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      in US Politics

      US news giants put more women in the White House

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      US media organisations are taking steps to mirror Joe Biden’s gender-balanced cabinet appointments, with at least six major news networks assigning women to lead White House coverage.Since Biden’s inauguration last week, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, the public television station PBS and the Washington Post have assigned chief reporting duties to women.The list includes women of colour, including PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor and NBC’s Kristen Welker, who last October became the first black woman to moderate a general-election presidential debate in almost 30 years, and kept it on track in a fashion that eluded male debate moderators.“It is clear that diversity in all forms including in gender and race is necessary to tell the stories of our generation in the most accurate and fair way,” Alcindor told CNN.US political commentator Keli Goff told The Observer: “If the events of the last year have shown us anything‎, it’s that it is essential to have institutions of power that reflect our nation’s diversity, and for newsrooms that cover those institutions to reflect our nation’s diversity as well.” “The increased diversity of the White House press corps is an important step forward for journalism and for ensuring our leaders are held accountable when it comes to blind spots they may have,” Goff added.The selections mark a turnaround for the White House press corps, which has traditionally been dominated by men.Rare exceptions include the trailblazing Helen Thomas, who served as White House correspondent for UPI and AP over 10 administrations before retiring aged 89 in 2010.The makeup of the press corps reflects the new administration. Biden’s communications team is fully staffed by women, including his press secretary, Jen Psaki, who has promised consistent weekday briefings.For the media, assigning more women to cover the White House comes at a pivotal moment. A report last week from the communications firm Edelman described a “raging infodemic” that has driven trust in all news sources to record lows.The study found that trust in traditional media stands at just 53%, an eight percentage point drop globally since 2019. Trust in social media stands at 35%, a drop from 43% over the same period.“Without a trusted leadership source to look to, people don’t know where or who to get reliable information from,” the report commented.At least in the cramped White House briefing room, the burden of correcting the decline in trust now falls largely on the shoulders of women.“A generation ago, being the only woman was perhaps a blessing – I really stood out from the crowd,” Ann Compton, a former ABC News White House correspondent, told CNN.“The day will come – should come – when it is not news that the majority in the public eye in any profession is female,” Compton added. More

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      in Elections

      Biden urged to commute sentences of all 49 federal death row prisoners

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      Led by two prominent African American congresswomen, 35 Democrats have urged Joe Biden to commute the sentences of all 49 federal prisoners left on death row – days after the Trump administration finished its rush to kill 13 such prisoners.Early last Saturday Dustin Higgs, 48, became the last of those prisoners to be killed, after Trump lifted a long-standing moratorium on federal executions. Biden entered the White House on Wednesday.According to the Death Penalty Information Center, of the 49 people still on federal death row, 21 are white, 20 are black, seven are Latino and one is Asian.Among those prisoners is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of planting pressure-cooker bombs on the route of the Boston Marathon in April 2013, killing three and injuring 264. His death sentence was overturned last year, a decision that is now before the supreme court.In a letter sent to Biden on Friday, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Cori Bush of Missouri led lawmakers in calling on Biden “to take swift, decisive action”.“Commuting the death sentences of those on death row and ensuring that each person is provided with an adequate and unique re-sentencing process is a crucial first step in remedying this grave injustice,” they said.The representatives said they looked forward to the new administration enacting “just and restorative policies that will meaningfully transform our criminal legal system for the better”.Addressing Biden, they wrote: “By exercising your clemency power, you can ensure that there would be no one left on death row to kill.”Such a gesture, they said, would be “an unprecedented – but necessary – action to reverse systemic injustices and restore America’s moral standing.”Pressley has been consistently outspoken in her opposition to capital punishment. In July 2019, soon after Trump attorney general Bill Barr announced the lifting of a 16-year moratorium on federal executions, the Massachusetts Democrat proposed legislation to “prohibit the imposition of the death penalty for any violation of federal law, and for other purposes”.“The death penalty has no place in a just society,” Pressley said then.But by the time Trump left office, he had overseen the most executions by a US president in more than a century.Among those supporting the new appeal is Kelley Henry, a supervising assistant federal public defender based in Nashville and an attorney for Lisa Montgomery, who on 12 January became the first woman killed by the US government in nearly 70 years.“Congress is right,” Kelley told CNN on Friday. “President Biden must go further than just not carrying out executions and should immediately commute all federal death sentences.“When the supreme court, without any explanation, vacates lower court stays to allow the execution of a woman whose mental illness leaves her with no understanding of why she is being executed, we know the federal death penalty system is broken beyond repair.”New White House press secretary Jen Psaki would not be drawn on specific plans to address the federal death penalty.“The president, as you know, has stated his opposition to the death penalty in the past,” Psaki said. “That remains his view. I don’t have anything more for you in terms of future actions or mechanisms, though.”Karen Bass of California, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York were among other well-known names to sign the letter to the new president.Appealing to Biden in December, Pressley said: “With a stroke of a pen, you can stop all federal executions.” More

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      in Elections

      Joe Biden's inner circle: meet the new president's close-knit team

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      Many of Biden’s new team have worked together before, and get on well – in sharp contrast to Trump’s ‘team of rivals’At the core of the administration Joe Biden is building is a trusted circle of officials, who are bound together by many years of working together in a close-knit team in the Obama administration, by a shared faith, or, in some cases, by a tie with Biden’s late son, Beau.It is the very opposite approach to the one taken by Donald Trump, who assembled a sharp-elbowed “team of rivals” – powerful men from different walks of life, who he had never met but thought looked the part. Biden treasures familiarity and nice-guy collegiality, and warned new appointees on Wednesday that if they don’t treat each other with respect, “I will fire you on the spot.” Continue reading… More

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      The inauguration was full of exquisite moments: but what was the best bit? | Emma Brockes

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      Apart from Joe Biden we had Kamala, Lady Gaga, Bernie’s mittens – and Trump suddenly seeming an irrelevanceIt started on Tuesday with nerves in the playground: why weren’t they holding it indoors? No one with sense, we agreed, had an appetite for spectacle, and our systems couldn’t take any more. Donald Trump was going, good riddance, but let’s not tempt fate; besides, on Wednesday morning we all had things to do. After a year of rolling crises, even New Yorkers were feeling meek and defeated. Let’s get this thing over with and try to move on.The most surprising thing about the inauguration this week – apart from the reminder that, when it comes to its national ceremonies, America is if anything even more camp than Britain – was the sheer, irrepressible joy of it. From the first minute to the last there was no containing this thing and nothing – not pragmatism, superstition, trauma fatigue or work – would get in the way of the feeling. “Bye bye Trump, that dummy,” said one of my daughters on Wednesday morning. And so it began. Continue reading… More

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      Biden and Trudeau agree to cooperate on Covid and climate change

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      In phone call, US and Canadian leaders discuss collaboration on vaccines and plan to meet next monthCanada’s Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden plan to meet next month, the prime minister’s office said, following a call between the two leaders in which they agreed to join forces to combat coronavirus in North America.The White House said in a statement that the two leaders highlighted the “strategic importance of the US-Canada relationship” and discussed cooperation on a wide-ranging agenda including combating the Covid-19 pandemic and addressing the climate crisis. Continue reading… More

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      in US Politics

      We shouldn’t forget which Australian commentators carried water for Trump | Jason Wilson

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      Now that Donald Trump has gone, what will his ride-or-die supporters in Australian media do? How will they “own the libs” when the libs have their hand at the tiller? Whose ideas will they crib as US conservatism falls deeper into a post-Trump fugue?
      The recent output of high-profile Australian Trumpists suggests that the solution will be to gradually back away from Trump himself, even as they double down on aspects of the Trumpist movement.
      That’s necessary because, even for the diehards and the know-nothings, since the 6th of January, Trump the man has revealed himself to be a spectacularly toxic liability.
      He departed, according to Gallup’s numbers, as the least popular US president in the history of opinion polling: he had the lowest average approval rating over the life of his presidency and, unlike every other president since Roosevelt, he never enjoyed majority approval.
      Most of his lame duck period was spent trying to overturn the election he lost, culminating in his incitement of a mob that stormed the Capitol building in DC. More than 100 people are facing federal charges, with prosecutors alleging some intended “to capture and assassinate elected officials”.
      Canny as ever, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell conceded, a day before Trump left the White House, that that crowd was “fed lies” and “provoked” by Trump.
      Trump spent the balance of his time since the election indulging in, on the one hand, an execution spree in federal prisons and, on the other, handing out pardons to cronies or mercenaries who wantonly murdered Iraqi citizens.
      It seems likely that state attorneys general and federal prosecutors alike will be jostling each other to serve him subpoenas and summonses.
      And a defanged, de-platformed Trump can’t even prosecute his case in the court of public opinion.
      So what’s a branch office culture warrior to do? Defending Trump directly would not only telegraph their moral bankruptcy but demand the kind of ingenuity that subsidised rightwing media neither demands nor rewards. If defending Trump is beyond the powers of a McConnell, it’s surely beyond the likes of a Sky News host?
      Some Australian conservatives simply sprinted from the blast area following the Capitol assault. Former US ambassador and treasurer Joe Hockey, who golfed with Trump through the Muslim ban, Charlottesville, the separation of children from parents, and the Covid-19 disaster, did well enough in his appointed role to earn a reputation as a “Trump whisperer”. But the riot, apparently, was too much to stomach. Hockey was, now, “appalled at the behaviour and incitement” of Trump, his family and his camp followers.
      Hockey followed up with an op-ed in the Nine newspapers which opined that “Biden’s calm but firm response to the attack on the Capitol is the leadership that most Americans want.”
      Perhaps the Capitol violence brought about an authentic change of heart for Hockey. Or perhaps he’s concerned about who will now be buttering his bread. His DC lobbying firm, Bondi Partners – staffed with cherry-picked Australian diplomatic talent – can no longer pitch the possibility of Hockey buttonholing Trump on the links.
      In the less rarefied air of Holt Street, Greg Sheridan also rapidly turned on Trump. Throughout last year’s election campaign, Sheridan held out the prospect of a Trump victory, claiming on 1 November that the “genuine authoritarian threat” came from Biden supporters, since his campaign was backed with the threat of “a plague of violent riots all through the big cities from people who won’t accept democracy if it yields Trump.”
      As late as 14 November, Sheridan was arguing that Trump offered a series of important lessons to conservatives around the world, including that “nationalism and patriotism are powerful forces that galvanise voters in a positive direction”.
      When nationalism and patriotism galvanised voters in the direction of sacking a federal building in order to overturn the election result, Sheridan dropped them like so many hot yams. Suddenly, the deplorables he had previously celebrated as “Trump’s liberty-loving base” were depicted as “clowns, thugs and street-fighting fascists”.
      For those who over-indexed on the president and his movement, and who cannot cut him loose quite so cleanly, it makes some sense to imagine the possibility of Trumpism without Trump. Enter James Morrow, whose work is difficult to talk about without courting paradox: its signature tone can only be described as low-energy histrionics.
      Morrow has shamelessly barracked for Trump both on Sky News and in the Daily Telegraph, and like all such rightwing Trumpists in Australia, he has done so safe in the knowledge that Trump’s failures, such as his catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic, will never have any effect on him.
      As the quick spread of coronavirus among White House staff and cronies in October amply showed, those who spruiked for Trump in the United States at least had skin in the game.
      A week ago, in a column addressing the fallout from the Capitol riots, Morrow wrote that “while it is a long bow to say Trump incited the incident (he in fact tried to calm protesters down), it is also true that his conduct since the election will forever mar his achievements from Middle East peace to wage growth.”
      This dead-ender nonsense might be worth a chuckle if it didn’t erase the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands, and the way that Trump and his enablers bequeathed so many domestic and foreign policy nightmares to Biden.
      In the Middle East, Trump simply gave carte blanche to longstanding US clients like Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He approved – and even boasted of – a series of massive arms deal with the kingdom, raking in another half a billion dollars’ worth of blood money in the dying days of his administration.
      Saudi Arabia will use some of these weapons in their ongoing war on their neighbours in Yemen, where 13 million people are at imminent risk of starvation.
      In another parting blow on 10 January, Mike Pompeo declared the kingdom’s enemies, the Houthis, a terrorist group, which will make it even harder to provide them with aid. The Financial Times editorial board – hardly a den of communists – described this as “a cynical effort to scupper Mr Biden’s ability to ease Middle East crises and reset US policy”.
      And whatever wage growth there may have been has been wiped out by the cratering of employment, in an economy whose destruction was hastened by Trump’s fecklessness and lies (remember when he told people to inject bleach?)
      On Thursday Morrow offered a piece of whataboutism that laid much responsibility for what Biden calls America’s “uncivil war” not on conservative media outlets and United States senators who encourage the baseless belief that the November election was stolen, but on “radical campus politics … violent demonstrations in American cities that were often dismissed as ‘mostly peaceful protests’ [and] social media platforms doing everything they can to silence conservative voices”.
      Having read that, it was diverting to see Morrow in the same article criticising the prose style of Biden’s inauguration speech.
      It’s embarrassing, of course, that this kind of commentary occupies such a prominent place in Australia’s national political discussion. But it’s just one example of the kind of thing that would have no home, and no constituency, without the active subsidy of News Corporation. That company’s role, over decades, in bringing us the disaster of Trumpism cannot be overstated.
      From my place in the US, which I have not been able to safely leave for a year due to an unchecked pandemic, I can say unambiguously that the Trump administration was incompetent, racist and corrupt from the moment it was sworn in, as many predicted it would be. We shouldn’t forget which Australian commentators carried water for a disastrous presidency until the second that it became inconvenient to be seen to do so.
      We shouldn’t let them forget, either. More

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      in World Politics

      The Science of Rebuilding Trust

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      During his inauguration, President Joe Biden appealed to us, American citizens, repeatedly and emphatically, to defend unity and truth against corrosion from power and profit. Fortunately, the bedrock tensions between unity, truth, power and profit have newly-discovered mathematical definitions, so their formerly mysterious interactions can now be quantified, predicted and addressed. So in strictly (deeply) scientific terms, Biden described our core problem exactly right.

      Can We Build Social Trust in an Online World?

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      I applaud and validate President Biden’s distillation of the problem of finding and keeping the truth, and of trusting it together. Human trust is based on high-speed neuromechanical interaction between living creatures. Other kinds of trust not based on that are fake to some degree. Lies created for money and power damage trust most of all.

      A Moment of Silence

      As Biden showed in his first act in office, the first step toward rebuilding is a moment of silence. Avoiding words, slowing down, taking time, breathing, acknowledging common grievances and recognizing a common purpose are not just human needs, but necessary algorithmic steps as well. Those are essential to setting up our common strategy and gathering the starting data that we need to make things right.

      The next step, as Biden also said, is to recognize corrupting forces such as money and power — and I would also add recognition. The third step, as I propose below, is to counter those three forces explicitly in our quest for public truth, to do the exact opposite of what money, power and careerism do, and to counter and reverse every information-processing step at which money, power and recognition might get a hold.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Instead of using one panel of famous, well-funded experts deliberating a few hours in public, employ a dozen groups of anonymous lone geniuses, each group working separately in secret for months on the same common question. Have them release their reports simultaneously in multiple media. That way, the unplanned overlap shows most of what matters and a path to resolving the rest — an idea so crazy it just might work.

      Since I’m describing how to restore democracy algorithmically, I might as well provide an example of legislation in the algorithmic language too. To convey data-processing ideas clearly, and thereby to avoid wasting time and money building a system that won’t work, technologists display our proposals using oversimplified examples that software architects like myself call “reference implementations” and which narrative architects like my partner call “tutor texts.”

      These examples are not meant to actually work, but to unambiguously show off crucial principles. In the spirit of reference implementations, I present the following legislative proposal, written to get to the truth about one particular subject but easily rewritten to find the truth about other subjects such as global warming or fake news: The Defend the Growing Human Nervous System With Information Sciences Act.

      The Defend Act

      Over centuries, humankind has defended its children against physical extremes, dangerous chemicals and infectious organisms by resolute, rational application of the laws of nature via technology and medical science. Now is the time to use those same tools to defend our children’s growing nervous systems against the informational damage that presently undermines their trust in themselves, their families and their communities. Therefore, we here apply information science in order to understand how man-made communication helps and hurts the humans whom God made.

      The human race has discovered elemental universal laws governing processes from combustion to gravitation and from them created great and terrible technologies from fire and weapons to electricity grids and thermonuclear reactions. But no laws are more elemental than the laws of data and mathematics, and no technologies more universal and fast-growing than the mathematically-grounded technologies of information capture, processing and dissemination. Information science is changing the world we live in and, therefore, changing us as living, breathing human beings. How?

      The human race has dealt with challenges from its own technologies before. Slash-and-burn tactics eroded farmland; lead pipes poisoned water; city wells spread cholera; radioactivity caused cancer; refrigerants depleted ozone. And we have dealt with epidemics that propagated in weird and novel ways — both communicable diseases spread by touch, by body fluids, by insects, by behaviors, by drinking water, by food, and debilitating diseases of chemical imbalance, genetic dysregulation, immune collapse and misfolded proteins. Our science has both created and solved monumental problems.

      But just as no technology is more powerful than the information sciences, when deployed against an immature, growing, still-learning human nervous system, no toxin is more insidious than extractive or exploitive artificial information.

      The Defend the Growing Human Nervous System With Information Sciences Act aims to understand first and foremost the depth and texture of the threat to growing human nervous systems in order to communicate the problem to the public at large (not to solve the problem yet). This act’s approach is based on five premises about the newly-discovered sciences of information.

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      First of all, there is an urgent global mental-health crisis tightly correlated over decades with consuming unnatural sensory inputs (such as from TV screens) and interacting in unnatural ways (such as using wireless devices). These technologies seem to undermine trust in one’s own senses and in one’s connections to others, with the youngest brains bearing the greatest hurt.

      Second, computer science understands information flowing in the real world. Numerical simulations faithfully replicate the laws of physics — of combustion, explosions, weather and gravitation — inside computers, thereby confirming we understand how nature works. Autonomous vehicles such as ocean gliders, autonomous drones, self-driving cars and walking robots, select and process signals from the outside to make trustworthy models, in order to move through the world. This neutral, technological understanding might illuminate the information flows that mature humans also use to do those same things and which growing humans use to learn how to do them.

      Third, the science of epidemiology understands the information flows of medical research. Research has discovered and countered countless dangerous chemical and biological influences through concepts like clinical trials, randomization, viral spread, dose-response curves and false positive/negative risks. These potent yet neutral medical lenses might identify the most damaging aspects of artificial sensory interactions, in preparation for countering them in the same way they have already done for lead, tar, nicotine, sugar, endocrine disruptors and so on. The specific approach will extend the existing understanding of micro-toxins and micro-injuries to include the new micro-deceptions and micro-behavioral manipulations that undermine trust.

      Fourth, the mathematics of management and communication understands the information flows of businesses. The economic spreadsheets and prediction models that presently micromanage business and market decisions worldwide can, when provided with these new metrics of human health and damage, calculate two new things. First, the most cost-effective ways to prevent and reduce damage. Second, such spreadsheets can quantify the degree to which well-accepted and legal practices of monetized influence — advertising, branding, lobbying, incentivizing, media campaigns and even threats — potentially make the information they touch untrustworthy and thereby undermine human trust.

      America has risen to great challenges before. At its inception, even before Alexis De Tocqueville praised the American communitarian can-do spirit, this country gathered its most brilliant thinkers in a Constitutional Convention. In war, it gathered them to invent and create a monster weapon. In peace, it gathered them to land on the Moon. Over time, Americans have understood and made inroads against lead poisoning, ozone destruction, polluted water, smog, acid rain, nicotine and trans-fats. Now, we need to assemble our clearest thinkers to combat the deepest damage of all: the damage to how we talk and think.

      Finally, we humans are spiritual and soulful beings. Our experiences and affections could never be captured in data or equations, whether of calorie consumption, body temperature, chemical balance or information flow. But just as we use such equations to defend our bodies against hunger, hypothermia or vitamin deficiency, we might also use them to defend against confusion, mistrust and loneliness, without in the process finding our own real lives replaced or eclipsed. In fact, if the human nervous system and soul are indeed damaged when mathematically-synthesized inputs replace real ones, then they will be freed from that unreality and that damage only when we understand which inputs help and hurt us most.

      Informational Threat

      The Defend Act tasks its teams to treat the human nervous system as an information-processing system with the same quantitative, scientific neutrality as medicine already treats us as heat-generating, oxygen-consuming, blood-pumping, self-cleaning systems. Specifically, teams are to examine human informational processing in the same computational terms used for self-driving vehicles that are also self-training and to examine our informational environments, whether man-made or God-made, in the same terms used for the “training data” consumed by such artificial foraging machines.

      An informational threat such as the present one must be met in new ways. In particular, the current threat differs from historic ones by undermining communication itself, making unbiased discussion of the problem nearly impossible in public or in subsidized scientific discourse. Thus, the first concern of the Defend Act is to insulate the process of scientific discovery from the institutional, traditional and commercial pressures that might otherwise contaminate its answers. Thus, the act aims to maximize scientific reliability and minimize commercial, traditional and political interference as follows.

      The investigation will proceed not by a single dream team of famous, respected and politically-vetted experts but by 10 separate teams of anonymous polymaths, living and working together in undisclosed locations, assembled from international scientists under international auspices; for example, the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will collaborate with the World Health Organization.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Each team will be tasked with producing its best version of the long-term scientific truth, that is of the same truth each other team ought to also obtain based on accepted universal principles. Teams pursuing actual scientific coherence thus ought to converge in their answers. Any team tempted to replace the law of nature with incentivized convenience would then find its results laughably out of step with the common, coherent consensus reported by the other teams.

      Choosing individual team members for intellectual flexibility and independence, rather than for fame or institutional influence, will ensure they can grasp the scope of the problem, articulate it fearlessly and transmit in their results no latent bias toward their home colleagues, institution, technology or discipline.

      Each team will contain at least two experts from each of the three information-science fields, each able to approximately understand the technical language of the others and thus collectively to understand all aspects of human informational functionality and dysfunctionality. To ensure the conclusions apply to humans everywhere, at least one-third of each team will consider themselves culturally non-American.

      Each team will operate according to the best practices of deliberative decision-making, such as those used by “deliberative democracy”: live nearby, meet in person a few hours a day over months in a quiet place and enjoy access to whatever experts and sources of information they choose to use. Their budget (about $4 million per team) will be sufficient for each to produce its report in one year, through a variety of public-facing communications media: written reports, slide decks, video recordings, private meetings and public speeches. Between the multiple team members, multiple teams and multiple media, it will be difficult for entrenched powers to downplay inconvenient truths.

      Released simultaneously, all public reports will cover four topics with a broad brush:

      1. Summarizing the informational distractions and damage one would expect in advance, based only on the mathematical principles of autonomous navigation mentioned above, including not only sensory distractions but also the cognitive load of attending to interruptions and following rules, including rules intended to improve the situation.

      2. Summarizing, as meta-studies, the general (and generally true) conclusions of scientifically reputable experimental studies and separately the general (and generally misleading) conclusions of incentivized studies.

      3. Providing guideline formulae of damage and therapy, based on straightforward technical metrics of each specific information source such as timing delay, timing uncertainty, statistical pattern, information format, etc., with which to predict the nature, timescale, duration and severity of informational damage or recuperation from it.

      4. Providing guidelines for dissemination, discussion and regulatory approaches most likely not to be undermined by pressures toward the status quo.

      Within two years of passing this act, for under $100 million dollars, the world will understand far better the human stakes of artificial input, and the best means for making our children safe from it again.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden executive orders target federal minimum wage and food insecurity

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      Joe Biden on Friday will sign a pair of executive orders aimed at providing immediate relief to millions of American families grappling with the economic toll of the Covid-19 pandemic and expanding safety protections for federal workers.Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterPressing ahead with an ambitious set of executive actions, the new administration is seeking to marshal an “all-of-government” effort to combat hunger as tens of millions of Americans face food insecurity amid historically high unemployment rates.“The American people can’t afford to wait,” said Brian Deese, the national economic council director, on a call with reporters. “So many are hanging by a thread.”The measures, he said, were a “critical lifeline” for American families, but were “not a substitute” for the nearly $2tn relief package Biden has called on Congress to pass.Biden will direct the Department of Agriculture increase a Covid-19 food program that helps families with children who would normally receive free or reduced-price meals at school, as well as expand the emergency increases approved by Congress to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for low-income Americans.He will also ask the Department of Treasury to update its process for delivering stimulus checks to millions of eligible Americans who reported issues or delays with the first rounds payments. And Biden will the Department of Labor to make clear that out-of-work Americans who refuse employment that could jeopardize their health would still qualify for unemployment benefits. Until now, workers who refused offers to return to their jobs out of concern for their safety no longer qualified for unemployment aid.The second order is aimed at expanding protections for federal workers by restoring collective bargaining powers and lay the groundwork for the federal government to implement a $15 federal minimum wage. As a first step, Biden will direct federal agencies to conduct a review of federal workers earning less than $15 an hour and develop recommendations for raising their wages.The latest executive actions come one day after a labor department report showed that unemployment claims remained at historically high levels, with 900,000 Americans filing for unemployment benefits last week. The figures reflected the magnitude of the economic challenges Biden inherited, amid a resurgence of the coronavirus this winter.Friday’s actions are part of a blitz of executive orders and directives Biden has taken since assuming the presidency.Hours after his inauguration, Biden signed an executive order extending a federal pause on evictions through the end of March, a move that will shield millions of Americans struggling to pay rent amid the pandemic. He also directed federal agencies to extend their moratorium on foreclosures of federally guaranteed mortgages and asked the education department to prolong its freeze on federal student loan payments through the end of September.On Thursday, he unveiled a “full-scale wartime” national Covid-19 strategy aimed at growing the production of vaccines, creating guidelines to reopen schools and businesses and imposing new requirements on mask-wearing.Biden has long argued that economic recovery is tied to combatting the coronavirus, a starkly different approach to his predecessor who urged states to lift restrictions even as infections rose.The centerpiece of Biden’s plan to address fallout from the pandemic is a $1.9tn relief package called the American Rescue Plan, which includes $1,400 direct payments to Americans, more generous unemployment benefits and billions of dollars for a national vaccination program.Already Republicans are objecting to the cost of the legislation, raising doubts about whether Biden will be able to attract bipartisan support as he had hoped. Several Republicans have questioned the need for an additional relief package weeks after they passed a $900bn coronavirus relief bill.Stressing that urgent action was needed, Deese declined to say how long the White House planned to court Republican support before potentially moving to a process that would allow Democrats to move the legislation forward without them.His team plans to hold a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators on Sunday to make the case for another round of stimulus, without which he said the nation’s economy would plummet further into “a very serious economic hole”.“When you’re at a moment that is as precarious as the one we find ourselves in,” he said at a White House press briefing on Friday, “the risk of doing too little the risk of undershooting far outweighs the risk of doing too much.” More