Manchin May Sink Key Biden Nomination

By Yuval Rosenberg

Manchin Says He'll Oppose Biden's Budget
Nominee

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) said Friday that he will not support
President Biden’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget,
raising the risk that the nominee, Neera Tanden, will fail to win
the required 50 votes in the Senate. Without Manchin’s support in
an evenly divided Senate, Tanden would need at least one Republican
to approve her nomination.

Biden told CNN he was standing by his pick and will not
withdraw the nomination. “I think we're going to find the votes to
get her confirmed,” he said.

Manchin said his opposition to Tanden’s nomination was based on
her record of acerbic criticisms of his colleagues, frequently
delivered via Twitter.

“I have carefully reviewed Neera Tanden’s public statements and
tweets that were personally directed towards my colleagues on both
sides of the aisle from Senator Sanders to Senator McConnell and
others,” Manchin said in a
statement. “I believe her overtly partisan
statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the
important working relationship between members of Congress and the
next director of the Office of Management and Budget. For this
reason, I cannot support her nomination. As I have said before, we
must take meaningful steps to end the political division and
dysfunction that pervades our politics.”

Critics were quick to question Manchin’s decision, pointing to
his support for Trump nominees including former attorneys general
Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr and outspoken Trump loyalist Ric
Grenell as ambassador to Germany.

Why it matters: Manchin, the most
conservative Senate Democrat, is flexing his new power as a
crucial vote that Biden will need to advance his agenda through the
50-50 Senate. Tanden could become the first Biden nominee to
be rejected by the Senate, and her failure could hinder Biden’s
agenda given that the OMB job has wide influence.

“If Tanden’s nomination fails, that could further delay the
development of Biden’s fiscal 2022 federal budget proposal, which
is already behind schedule and which is the first step in the
funding process for the next fiscal year beginning Oct. 1,”

wrote Bloomberg’s Erik Wasson.

Next Step in Democrats’ Stimulus Sprint Comes Monday

The next phase of Democrats’ push to pass a $1.9 trillion Covid
relief package is set to start on Monday, when the House Budget
Committee is scheduled to mark up the legislation.

The
text of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was
released on Friday. The 591-page bill binds together submissions
from nine House committees into one massive reconciliation
package.

“Without this relief package, conditions will spiral
further out of control and families will suffer needlessly,” House
Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-KY) said in a statement
Friday. “Multiple variant strains of the novel coronavirus are now
infecting Americans across the United States, and our vaccine
rollout and efforts to contain the virus are in desperate need of
resources. We are in a race against time, and aggressive, bold
action is needed before our nation is permanently scarred by the
human and economic costs of inaction. We have the plan and the
fiscal space, we have the American people behind us, and now we
have the bill to get it done.”

What’s next: The package is likely to undergo some
changes after it passes from the Budget Committee to the Rules
Committee, its final stop before a floor vote.

“Rules is where the substantive changes will occur, including
the likely necessary step of bringing the combined package into
compliance with its overall $1.89 trillion limit under the fiscal
2021 budget resolution,” Roll Call’s Paul M. Krawzak explained
Thursday. “The nine committees have so far approved pieces the
Congressional Budget office has tallied up to $1.95 trillion.”

Krawzak notes that the total price tag could be brought back in
line with budget limits by eliminating some business tax breaks,
which the House sought to do in two aid bills last year, or by
scaling back the spending in the package, which could involve some
tricky tradeoffs. For example…

The House plan includes five months of enhanced unemployment
benefits, not six: The House package calls for extending
enhanced unemployment benefits of $400 a week until August 29, a
month earlier than President Biden had proposed.

That change, which reduces the overall cost of the legislation,
has drawn some pushback, with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR)
vowing las week to “fight like hell” to extend the
benefit through September. The left-leaning Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities said this week that the Democratic plan would
help millions and bolster the economy but noted that the current
unemployment benefits cutoff “is problematic” since the labor
market isn’t likely to be fully recovered the fall, but Congress is
scheduled to be on recess in August. “The August timing makes a
benefit lapse, which would hurt families and disrupt states’
ability to administer jobless programs, likelier,” CBPP said in its

report.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said
this week that the Democratic package was “losing focus” on the
pandemic and diverting funds to less urgent priorities unrelated to
the Covid crisis. “The goal of COVID relief is to end the pandemic,
protect incomes, and support the economic recovery. The House bill
not only spends far more than is needed to achieve these goals, but
also puts too many of these plentiful dollars in the wrong places,”
CRFB President Maya MacGuineas said in a
statement this week. “More than 15 percent of the
package – about $300 billion – is spent on long-standing policy
priorities that are not directly related to the current
crisis.”

In particular, the group called out a bailout of union
pensions included in the legislation, saying that rescue was
included at the expense of additional enhanced unemployment
benefits. "That multiemployer pension bailout in the bill cost
about $56 billion, which would be enough to extend unemployment
benefits to the end of September, and possibly a bit further," Marc
Goldwein, head of policy at the CRFB, told
Insider.

6 Million Covid Vaccine Doses Delayed by Winter Storms, White
House Says

Hazardous winter storms across much of the country have
delayed delivery of 6 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines, the White
House said Friday. Andy Slavitt, White House senior advisor for
Covid response, told reporters that the doses represent three days’
worth of shipments. “The vaccines are sitting safe and sound in our
factories and hubs,” he said, adding that the administration
expects it will catch up as the weather improves over the next
week. Slavitt noted that many states have been able to compensate
for the delays by using existing inventory. The administration is
asking vaccination sites to extend their hours over the coming week
to help make up for the delays.

Biden to Commit $4 Billion to Global Covid Vaccine Fund

President Biden announced Friday that the U.S. will soon release
$2 billion in initial funding to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a
private-public partnership that combats disease in low-income
countries.

Appropriated by Congress in the 2021 fiscal year spending
package, the funds will be used to provide access to Covid-19
vaccines through the organization’s Covax Facility.

Although the Trump administration refused to participate in the
international effort, lawmakers have committed a total of $4
billion to the program, which aims to provide equitable access to
Covid vaccines throughout the world. The remaining $2 billion will
be released by the Biden administration over the next two years as
other donors fulfill their pledges to the organization.

Gavi was founded in 2000 as the Global Alliance for
Vaccines and Immunization, with support from the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation. Read more about the vaccine effort at the
Gavi
website.

The True Number of Unemployed in the US

There are officially 10.1 million unemployed people in the U.S.
right now, according to the Labor Department’s latest monthly jobs
report, but some economists think the true number is considerably
higher than that.

As The Washington Post’s Heather Long
highlights Friday, about 18.3 million people are
currently receiving some kind of unemployment assistance, according
to the weekly jobs report, with that number hovering near 20
million for months.

What explains the enormous gap between the two data points?
Understaffed and poorly equipped state unemployment offices are a
big part of the story, Long says. Most states have been overwhelmed
by the surge in jobless filings since the pandemic began, and some
have processed unemployment claims in irregular batches, severely
distorting the weekly reports with data that stretches back weeks
or even months. As Long puts it, one person’s claims for 20 weeks
of unemployment can look like 20 people in one week when claims are
processed all at once.

Fraud is another factor, with the temporary Pandemic
Unemployment Assistance program coming under special scrutiny.
Congress created the PUA last year to help workers who don’t
usually qualify for unemployment aid, including the self-employed
and gig workers. But the program has been marred by fraud, and the
resulting investigations have sent the weekly numbers bouncing all
over the map. Ohio, for example, reported 10,156 new PUA claims two
weeks ago and then 232,016 last week, with the variation probably
driven by reporting issues rather than enormous swings in
real-world joblessness.

A third factor, Long says, is the fact that some people getting
unemployment aid have jobs, though they’re part-time.

Alternative estimates: Some economists have created their
own estimates to get closer to the true number of unemployed. Fed
Chair Jay Powell said last week that he thinks the unemployment
rate is close to 10%, which would put the number of jobless at
about 16 million. Former Obama administration economist Jason
Furman estimates that there are about 13.3 million unemployed,
while former CBO chief Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who led President
George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, thinks the 10
million figure is about right, given the decline in the
employment-to-population ratio in the wake of the pandemic.

Heidi Shierholz, a former Labor Department economist now with
the liberal Economic Policy Institute, offers a much higher
estimate of nearly 19 million unemployed, derived from the number
of officially unemployed (10.1 million), those who dropped out of
the labor force (5.3 million), and those who are misclassified or
non-responsive to surveys (3.5 million). Add the people who have
seen cuts to their income (6.8 million), and the total of those
negatively affected economically by pandemic comes to 25.5
million.

The bottom line: There’s a good chance
that the official unemployment numbers are missing a considerable
number of people, with the shortfall potentially running into the
millions. But the speed and severity of the Covid-19 pandemic have
made that number harder to calculate, and without a comprehensive,
national, real-time reporting system, policymakers will have to
muddle through with a range of estimates and a higher than usual
degree of uncertainty.

Send your feedback to yrosenberg@thefiscaltimes.com.
Follow us on Twitter:
@yuvalrosenberg,
@mdrainey and
@TheFiscalTimes. And please tell your
friends they can
sign up here for their own copy of this
newsletter.

News

Views and Analysis