Daily Political Briefing
Aug. 9, 2021Updated
Aug. 9, 2021, 11:56 p.m. ET
Aug. 9, 2021, 11:56 p.m. ET
Under pressure from the families of people who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, the Biden administration said on Monday that it intended to disclose some long-classified documents that the families think may describe links between Saudi Arabia’s government and the hijackers.
The Justice Department said in a court filing that the F.B.I. “recently” closed a portion of its investigation into the terrorist attacks and was beginning a review of documents that it had previously said must remain secret with an eye toward disclosing more of them.
The papers were filed in a long-running lawsuit the victims’ families have brought against Saudi Arabia. In its letter to two federal judges in Manhattan overseeing the case, the Justice Department said that the F.B.I. would review its previous decisions on the case “to identify additional information appropriate for disclosure” and would “disclose such information on a rolling basis as expeditiously as possible.”
The letter provided no further details.
Last week, a group representing more than 1,600 people directly affected by the attacks said President Biden should not participate in memorial events for the 20th anniversary of the attacks next month unless he fulfilled a campaign promise to review the documents for possible declassification and release.
The White House issued a statement on Monday from Mr. Biden expressing sympathy for the family members and invoking a 2009 policy, issued when he was vice president, that imposed limits on when the government may assert the state secrets privilege to block the disclosure of evidence in lawsuits for national security reasons.
“As I promised during my campaign, my administration is committed to ensuring the maximum degree of transparency under the law, and to adhering to the rigorous guidance issued during the Obama-Biden administration on the invocation of the state secrets privilege,” Mr. Biden said.
When President Biden took office in January, many Cubans expected a return to the Obama days, when the United States sought to bury the last vestige of the Cold War by restoring diplomatic relations with Havana and calling for an end to the embargo.
Instead, Mr. Biden is taking an even harder line on Cuba than his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump, who tightened restrictions on travel and financial transactions.
The White House imposed new sanctions against Cuban officials in the past few weeks in response to the arrest of hundreds of protesters who took to the streets in cities across the island nation on July 11 to denounce their authoritarian government and the island’s persistent food and medicine shortages. Mr. Biden also asked government experts to draw up plans for the United States to unilaterally expand internet access on the island and has pledged to increase support for Cuban dissidents.
“We hear the cries of freedom coming from the island,” Mr. Biden said during a recent meeting with Cuban Americans in the White House. “We’re holding the regime accountable.”
To many Cubans who had hoped for a return to normalized relations — with more flights to the island and more channels to send cash, medicine and food to loved ones — Mr. Biden’s approach has been a blow.
“The past month has been really, really hard to take,” said Manuel Barcia Paz, a Cuban scholar in the United Kingdom, who has struggled to send money to his ailing parents in Cuba.
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and her allies will propose a minimum tax on the profits of the nation’s richest companies, regardless of what they say they owe the government, as part of Democrats’ $3.5 trillion economic and social-policy package.
Ms. Warren’s so-called “real corporate profits tax” was a key part of her presidential campaign, and she has enlisted Senator Angus King, the Maine independent, to help press her case that profitable companies should be taxed, regardless of loopholes and maneuvers that have allowed many of them to avoid federal corporate income taxes altogether.
The measure would require the most profitable companies to pay a 7 percent tax on the earnings they report to investors — known as their annual book value — above $100 million. By taxing the earnings reported to investors, not to the Internal Revenue Service, Democrats would be hitting earnings that companies like to maximize, not the earnings they try hard to diminish for tax purposes.
“During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden and I disagreed on some tax policies, but there was one thing we strongly agreed on: corporations shouldn’t be able to tell shareholders they were making huge profits, then tell the I.R.S. they made nothing in profits,” Ms. Warren said in an interview.
After the passage of a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, which is expected this week, Democrats will turn to a budget blueprint that will set the terms of a sprawling multi-trillion-dollar package intended to carry the remainder of their ambitions to shore up the nation’s social safety net and to pay for it by increasing taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. If it clears the Senate, it is all but guaranteed to do so with votes coming only from the 50 senators who caucus with Democrats.
That package won’t fully materialize until the fall, but the unveiling of the bare-bones blueprint has spurred Democrats like Ms. Warren to offer their proposed contributions. Although proposals on items like free pre-K, community college and family leave have attracted much of the attention, how to pay for it, including proposed tax increases on the wealthy and corporations, will generate at least as much controversy. The campaign to further scrutinize wealthy corporations has been boosted by reporting from ProPublica that showed how the richest Americans pay very little taxes.
“Now is the time to put the revenues on the table to pay for our infrastructure plans — this is the moment,” Ms. Warren said.
In a separate interview, Mr. King answered the expected Republican criticism, saying, “It’s not socialism — it’s an attempt to have a fair tax at a pretty low level for companies that would otherwise pay zero.”
An economic analysis from Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, economic professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who advised Ms. Warren during the presidential campaign, estimated that about 1,300 public corporations would be impacted by the policy, generating close to $700 billion between 2023 and 2032.
“We understand that responsible legislation includes showing how it will be paid for and making those payments come from the billionaires and giant corporations who have evaded paying their fair share for so long,” Ms. Warren said. “Getting the tax revenue part of the reconciliation package right is about making the playing field just a little more level for everyone.”
The Senate trudged on Monday toward final passage of a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure package, after clearing the last significant procedural hurdles for the legislation over the weekend.
The legislation is expected to pass, after nearly 70 senators voted to advance it late Sunday night. It is the product of weeks of intense negotiations, largely led by White House officials and a core group of 10 Republican and Democratic senators.
But without unanimous agreement to expedite the process, the bill may not pass until Tuesday morning because Senate rules require 30 hours of debate. Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican of Tennessee, held up a move to expedite the bill over the weekend, largely to protest how it is paid for.
After spending a relatively rare weekend in Washington plodding through the legislative process, senators remained hopeful that on Monday they would reach an agreement on postponing the vote until Tuesday at a reasonable, daylight hour, rather than taking a vote in the early morning hours.
Rank-and-file lawmakers spent hours haggling over a pair of dueling amendments that would adjust who would be subject to increased tax scrutiny on cryptocurrency, among other outstanding proposals. Even after a compromise was struck on Monday, negotiators failed to get the necessary unanimous support needed to make changes to the legislation.
As soon as the bipartisan bill clears the Senate, Democratic leaders plan to turn attention to a separate $3.5 trillion budget plan, which would unlock a second expansive legislative package that includes spending on health care, child care and education. Liberal Democrats in the House have said they will not support the bipartisan infrastructure bill without passage of that far larger package.
Half a dozen moderate Democrats, including Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, circulated a letter over the weekend calling for Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California to ensure a swift vote on the bipartisan deal.
The Biden administration has cast the bill as an attempt to maintain America’s edge over China and other global competitors. On Monday, the president enlisted the secretary of state to make the argument that investing in infrastructure and innovation in the United States was good foreign policy.
“I’m here to tell you that we could be doing better,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told students, educators and officials at the University of Maryland, where he toured an engineering laboratory. “That is the hard truth. We’re falling behind where we once were in the world. And our rivals slowly but surely are pulling close behind us. In some areas, they’re already ahead of us.”
Mr. Blinken noted that each year China spends three times more than the United States on roads, schools and other infrastructure. He also said China is outpacing the United States in research and development.
The United States ranks ninth in the world in terms of innovation investments while China has surged to No. 2, Mr. Blinken said, citing data from the White House National Economic Council. (Other analyses offer a less dire view of American spending on research and development when compared to China.)
“This matters,” Mr. Blinken said. “It matters because if these trends continue, we’ll be less competitive in a more competitive world.”
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‘Big, Bold Change’: Democrats Unveil $3.5 Trillion Budget Blueprint
Senate Democrats hope to pass the budget blueprint by the end of the week. It would boost spending on health care, child and elder care, education and climate change, while bypassing an expected Republican filibuster.
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Senate Democrats unveiled our budget resolution with reconciliation instructions, which is the first step in unlocking the legislative process for a budget reconciliation bill later this year. The Democratic budget will be the most significant legislation for American families since the era of the New Deal and the Great Society. It is big, bold change, the kind of change America thirsts for. It will lower costs for Americans. It will cut taxes for American families. It will create millions of jobs while tackling the climate crisis, and it will be paid for by wealthy paying their fair share. The divisions in our country and our politics today have their roots in the decline of economic mobility. Now, the American people don’t expect one piece of legislation to solve all our nation’s ills. No single law can do that. But we have to start in a bold, strong way, rebuilding the basic social contract for middle-class American families and for everyone struggling to get there, a promise of equal opportunity and equality, helping middle-class Americans stay in the middle class, building ladders to help others climb into that middle class. And at its core, that’s what this budget is all about.
Democrats formally began their push on Monday for the most significant expansion of the nation’s social safety net since the Great Society of the 1960s, unveiling a budget blueprint that would spend $3.5 trillion on health care, child and elder care, education and climate change.
The budget resolution, which Senate Democrats hope to pass by the end of this week, would allow the caucus to piece together social policy legislation this fall, paid for by raising taxes on the wealthy, large inheritances and corporations.
And if Democrats and their two independent allies can hold together, that measure could pass the Senate without a Republican vote, nullifying the filibuster threat.
That measure would pass after a separate $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill likely clears the Senate on Tuesday. Together, they would secure the remainder of President Biden’s $4 trillion economic agenda, but the two-step effort will test Mr. Biden’s ability to both work with Republicans and maneuver around them.
But the two-pronged effort will test the president’s ability to keep the razor-thin Democratic majorities in both chambers united as his party’s leaders both work with Republicans and maneuver around them.
“It is big, bold change — the kind of change America thirsts for,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, in a speech on the Senate floor.
Republicans have made it clear that they have no intention of supporting the measure. Though many in the conference support the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, they have railed against the Democrat’s wider budget plan as a “reckless tax and spending spree.”
“Democrats are about to tell Republicans to go take a hike and start teeing up trillions more dollars in borrowing and spending without a single Republican vote,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader. “But at the same time they’re extolling the virtues of their latest socialist shopping list, they are afraid to up the limit on their credit card.”
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WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen reiterated her call for Congress to raise or suspend the nation’s borrowing cap on Monday, urging lawmakers to act on a bipartisan basis and warning that a default would cause “irreparable harm” to the economy.
In a letter to Congress, Ms. Yellen reminded lawmakers that raising the debt limit does not authorize or increase government spending. In fact, she said, it allows the Treasury Department to pay for expenditures that have already been enacted.
“Failure to meet those obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy and the livelihoods of all Americans,” Ms. Yellen said.
Top Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, have suggested that Democrats will have to lift the debt ceiling on their own using a budgetary procedure known as reconciliation.
Republicans and Democrats in the Senate are pressing ahead this week on the final stages of an infrastructure bill. Separately, Democrats in the Senate are also moving forward with a $3.5 trillion budget measure that would allow them to enact huge federal investments to expand social and environmental programs.
Ms. Yellen’s letter to Congress was her third such warning in recent weeks. Last week, she told lawmakers that she was already beginning to employ extraordinary measures, such as curbing investments in government retirement programs, to delay a default.
Because of the various relief programs that are in place, it is more difficult for the Treasury Department to predict how long Ms. Yellen can use such tools. The Congressional Budget Office said last month that Treasury Department would most likely run out of cash sometime in October or November.
Ms. Yellen, in her letter, noted that during the Trump administration, Congress lifted the debt ceiling on a bipartisan basis three times.
“Congress should do so again now by increasing or suspending the debt limit on a bipartisan basis,” Ms. Yellen said. “The vast majority of the debt subject to the debt limit was accrued prior to the administration taking office.”
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will seek to make coronavirus vaccinations mandatory for the country’s 1.3 million active-duty troops “no later” than the middle of next month, the Biden administration announced on Monday.
Officials initially said the shots could be required by the end of August to help stop the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant. But they decided to wait, bowing to concerns expressed by White House officials about putting a mandate in place for troops before the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval for the vaccine.
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U.S. Military Will Mandate Vaccinations for Troops
John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III will seek approval to make coronavirus vaccinations mandatory for U.S. active-duty troops by September.
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He will request approval from the president for a waiver to make the Covid vaccines mandatory by mid-September. He’ll make the request for the waiver by mid-September. I’ve seen some reporting out there that means that all the troops have to be vaccinated by mid-September. That’s not accurate. He’ll make the request by mid-September unless or until F.D.A. licensure occurs before that time, at which point the secretary has the authority he needs upon F.D.A. licensure to issue to make whatever vaccine is then given that license mandatory. Until these vaccines become mandatory, we continue to want to appeal to a sense of teamwork among the unvaccinated service members in the force that this isn’t just about you. It’s about your ship. It’s about your platoon. It’s about your squadron. It’s your opportunity to contribute to the health and readiness of your teammates, and thereby the nation. We’re seeing an uptick in cases, uptick in hospitalizations across the force as we are in the country. And the Delta variant is a factor in that. So we’re going to watch it closely. And as the secretary told the force today, if he needs to move — act sooner than this timeline — then he’ll do that.
The secretary of defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, said in a memo to the staff on Monday that he would seek to speed up a mandate if the F.D.A. approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine before the middle of September, which the agency aims to do. In the meantime, he told the services to begin preparing the force for mandatory vaccinations.
But the middle of September is more than five weeks away, and even then, the administration has not put a deadline in place for when troops must be fully vaccinated.
The decision to delay is the latest shift in the Biden administration’s response to the surging Delta variant. President Biden has expressed frustration with the vaccination rate around the nation and urged the private sector and state and local governments to step up pressure on the unvaccinated. But he has repeatedly passed on ordering troops as their commander in chief to be injected with vaccines that have not been fully approved by the F.D.A.
About 64 percent of the 1.3 million active-duty service members are fully vaccinated. That rate is unacceptably low to the military because it is difficult to deploy troops who have not been inoculated to countries with stringent local restrictions and because a surge of the virus among troops can cripple readiness.
“I want you to know that I will seek the president’s approval to make the vaccines mandatory no later than mid-September, or immediately upon” F.D.A. approval, Mr. Austin said in his memo, adding “whichever comes first.” He said that the department would keep a close eye on the rate of new virus cases and added that “I will not hesitate to act sooner or recommend a different course to the president if I feel the need to do so.”
But Mr. Austin already recommended a different course to his boss, and the president balked. Last week, the defense secretary advised Mr. Biden that a vaccine mandate was one of the few measures available to protect troops from the virus.
The Pentagon recommended going ahead with the mandate and not waiting for F.D.A. approval, according to three administration officials with knowledge of the internal deliberations. White House and Defense Department legal staff members said the president also had the authority to mandate vaccines for members of the National Guard and the Reserves.
During a meeting at the White House on Friday, defense officials presented a plan to immediately mandate vaccinations for all active-duty service members, the officials said. But White House officials urged caution, the officials said.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Biden said his administration was “on a wartime footing, and every American who is eligible should take immediate steps to get vaccinated right away.”
The president said that “we cannot let up in the fight against Covid-19, especially with the Delta variant spreading rapidly through unvaccinated populations.”
Health and other officials have said that vaccinating troops could help slow the spread of the virus in communities near military bases and in areas where hesitancy has been strong.
“Military settings, including bases with many civilian employees, can be very vulnerable from an infectious disease perspective,” said Lindsey Leininger, a health policy researcher and a clinical professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. “Better late than never for the mandate.”
Mr. Biden’s caution came as a surprise to some administration officials because the president announced last month that all federal employees and on-site contractors must be vaccinated against the coronavirus or submit to regular testing and other measures. That requirement affected the 766,372 civilians working for the Defense Department, not active-duty service members.
The Department of Veterans Affairs recently required 115,000 of its frontline health care workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus in the next two months. The department is looking at ways to expand that mandate to other workers in the system and possibly those who visit department facilities.
Because American military members are governed by different health and justice authorities than other federal workers, the decision is ultimately made by the president, who must grant a waiver to the Defense Department to make vaccinations mandatory for a vaccine not yet approved by the F.D.A. and authorized only on an emergency basis.
The F.D.A. plans to fully approve Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine, one of the most widely used vaccinations, by early next month, people familiar with the effort have said. But as the Delta variant spreads, some officials and businesses have decided to move more quickly.
Though coronavirus vaccines have become a political flash point in the civilian population, several military leaders said they did not expect much resistance from troops, who are accustomed to getting mandatory shots.
Within minutes of Mr. Austin’s memo, national figures from both parties voiced their support for a vaccine mandate for troops.
“Secretary Austin is protecting our troops with his announcement today that all service members must be vaccinated against Covid,” Leon E. Panetta, who was defense secretary during the Obama administration, said in a statement.
Representative Mike D. Rogers of Alabama, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that “vaccines protect our men and women, many of whom live in cramped and crowded conditions, from the spread of disease.”
But some Republicans have signaled opposition to the move, especially without F.D.A. approval. Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee, warned in a letter to Mr. Austin last week that “mandatory vaccination is illegal for military personnel prior to complete approval.”
President Biden imposed a new round of economic sanctions on Belarus on Monday, marking the anniversary of an election that many Western governments view as fraudulent and that spurred mass protests in the former Soviet Union country.
Mr. Biden signed a sweeping executive order expanding the number of sectors the United States can target in Belarus, while also issuing the largest tranche of sanctions against the country to date. The White House framed the actions as punishment for the authoritarian tactics of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the brutal strongman who has been in power since 1994 and who claimed to have won the country’s election last year with 80 percent of the vote. The mass demonstrations that followed that election were met with violent police crackdowns.
“Rather than respect the clear will of the Belarusian people, the Lukashenko regime perpetrated election fraud, followed by a brutal campaign of repression to stifle dissent,” Mr. Biden said in a statement on Monday.
Mr. Biden’s executive order authorized the United States to target 17 companies working with Belarus in a range of sectors, including security, energy and transportation, as well as companies producing potash and cigarettes. Also sanctioned were Belaruskali OAO, one of the largest state-owned businesses in the country, and the Belarusian national Olympic committee, which the administration described as being “a tool for Lukashenko and his inner circle to launder funds and evade sanctions.”
Included in the sanctions were 27 individuals who were involved in the violent response to protests last year or the forced landing of a European passenger jet carrying an opposition journalist who was later detained, or who profit from the Belarusian government, according to the Treasury Department.
The United States was joined by Britain in imposing penalties against state-owned companies.
The White House noted in a statement that the sanctions come after the Belarus government attempted to forcibly send home an Olympic sprinter, Kristina Timanovskaya, who said she feared for her safety because she had criticized her coaches and the country’s national committee for registering her for a relay event for which she had not trained. The chairman of the Belarusian Olympic committee is the eldest son of Mr. Lukashenko. Ms. Timanovskaya fled to Poland out of fear for her safety.
The Biden administration had committed to reimposing sanctions on Belarus in May after Mr. Lukashenko forced the landing of a European passenger jet, a Ryanair Boeing 737.
The plane was traveling through Belarusian airspace, from Greece to Lithuania, when it was diverted and forced to land in Minsk, the capital, with an escort from a fighter jet. While Mr. Lukashenko claimed he rerouted the plane because of an emailed bomb threat, Roman Protasevich, a Belarusian opposition journalist who was on the plane and who had been living in exile abroad, was detained along with his girlfriend after the plane landed.
A Swiss email provider has said that the email cited by the Belarusian authorities was sent after the plane had already been diverted.
Rick Bright, the virologist who claimed the Trump administration retaliated against him last year by ousting him from his job, has settled his whistle-blower complaint against the federal government and will receive back pay and compensation for “emotional stress and reputational damage,” his lawyer said Monday.
Dr. Bright’s removal last April as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency created upheaval within the Department of Health and Human Services in the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic.
He said he was removed from his post after he pressed for rigorous vetting of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug embraced by President Donald J. Trump as a coronavirus treatment, and that the administration had put “politics and cronyism ahead of science.”
Those allegations are still being investigated by the Office of Special Counsel, which protects federal whistle-blowers. Under Mr. Trump, H.H.S. officials denied any wrongdoing.
The Biden administration confirmed the settlement of the case on Monday in a statement praising Dr. Bright, who advised President Biden during his transition.
“The agency would like to thank Dr. Bright for his dedicated public service and for the contributions he made to addressing the Covid-19 pandemic while he served as BARDA director,” the statement said. “We wish him well in his new endeavors.”
Neither side disclosed details or specifics of the settlement. But Dr. Bright’s lawyer, Debra S. Katz, said her client had been compensated to the fullest extent allowed by the law. She said he will receive back pay, as well as damages to cover the costs of private security and temporary housing that he required after receiving threats. He will also receive compensation, Ms. Katz said, for distress “associated with the disparaging comments and threats” made by administration officials including Mr. Trump, who had blasted Dr. Bright on Twitter as a “creep” and a “disgruntled employee.”
Dr. Bright now works for the Rockefeller Foundation, where he is developing a new institute devoted to pandemic prevention that will function as a hub for scientists in government, the private sector and academia. The goal is to identify new pathogens, he said in an interview. He said he was glad to have the episode behind him.
“Going through the assault that I experienced from the last administration, going through the public criticism from the White House and H.H.S. leadership when I was just trying to do my job, put a lot of stress on me,” he said. “They were trying to find anything they could to disparage me and discredit me.”
After clashing with his bosses, Dr. Bright was assigned to a narrower role at the National Institutes of Health to work on a “Shark Tank”-style program to develop coronavirus treatments. He later went on sick leave because of hypertension, a spokeswoman said at the time. In the interview Monday, Dr. Bright said that at the height of the controversy, he also received a diagnosis of skin cancer.
Ultimately, he quit the government — a departure that Ms. Katz characterized as effectively a termination, because, she said, he had not been given any meaningful work.
Ms. Katz said the settlement was especially satisfying to her. “Many times, whistle-blowers come forward and that’s the end of their career,” she said. But Dr. Bright, she said, has “gone from being persona non grata under the Trump administration to being a respected and important subject matter expert.”
With almost all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, the Taliban has mounted a summer-long military campaign that has forced widespread surrenders and retreats by Afghan government forces.
By late July, the Taliban had seized control of approximately half of the country’s roughly 400 districts. Government troops abandoned scores of outposts and bases, often leaving behind weapons and equipment. In many cases, they surrendered without a fight, sometimes after the intercession of village elders dispatched by the Taliban.
The Taliban military victories, especially in northern Afghanistan, where opposition to the militants has traditionally been strongest, provided a violent coda to the U.S. military mission in America’s longest war.
President Biden, declaring that the United States had long ago accomplished its mission of denying terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan, said in April that all American troops would leave the country by Sept. 11. That date has since been moved up to Aug. 31, at which time the White House has said that all military operations against the Taliban will cease. Troops from NATO countries also have withdrawn.
Mr. Biden conceded that after nearly 20 years of war, America’s longest on foreign soil, it was clear that the U.S. military could not transform Afghanistan into a modern, stable democracy.
Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops followed a 2020 agreement signed between the Trump administration and the Taliban that called for all American forces to leave Afghanistan by May 1 of this year. In return, the Taliban pledged to cut ties with terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, reduce violence and negotiate with the American-backed Afghan government.
The primary objectives of the 2020 deal were for Afghan leaders and the Taliban to negotiate a political road map for a new government and constitution, reduce violence and ultimately forge a lasting cease-fire.
But violence continued as the Taliban raced across Afghanistan, securing strategic victories and raising questions about the country’s short-lived experiment with democracy, gender equality and the rejection of extremism.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, said late Sunday that she had resigned, a move that came as the governor fought for political survival after a report from the New York State attorney general concluded he had sexually harassed nearly a dozen women.
Her resignation meant that Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, lost one of his most loyal aides and trusted strategists while facing an imminent threat of impeachment in the State Legislature and calls to step down from a constellation of top officials in his party, including President Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.
Ms. DeRosa had stood by the governor’s side for years even as his inner circle shrank in size and many of the top staffers who had helped first elect him in 2010 left the administration.
The state attorney general report found that Ms. DeRosa had spearheaded efforts to retaliate against one of the women who had spoken out publicly about her allegation in December.
After becoming a fixture in Mr. Cuomo’s coronavirus briefings during the pandemic, Ms. DeRosa also had come under fire earlier this year for her involvement in the administration’s efforts to obscure the full extent of nursing home deaths, a matter that is under investigation by federal authorities and the State Assembly.
Her departure sent shock waves through Albany as political observers rushed to decipher what her resignation meant for Mr. Cuomo’s future. The governor has not left Albany since the report’s release on Tuesday as he conferred with advisers over how to proceed.
Ms. DeRosa announced her resignation the night before an interview with one of Mr. Cuomo’s accusers, Brittany Commisso, was scheduled to air on “CBS This Morning.”
Ms. Commisso, an executive assistant who had remained anonymous until Sunday, accused Mr. Cuomo of groping her breast while they were alone in the Executive Mansion late last year, one of the most serious claims leveled against the governor. She filed a criminal complaint with the Albany County sheriff department, raising the possibility that Mr. Cuomo could face criminal charges.
The Biden administration is violating the terms of a longstanding court settlement that requires certain protections for migrant children in government custody, lawyers said Monday in a motion filed in a federal court.
The filing describes “shockingly deplorable” conditions at two emergency shelters set up in Texas earlier this year to house a record number of children caught crossing the border with Mexico. It draws on reports from whistle-blowers who have worked at the shelters, one in Pecos, Texas, and another on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso — as well as from legal advocates who are allowed limited access.
Under a 1997 court decree, known as the Flores settlement, migrant children are to be transferred to state-licensed shelters with specific standards and requirements for care, including education and recreational activities, within three days of being taken into government custody.
Many of the conditions described in the new motion have been previously reported in the media, but the court papers filed on Monday carry weight because they are now part of the official record in the Flores case. The judge overseeing the case has the power to order the government to take steps to comply with the agreement.
The last time lawyers for the plaintiffs filed a motion to the court overseeing the settlement was at the beginning of the pandemic.
The new motion alleges there are “alarming and harmful conditions created by lax oversight of inexperienced contractor and volunteer staff” in emergency shelters, citing in particular a shelter at Fort Bliss. The papers also charge that “inconsistent and often chaotic case management” delays children’s release to relatives or other sponsors.
“These allegations definitely don’t reflect the direction this administration has aspired to,” Wendy Young, the president of Kids in Need of Defense, a children’s advocacy organization, said on Monday.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the shelter system, did not respond to a request for comment.
After the plaintiffs filed a motion last year, the federal judge overseeing the case, Dolly M. Gee of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release migrant children from three family detention centers to family members in the United States because of the risk of Covid-19 spreading in congregate settings.
At the time, the government was not facing the volume of unaccompanied children that it is today. Judge Gee criticized the Trump administration for inconsistent compliance with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And she has continued to hold regular status meetings over the course of the pandemic.
The Trump administration was broadly criticized for the conditions under which it held migrant children in 2019, the last time large numbers of children arrived alone at the southern border.
For months, the average length of stay for migrant children in custody of the Department of Health and Human Services has been about a month. While the plaintiff’s lawyers did not propose shutting down the emergency shelters, they argued in their motion that younger children and those with special needs be placed in licensed shelters as “expeditiously” as possible. And they proposed that the Biden administration provide monthly reports to the court about its efforts to speed the release of children to relatives in the United States or other sponsors.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of unaccompanied migrant children, faced a shortage of licensed shelters this spring because of cuts made during the Trump administration and restrictions put in place because of the pandemic. After children were packed into border stations for longer than the law allows and in unacceptable conditions, the Biden administration set up more than a dozen emergency shelters in a matter of weeks, relying heavily on contractors. The emergency shelters do not have strict standards.
Children’s advocates and lawyers have said that inexperienced contractors are to blame for many of the problems at the emergency shelters, including a failure to meet the needs of children with mental health challenges and to “protect children from bullying or physical assault.”
As of last week, only four emergency shelters remained open, and more than half of the thousands of migrants housed in the shelters were at Pecos or Fort Bliss, according to internal data obtained by The New York Times.
The internal watchdog at the Department of Health and Human Services recently opened an investigation into reports of substandard conditions and care at Fort Bliss, the government’s largest emergency shelter.
In its latest move to undo Trump-era policies, the Education Department said on Monday that states are free to police federal student loan servicers that run afoul of local consumer protection laws, reversing its previous legal stance.
“Effective collaboration among the states and federal government is the best way to ensure that student loan borrowers get the best possible service,” Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona said in a statement announcing the change.
The federal government pays seven vendors to collect payments from nearly 43 million borrowers on $1.4 trillion in federal student loans. Government auditors and other watchdogs have repeatedly criticized the companies for shoddy practices and mistakes that they say have harmed struggling borrowers and raised the repayment costs for many people.
Multiple state attorneys general have sued federal loan servicers over their missteps. In 2018, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under President Donald J. Trump, sought to block those lawsuits by arguing that only the federal government had the authority to oversee and punish its federal loan servicers.
Several federal judges viewed that stance skeptically. In at least four cases, federal district or appellate courts ruled against the department and found that states retained some enforcement rights over servicers’ actions toward their state’s residents.
The Education Department cited those rulings in new guidance explaining its reversal and said working collaboratively with the states instead of fighting them “could produce a more robust system of supervision and enforcement to monitor and improve performance under this far-flung system.”
Maura Healey, the attorney general of Massachusetts, praised the new stance. Her office sued, and later settled with, the government’s largest loan servicer over errors that she said had hobbled public service workers seeking to use a loan-forgiveness program. (That servicer, the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency, known to most borrowers as FedLoan, plans to terminate its contract with the government at the end of this year.)
“States have long played an integral role in higher education oversight and have been on the front lines of protecting student borrowers from fraud and abuse,” Ms. Healey said. “My office looks forward to collaborating with the department to ensure servicer accountability and borrower rights.”
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