of war is very low,” National Security Bureau Director-General Chen Ming-tong told a parliamentary defense committee meeting.

“But there are many things you still have to pay attention to, called contingent events.”

Alex Ward contributed to this report.

Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, has brought on a top Republican lawyer to handle the House’s Jan. 6 investigation.

Two people familiar with the matter told POLITICO that George Terwilliger, the deputy attorney general during the George H. W. Bush administration, is representing Meadows for the select committee’s inquiry into the Capitol attack. Terwilliger confirmed that he represents Meadows, who did not respond to a request for comment.

Terwilliger’s representation of Meadows, which has not been previously reported, signals that the former White House chief of staff is taking the select panel’s probe very seriously. The hiring also signals that Washington’s tight-knit conservative legal community is paying close attention to the issues the House investigation touches on — including executive privilege.

Terwilliger is influential and well known in the D.C. legal arena. He spent 15 years at the Justice Department, serving as deputy attorney general when former Trump DOJ chief Bill Barr had his first stint as attorney general and later assumed the top DOJ role in an acting capacity.

Over the years Terwilliger has worked on a host of politically charged legal fights, including on George W. Bush’s legal team during the 2000 Florida recount and representing Bush-era attorney general Alberto Gonzales in the wake of the U.S. attorneys scandal. More recently, Terwilliger represented former Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) when the Justice Department probed Schock for corruption. DOJ dropped the charges against Schock and reached a settlement with him.

Meadows, meanwhile, is a central focus for the Jan. 6 select committee.

The committee subpoenaed him on Sept. 23 and has since said that he’s engaging with its investigators. Steve Bannon, another Trump World denizen subpoenaed the same day, faces a criminal contempt vote Thursday after he stiff-armed the committee; Meadows faces no such public opprobrium.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chair of the Jan. 6 panel, argued in a letter to Meadows that he has detailed knowledge of the events that the committee is scrutinizing.

“You were the president’s chief of staff and have critical information regarding many elements of our inquiry,” Thompson wrote in a letter accompanying the panel’s subpoena to Meadows. “It appears you were with or in the vicinity of President Trump on January 6, had communication with the president and others on January 6 regarding events at the Capitol and are a witness regarding the activities of the day.”

Meadows was backstage at the raucous National Mall rally that came immediately before Trump supporters attacked the Capitol. Donald Trump Jr. praised Meadows in a selfie video taken at that event.

“Mark Meadows, an actual fighter, one of the few, a real fighter,” the former president’s son said, as CNBC has detailed.

The committee is also eyeing efforts by Meadows and others at the Trump White House to get DOJ officials to open investigations into potential election fraud, which dovetailed with Trump’s repeated attempts to cast doubt about his loss to President Joe Biden. Notably, Barr — Trump’s own top cop before leaving office — has said DOJ didn’t find evidence that fraudulent votes could have impacted the election’s outcome.

It is unclear how much help Meadows will voluntarily provide to the committee.

As he and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus gathered with President Joe Biden earlier this year, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn made note of the portrait of FDR that was hanging on the Oval Office wall.

It was important, he stressed, for Biden to not make the same missteps Roosevelt did in the New Deal when it came time to craft his own domestic agenda; to ensure that millions of people of color were not excluded in the final outcome.

That moment, which was recounted by two sources in the room, continues to resonate months later. With Biden under pressure to reduce the price tag of his social spending and climate plan, Democratic lawmakers and advocates are keeping a close eye on likely cuts to provisions boosting health care and economic aid for people of color.

Echoing Clyburn’s comments on the New Deal, some are concerned that programs benefiting Black and brown people could be cut altogether or significantly weakened, potentially widening inequities. Clyburn himself said in an interview he was concerned the final product would expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing services, while giving Medicaid proponents little to latch on to.

“If you give permanent funding to Medicare at the expense of Medicaid, you are widening the health care gap between poor people and more wealthy people because Medicare — billionaires get Medicare,” he said. “Medicare is for everybody irrespective of income. Medicaid is for poor people.”

Clyburn’s office pointed out that 60 percent of the 2.2 million Americans who would benefit from a federal Medicaid expansion are people of color. Ultimately, the congressman is pushing for a compromise that keeps all the original provisions in the final package and lowering the price tag by reducing programs’ timespans rather than dropping them.

Others in the party make the case that passing Biden’s “Build Back Better” package into law, even a scaled back version, would itself prove critical to closing racial equity gaps, and that the party shouldn’t lose sight of that potential achievement.

“This would be the biggest racial justice bill in generations,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).

“And yes, it’s infrastructure, and yes, it’s social spending, but it should be viewed as the Biden administration views this, which is an opportunity to address historic wrongs and ongoing injustice. It won’t solve anything permanently, but for the federal government to have this level of commitment to racial justice is quite literally once in a lifetime.”

As Democrats race to meet a self-imposed Oct. 31 deadline for finalizing the legislation, the White House and congressional leadership are increasingly being forced to navigate debates like these. In recent weeks, the president has strained to find common ground between centrist Democrats and progressives across the Senate and House, made more difficult by the party’s razor-thin majorities. An administration official said the White House is fighting for everything in the president’s originally proposed plan.

Through it all, lawmakers and advocates have reminded the White House of Biden’s promise to integrate racial equity into all aspects of his presidency — and that communities of color are one of the bedrock constituencies for the Democratic party.

Biden’s original plan sought to achieve that by funding everything from historically Black colleges and universities, to Medicaid expansion in Republican-led states, to pay increases for home care workers, who are predominantly women of color.

“Equity is embedded in the Build Back Better agenda and is at the core of our entire economic growth strategy for ensuring that the economy delivers for the American middle class,” said White House spokesperson Andrew Bates. “That has always been the case and always will be.”

Nowhere is the growing tension over the morality and efficacy of the coming cuts more apparent than in health care, where lawmakers are engaged in negotiations about which programs to scale back and which to preserve, and how those choices will impact communities of color, whose underlying health disparities were lethally exacerbated by Covid-19.

House leadership and the House’s moderate New Democrat block are pushing Congress and the Biden administration to prioritize an expansion of Medicaid to cover roughly 2 million uninsured people in red states that refused to expand the program under the Affordable Care Act — arguing that the majority of those helped would be poor people of color.

Progressives and outside advocates involved in the negotiations counter that expanding Medicare benefits would also help millions of seniors of color who currently can’t afford dentures, glasses or hearing aids.

Eliot Fishman, the senior director of health policy at Families USA, is not taking a side in the fight, but shared research showing that of the country’s roughly 6 million Black Medicare beneficiaries, about one third have lost all of their natural teeth, and a majority did not see a dentist in the last year because of the cost.

“The lack of that benefit falls particularly heavily on the same populations that always tend to lose out in federal legislation,” he said.

Other lawmakers and advocacy groups, fearful that their health provisions will fall victim to efforts to cut at least a trillion dollars from the overall bill, are mounting racial equity arguments as well.

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry told advocates on a recent call that she’s been stressing to lawmakers that the money directed toward home care (already scaled down from $400 billion to $190 billion in the House version of the bill) would “add one million jobs for Black, brown, AAPI, Indigenous and immigrant women who make up the care workforce in this country.”

The program would also help families keep the elderly and people with disabilities at home rather than put them in nursing homes. That need grew more urgent after more than 150,000 people died in nursing homes across the country due to Covid-19, with wide disparities in infections and deaths between facilities with mainly white residents and those with mainly residents of color.

Those fighting to make Affordable Care Act subsidies permanent are leaning on similar arguments. Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) told POLITICO the provision “will enable hundreds of thousands of Blacks in our nation to purchase an affordable plan or save money on the coverage they already have.”

Some Democrats are also wary of dramatic cuts to funding for affordable housing in the package. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chair of the House Financial Services Committee, is fighting to keep high levels of aid for housing in the package as Democrats negotiate the final funding. Clyburn also said it would be “the biggest mistake” Democrats could make if they walked away from aid for affordable housing.

“The appropriate approach is not to cut anything out but to look at the timeframes in which we were expecting some of those services or supports to last,” said Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.). Getting programs extended, she added, is easier than getting them “created for the very first time.”

No matter what pieces of the bill end up getting cut, Fishman and other advocates warn that people of color will likely bear the brunt of the impact, and the opportunity to mount another legislative push may not come again for many years.

“We have racial disparities for kids. We have racial disparities for women of childbearing age and postpartum. We have racial disparities for people over 65. We have racial disparities for adults on Medicaid,” he said. “Nobody’s going to win in a ‘who has more racial disparities?’ contest. On every front, if we don’t get something in this bill, it means we’re leaving some segment of the population behind, and that’s a frightening prospect.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell may be insisting that he won’t help President Joe Biden and Democrats solve a debt ceiling impasse again.

But White House officials are still planning for the Kentucky Republican to climb down as yet another deadline approaches in December, after he convinced 10 Republican colleagues to break the logjam last week.

Inside the White House, aides don’t view McConnell’s insistence as a hard “no.” Instead, they consider the recent vote in the Senate to raise the debt limit for two months a harbinger for the future, underscoring that Republicans could easily join Democrats through regular order if need be.

Such a conviction suggests that Washington is girding for another exasperating and potentially costly game of chicken, only this time, with the rest of Biden’s sprawling agenda thrown into the mix. McConnell has insisted that Democrats use the reconciliation budget process to pass a debt ceiling bill with only Democratic votes. But some Democrats bristle at the idea, arguing it could take up too much floor time and would set a dangerous precedent.

Debt ceiling stalemates have been an unnerving fixture of the U.S government in recent years, often involving horse-trading and one side blinking before the government defaults on its debt. This last go-around was different. Rather than demanding spending cuts in exchange for their votes, Senate Republicans made no serious requests of Democrats. Instead, they argued that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer should raise the debt limit through reconciliation and without them, even as they said they wanted to see the issue resolved.

After talk among Senate Democrats turned to changing the filibuster rules to allow for a simple majority vote on the debt ceiling, McConnell acquiesced and ended the GOP filibuster, allowing a vote on the short-term extension. Veterans of the chamber believe another resolution will now happen by December.

“There’s going to be a lot of twists and turns and unforeseen developments along the way,” said Tom Daschle, the former Democratic Senate leader and a veteran of past debt limit fights. “I think the bottom line is they’ll find a way to get it done, whether it’s through reconciliation or something else.”

Biden officials stressed that they would again defer to Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to help manage the legislative mechanics around getting the debt ceiling raised or suspended. But they contend Republicans’ insistence about refusing to participate in discussions rings especially hollow given that GOP senators just did so when pushed.

“Congress took a welcome step forward over the last week in putting a disastrous debt standoff behind us, and Republicans demonstrated with their votes last Thursday that there’s no reason why they can’t do the exact same thing in December by joining with Democrats to raise the debt limit instead of triggering another showdown that would jeopardize millions of jobs, pay for the military, and benefits for seniors,” White House spokesperson Mike Gwin said in a written statement.

Democrats on Capitol Hill are nervous about how it will all play out. While much of the focus has been on the Senate, House Democrats who have to defend close districts worry a messy standoff will complicate their efforts in the midterms, not to mention hurt their own standing, having been forced to vote multiple times for a debt ceiling hike. Some insist that it might be better to pocket their recent win on the issue and just do it via reconciliation.

That belief is rooted in the idea that while McConnell moved off his stance before, a default would be disastrous for the economy and the White House wouldn’t be able to dodge blame.

“It’s dangerous to both sides,” said Ben Nelson, another former Democratic senator. “The most danger probably does incur to the administration and the party that’s in charge of the administration. But for anyone outside to think they escape the implications and they can blame it all on the administration, I think they are in la la land.”

McConnell’s office pointed to his letter where he pledged not to help again on the debt ceiling, citing Biden’s massive social spending bill that Democrats are negotiating and Schumer’s “partisan, angry and corrosive” speech criticizing Republicans for walking up to “the cliff’s edge” after the most recent debt limit vote.

Undergirding the White House’s confidence in managing a second debt ceiling deadlock is a larger belief that Americans are tired of high-stakes political brinkmanship. They also think their pressure playbook — a slow boil of like-minded allies speaking out about the dangers and then culminating with Biden using the bully pulpit — ultimately proved successful.

Officials plan to take a similar approach of methodically ratcheting up the volume as the new deadline grows closer.

“Fundamentally,” Gwin concluded, “we cannot allow partisan politics to hold our economy hostage, and we can’t allow the routine process of paying our bills to turn into a political football that puts our country at risk every two years, or every two months.”

OTTAWA — The U.S. will reopen its border to fully vaccinated, nonessential travelers at land and ferry crossings on Nov. 8.

“The US’ new travel policy that requires vaccination for foreign national travelers to the United States will begin on Nov 8,” White House assistant press secretary Kevin Munoz tweeted Friday. “This announcement and date applies to both international air travel and land travel. This policy is guided by public health, stringent, and consistent.”

A Canadian government source told POLITICO earlier in the day that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has informed Ottawa of the Nov. 8 timeline.

The U.S. land border closure to discretionary travel has been in place since March 2020.

The Biden administration has been under intense pressure for months to remove travel restrictions for nonessential, fully vaccinated travelers at land ports of entry.

An unanswered question for many Canadians is whether the U.S. will accept travelers who were given a mixed-dose regimen of two different Covid-19 jabs.

The White House has been consulting with the oil industry to seek a remedy for rising gasoline prices as surging inflation threatens to tarnish the economic recovery, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

The latest outreach to the oil industry is an awkward shift for the Biden administration, which has pledged to move the country away from fossil fuels and has drawn criticism from the industry and Republicans for pausing lease sales of federal land for oil and gas development.

But President Joe Biden faces mounting political pressure to curb rising prices that have lifted the average per gallon price of gasoline to $3.28, more than $1 above the year-ago level, as crude oil prices hit 7-year highs this week above $80 a barrel. That pain at the pump comes as the U.S. consumer price index jumped 5.4 percent in September, matching a 13-year high and driven partly by troubled supply chains — creating another political headache for Biden heading into the 2022 election season.

Much of the rise in energy costs is beyond the White House’s control and has been attributed to rebounding demand as the economy snaps back from the pandemic as well as an uptick in China’s energy consumption, market analysts said. U.S. oil production has also slipped compared to record output before the pandemic, and oil companies that were hit hard by the plunging demand then have been slow to drill new wells. The OPEC oil cartel is also being careful about opening its spigots too loosely after oil prices tumbled during the pandemic.

The Biden administration has requested OPEC increase its exports, but has few other options for bringing prices down. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said last week that the administration was considering releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a move that is usually reserved for supply disruptions.

Oil industry officials and experts said the White House team had experience in renewable energy markets, but relatively few people with detailed knowledge of oil markets — the problem of the moment.

“Senior staff is preoccupied with trying to identify options to bring down oil prices, which they believe are driving [the] inflation uptick,” said Stephen Brown, a longtime energy lobbyist and current strategist with RBJ Strategies. “Some producers will talk to them, but it is also not like they have a lot of friends in this sector.”

One lobbying source described a Tuesday night meeting of White House officials focused on rising oil and gasoline prices. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the meeting or outreach to the oil industry. One other person said the meeting included senior staff and did not necessarily involve Cabinet members.

The White House is rushing to show it’s trying to tame high inflation, which has already prompted the Federal Reserve to signal it will reduce its pace of bond purchases that are designed to keep longer-term interest rates low. Biden and his team are targeting bottlenecks in the supply chain that have strained inventories and contributed to higher prices. On Wednesday, he announced the Port of Los Angeles would begin operating 24 hours a day and that major companies including UPS and FedEx would also extend their working hours.

“I want to be clear, this is across the board commitment to going to 24/7,” he said in remarks from the White House. “This is a big first step in speeding up the movement of materials and goods through our supply chain. But now we need the rest of the private sector chain to step up as well.“

Some in the oil industry are using the rise in fuel prices to push back against the Democratic promises to raise costs for oil and gas drilling on public lands.

“To ensure we have a stable and affordable supply of energy here in the United States, the Biden Administration should support the domestic production of oil and natural gas, ensure the continued production on federal land, work with the industry on sensible and smart methane regulations, and stop calling for higher taxes on the American oil and gas industry,” Anne Bradbury, chief executive of trade association American Exploration and Production Council, said in a statement.

Biden came into office promising to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and renewables such as solar and wind power. But the White House has made overtures to the oil and gas industry, such as White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy’s meeting with members of the American Petroleum Institute. And despite the pause in oil and gas lease sales, the Interior Department has outpaced the Trump administration in approving new permits to drill on public land.

Still, the industry is smarting over the administration’s call for OPEC to increase oil production, saying it sounded hypocritical given its stance on the auctions for new parcels of public land to drill. Industry officials also complain they have not received nearly the amount of attention they enjoyed under President Donald Trump or even President Barack Obama.

Amid the pandemic-related global supply chain problems, extreme weather events and China’s strong demand for oil and natural gas, administration officials have been leaning more frequently on the industry for advice, sources said.

A person at one oil company active in offshore drilling said the administration had reached out to them last month wanting specifically to know how to keep gasoline production on track after Hurricane Ida forced companies to shut in oil production in the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite the overtures, the federal government has few levers to pull to ward off higher oil prices, market analysts said. Companies have to rehire the truck drivers and other employees they let go when fuel demand cratered last year as the pandemic kept people at home.

Andrew Lipow, head of Houston-based oil market consulting firm Lipow Oil Associates, said the increase in pump prices is a direct result of oil companies finally heeding investors’ calls to slow production and tighten their spending. Investors had fled the sector in the years leading into the pandemic as companies racked up debt to produce an ever-increasing number of barrels.

“Years ago they drilled like crazy and made no money,” Lipow said. “This time around they need to show returns to inventors and they’re increasing their dividends” instead of sending more rigs to the oil fields.

President Joe Biden will embark on a three-leg trip to Europe starting at the end of October that will include a Vatican meeting with Pope Francis, the White House announced Thursday.

The president and first lady Jill Biden plan to travel to Rome in conjunction with the G-20 summit on Oct. 30-31. While there, Biden will also hold bilateral meetings with other world leaders, details of which the White House said would be made available closer to the event.

Prior to the G-20 summit, Biden, the second Catholic president in U.S. history, will visit the Vatican for an audience with Pope Francis. The confab will cover “working together on efforts grounded in respect for fundamental human dignity, including ending the COVID-19 pandemic, tackling the climate crisis, and caring for the poor,” according to the White House.

Francis has publicly embraced Covid-19 vaccinations at a time when some religious conservatives have raised moral qualms with the vaccines — primarily due to remote links to abortion-derived cells during the development process. Earlier this week, the archbishop of the U.S. military said Catholic service members could refuse the mandatory vaccination on religious grounds, highlighting the ongoing split within the church.

At the same time, the pope’s meeting with Biden, a devout churchgoer, comes amid an ongoing debate among Catholic leaders in the U.S. over whether to rebuke the president and other Catholic politicians for their support of abortion rights by denying them Communion. Last month, Francis declined to directly wade into the issue, but said that politics should stay separate from church practices and urged priests and ministers to “be pastors, and not go condemning.”

Following the trip to Italy, Biden will head to the United Kingdom to attend the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — shorthanded to COP26 — in Glasgow from Nov. 1-2.

It will mark Biden’s second major trip to Europe as president. Over the summer he traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to attend meetings of the G-7, NATO and a U.S.-EU summit.