Biden Ends the Covid-19 National Emergency

Biden before he departed for Ireland
Reuters
By Yuval Rosenberg

Happy Tuesday! President Biden arrived in Belfast today,
the first stop on a four-day trip to mark the 25th anniversary of
the Good Friday Agreement, the peace deal that helped end years of
violence and bloodshed in Northern Ireland. Biden will also visit
his ancestral homeland, the Republic of Ireland.

Here’s what else we’re watching while waiting for the
NBA’s play-in tournament to start.

Biden Officially Ends the Covid-19 National Emergency

The Covid-19 pandemic is no longer a national emergency.
President Joe Biden on Monday made that official, signing a
resolution to terminate the emergency status that had been in place
since March 2020.

Biden had planned to end the emergency next month, but House
Republicans in February passed a measure to end it sooner. The
White House opposed the GOP effort to more quickly end both the
Covid-19 emergency and a related public health emergency, but the
president subsequently made clear he would not veto the Republican
measure. The Senate then passed the bill in a bipartisan 68-23
vote.

The resolution Biden signed on Monday, H.J. Res. 7, only ends
the pandemic emergency. The emergency declaration first enacted
under President Donald Trump allowed the government to take a broad
range of actions to respond to the virus and the economic
challenges it presented. Among the effects of the emergency ending,
according to Zeke Miller of the
Associated Press: “The Department of Housing and
Urban Development’s COVID-19 mortgage forbearance program is set to
end at the end of May, and the Department of Veterans Affairs is
now returning to a requirement for in-home visits to determine
eligibility for caregiver assistance.”

The public health emergency, and the controversial Title 42
border policy it enables, will remain in effect until May 11. That
emergency allowed to government to provide Covid-19 tests,
treatments and vaccines at no cost and to expand other
benefits.

The end of the pandemic emergency came without much fanfare from
the Biden administration. The White House on Monday issued a
two-line statement simply stating that Biden had signed the
resolution into law — “almost aggressively anodyne,” The Washington
Post’s
Philip Bump called it.

CNN’s Nikki Carvajal
notes that a White House official downplayed the
impact of the signing, saying that the end of the emergency “does
not impact our ability to wind down authorities in an orderly
way.”

Why it matters: The pandemic may officially be over but
people are still dying from the virus, of couorse. “Despite Biden’s
signature on H.J. Res. 7, of course, the coronavirus is still doing
damage,” Bump notes. “While the variant of the virus that’s most
prevalent at this point is proving to be less deadly than prior
iterations,
more than 1,700 people died from the virus in the
past week alone.”

Quote of the Day

“We should be exploring every possibility to get our fellow
Americans back into the labor force, including strengthening work
requirements across all government programs.”

− Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO), chairman of the House
Ways and Means Committee, in a
Washington Post article detailing a new Republican
push to impose work requirements on a range of federal programs,
likely including Medicaid and food stamps.

“Many Republicans have said that federal aid programs offer a
way for policymakers to boost U.S. workforce participation while
saving Washington money — a stance that infuriates Democrats, aid
workers and others, who say such changes could harm vulnerable
families still reeling since the coronavirus pandemic,” the Post’s
Tony Romm and Rachel Roubein write. “The debate in some ways
resembles the Republican-led campaign against so-called welfare
queens in the 1990s, when a politically resurgent GOP — then under
the leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrich — secured a dramatic
restructuring of the government’s social safety net. The resulting
overhaul, enacted by President Bill Clinton, slashed cash benefits
for millions of Americans in ways that GOP leaders now cite as a
model.”

Numbers of the Day

$5 billion: The Biden administration is starting a
program dubbed “Project Next Gen” that will spend more than $5
billion to speed development of new coronavirus vaccines and
treatments, The Washington Post’s Dan Diamond
reported Monday. The program is a successor to the
Trump-era “Operation Warp Speed” that led to the rapid development
of Covid-19 vaccines.

Much like that effort, Project Next Gen reportedly will also
have the government partner with private-sector companies, this
time with the goal of developing vaccines that are more effective
against a broader range of coronaviruses and variants. The money
for the program was freed up after the Department of Health and
Human Services, at the direction of the White House, shifted funds
intended for coronavirus testing and other priorities, Diamond
says.

2.8%: The International Monetary Fund lowered its global
growth forecast for 2023 to 2.8%, down from the 2.9% projected in
January and 3.4% growth in 2022. In its latest
World Economic Outlook, the IMF warned of an
uncertain outlook, with stubborn inflation and concerns about the
financial sector lowering the chances of avoiding a sharper
downturn.

“Risks to the outlook are heavily skewed to the downside, with
the chances of a hard landing having risen sharply,” the new report
says. It adds: “Advanced economies are expected to see an
especially pronounced growth slowdown, from 2.7 percent in 2022 to
1.3 percent in 2023. In a plausible alternative scenario with
further financial sector stress, global growth declines to about
2.5 percent in 2023 with advanced economy growth falling below 1
percent.”

Still, the report raised its forecast for U.S. growth this year
to 1.6%, up two-tenths of a percentage point from January and
six-tenths from October 2022.

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