President Trump on Wednesday made good on his promise to veto the annual military policy bill, setting up what could be the first veto override of his presidency after both chambers of Congress overwhelmingly approved the legislation.
In refusing to sign the legislation, Mr. Trump cited a series of provisions, including one that would allow the military to strip the names of Confederate leaders from military bases. He also has demanded that the bill include a provision that would repeal a legal shield for social media companies that he has tangled with, a significant legislative change that Republicans and Democrats alike have said is irrelevant to a bill that dictates military policy and has become law for each of the last 60 years.
“My administration has taken strong actions to help keep our nation safe and support our service members,” Mr. Trump wrote in the veto notification. “I will not approve this bill, which would put the interests of the Washington, D.C., establishment over those of the American people.”
The House is expected to return on Monday to vote on an override. Should it pass, the Senate is expected to return on Tuesday to begin considering the override.
The veto is the latest sign that Mr. Trump, in his last weeks in office, is ready to challenge lawmakers in his own party, forcing them to chose between fealty to him and loyalty to their congressional leaders and, for some, their ideals.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California on Wednesday dared congressional Republicans to block an effort to unanimously pass legislation that would provide $2,000 direct payments to millions of Americans, trying to drive a wedge in the opposition by taking up President Trump’s call to expand the checks.
Mr. Trump’s threat on Tuesday night to reject a $2.3 trillion spending and coronavirus relief package over the size of the planned $600 checks was a Christmas gift to Ms. Pelosi and a huge challenge to his party. The president effectively presented Republicans a choice: Side with him and some of the Democrats’ most liberal members or stick with their congressional leaders.
The dilemma may be particularly acute in Georgia, where, just days before two crucial runoffs that will determine control of the Senate, the two Republican candidates, Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, were already proclaiming passage of the coronavirus relief bill as a triumph. Both candidates have also pledged their fealty to Mr. Trump, who on Monday called the legislation a “disgrace.”
“Just when you think you have seen it all, last night, the president said that he would possibly veto the bicameral agreement negotiated between Republicans and Democrats,” Ms. Pelosi wrote in a letter to Democratic colleagues.
The House is set to convene on Christmas Eve in a so-called pro forma session, typically a brief meeting that requires one lawmaker be present and lasts for just a few minutes, and Democrats plan to bring up a stand-alone bill that would provide for $2,000 direct payments for American families. The legislation passed by Congress on Monday set those checks at $600.
The maneuver could be blocked by any one lawmaker willing to return to Washington and object to the request during the 9 a.m. session, and Ms. Pelosi said that top Democrats were waiting to hear from Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, to see if any Republican would object to the request.
“If the president truly wants to join us in $2,000 payments, he should call upon Leader McCarthy to agree to our unanimous consent request,” she added. “The entire country knows that it is urgent for the president to sign this bill, both to provide the coronavirus relief and to keep government open.”
It is likely that at least one Republican will object to the request, given consternation among many rank and file lawmakers in the Republican conference about the enormous level of government spending approved on Monday. And in the Senate, efforts earlier this month to unilaterally pass a stand-alone bill with $1,200 direct payments were repeatedly blocked.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Wednesday appeared in Wilmington, Del., to introduce his nominee to serve as education secretary, Miguel A. Cardona, a product of the public school system who grew up in public housing, whom he called “a secretary of education for this moment.”
“We need someone who gets that education isn’t just what we do as a nation, it’s who we are,” Mr. Biden said. He also committed to reopening a majority of public schools across the country by the end of his first 100 days in office and reiterated his support for canceling up to $10,000 in student loans for each borrower because of the pandemic.
If confirmed, Dr. Cardona, who currently serves as Connecticut’s schools chief, will be tasked with managing the most urgent education crisis in decades: attempting to oversee the reopening of schools without turning the issue into a partisan matter. Dr. Cardona’s background as a public school educator stands in stark contrast to that of the current education secretary, Betsy DeVos, a billionaire champion of private schools that she and her children attended. In his brief remarks, Dr. Cardona compared the American public school system to a “wilted rose, neglected, in need of care.”
“We must be the master gardeners who cultivate it,” he said, noting that the inequities of the country’s education system would still be a problem that needed to be addressed even after the pandemic. Mr. Biden had promised during the campaign to appoint an education secretary with public school experience.
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris said the Biden-Harris administration would continue to fight for additional emergency relief for educators and schools in another stimulus package it plans to introduce next year.
Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris took no questions.
On Wednesday, the Biden transition team also announced more individuals who will serve in the White House Counsel’s Office, as part of the incoming administration’s stated goal of helping to “restore faith in the rule of law and the accountability of government institutions.”
The new additions to the White House legal team include Jonathan Cedarbaum, a partner at WilmerHale who has been serving as senior counsel for litigation for the Biden-Harris campaign; Danielle Conley, a former associate deputy attorney general at the Justice Department; Jonathan Su, who served as special counsel to President Barack Obama; and Stuart Delery, a former acting associate attorney general during the Obama administration.
Like a coin flip that never lands, America’s double-headed presidency is queasily suspended in midair as President Trump threatens to veto a bipartisan, Biden-blessed bill intended to speed relief to families, businesses and governments in time for the holidays.
The 11th-hour disruption was one of those entirely predictable surprises that have defined the Trump era. Over the last four years — especially on big-ticket budget deals (like the 2019 defense bill) — Mr. Trump has absented himself from negotiations and piped up only at the last possible second, often to little or no effect on priorities like funding his border wall.
In a speech posted late Tuesday on his Twitter account, Mr. Trump positioned himself as a guardian of the working class who had been quietly watching the congressional negotiations in horror as they crammed billions in wasteful spending into the bill, which he called “a disgrace.”
He is now pushing for $2,000 payments for individuals, not the $600 stimulus checks included in the compromise, a position embraced by progressives and deplored by conservatives.
It is not clear how Mr. Trump’s proposal will be taken in Congress. Democrats planned to raise the amount of the direct payments on Thursday by unanimous consent, but whether it passes there or even comes up in the Senate is unclear. The stimulus bill passed both houses on Monday with a veto-proof majority.
Why is Mr. Trump doing this now? One reason: A no has always been more attractive than a yes for the disruptive Mr. Trump, whose 2016 presidential run was impelled by his dislike of President Barack Obama but turbocharged by his contempt for the Republican Party establishment.
The opposite holds for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., who ran in 2020 as a reassuring figure intent on restoring kindness and sanity to government. Mr. Biden offered tempered approval of the unloved $900 billion compromise deal on Tuesday, calling it a “down payment” on another coronavirus relief package next year.
On the stimulus issue, Mr. Biden is actually far closer to Mr. Trump than Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, who has been wary of writing bigger checks. But Mr. Biden, speaking to reporters on Tuesday, when the deal seemed done, cast it as a hopeful harbinger of future agreements with Mr. McConnell, his frequent bargaining partner in the Obama years.
In that sense, Mr. Biden is coming in as president the way he left the vice presidency, with a smile of reassurance, while Mr. Trump is going out as he came in — with a defiant scowl.
How the current impasse, which comes at a moment of acute national crisis, plays out is hard to say. Mr. Trump is scheduled to leave this afternoon for his annual Christmas trip to Florida, though his plans could change.
But what struck many Republican aides most on Wednesday was Mr. Trump’s sudden embrace of a cause typically championed by the other party.
While Mr. Trump floated the idea of increasing the size of the checks in private last week, he did not push for the proposal on Twitter or weigh in personally with legislative leaders, nor did he instruct Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who represented him in the talks, to reject the compromise.
With four weeks left in President Trump’s term, he is at perhaps his most unleashed — and, as events of the last few days have demonstrated, at the most unpredictable point in his presidency.
When he has emerged from his relative isolation in recent days, it has been to suggest out of the blue that he would try to blow up the bipartisan stimulus package, driving a wedge through his party in the process, and to grant clemency to a raft of allies and supporters, mostly outside the normal Justice Department process.
He has otherwise sequestered himself in the White House, playing host to a cast of conspiracy theorists and hard-core supporters who traffic in ideas like challenging the election’s outcome in Congress and even invoking martial law, seeking to give some of them government jobs.
He is almost entirely disengaged from leading the nation even as Americans are being felled by the coronavirus at record rates. Faced with an aggressive cyberassault almost surely carried out by Russia, his response, to the degree that he has had one, has been to downplay the damage and to contradict his own top officials by suggesting that the culprit might have been China.
He remains the most powerful person in the world, yet he is focused on the one area in which he is powerless to get what he wants: a way to avoid leaving office as a loser.
If nothing else, it will make for an especially anxious next 27 days in Washington.
Current advisers have described a daily struggle to keep Mr. Trump from giving in to his impulse to listen to those who are telling him what he wants to hear. And former advisers say the most worrisome issue is the gradual disappearance of the core group of West Wing aides who could get him to turn away from risky, legally dubious and dangerous ideas.
“The number of people who are telling him things he doesn’t want to hear has diminished,” said his former national security adviser, John R. Bolton, who had a very public parting of ways with Mr. Trump.
Many Trump advisers hope that his planned trip to his private South Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, will give him a change of scenery and a change of perspective. He is scheduled to arrive there on Wednesday and stay through the New Year holiday, although some aides said he still might decide against it.
The Trump administration reached a deal with Pfizer and BioNTech to bolster the supply of their coronavirus vaccine for the United States by 100 million doses by the end of July.
The new agreement means the companies will supply the United States with a total of 200 million doses, enough to vaccinate 100 million Americans. The additional shots will cost $1.95 billion, the companies said.
The agreement, announced on Wednesday, would help the United States at least partly offset a looming vaccine shortage that could leave millions of American adults uncovered in the first half of 2021.
So far, only two coronavirus vaccines — Pfizer-BioNTech’s and one made by Moderna — have won federal authorization for emergency distribution, and most of what the companies are capable of producing for the next six months has already been allocated through contracts with the United States and other governments.
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, said in an interview on Tuesday with the media outlet Newsy that she planned to retire after concluding her role helping the federal government transition to the Biden administration.
“I will be helpful in any role people think I can be helpful in,” she said. “And then I will retire.”
In recent weeks Dr. Birx, 64, indicated publicly and privately that she was open to serving in the Biden administration. It was unclear what prompted her to announce her plan to retire. In the interview with Newsy, she called her time at the White House “overwhelming” and difficult on her family. She suggested that recent coverage of a trip she made over the Thanksgiving holiday had unduly dragged her family into the spotlight.
The Associated Press reported on Sunday that after Dr. Birx recommended limiting gatherings to the “immediate household,” she traveled to a vacation home in Delaware over Thanksgiving weekend with three generations of her family, which included several households. Dr. Birx told The A.P. that she traveled not to celebrate Thanksgiving, but rather to winterize the property before a potential sale. She said that those on the trip were part of her immediate household but lived in two homes.
“I think what was done in the last week to my family — you know, they didn’t choose this for me,” she said in her interview with Newsy. “They’ve tried to be supportive.”
Neither the White House nor Dr. Birx responded to requests for comment on Tuesday. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said in a tweet on Tuesday that Mr. Trump “has great respect for Dr. Birx and likes her very much.”
“We wish her well,” she wrote.
Dr. Birx arrived at the White House in late February as Vice President Mike Pence assumed control of the coronavirus task force, and quickly developed a niche as a numbers maven. She worked long hours overseeing a team of specialists gathering data on infections and hospitalizations, whose work she would organize into daily presentations for senior White House officials and the task force. She has also been the point of contact for state and local officials, and oversees the drafting of detailed reports offering guidance to the states.
In recent months, she has traveled around the country, appealing to Americans to wear masks and limit their contact with others, a message that clashed with the White House’s relaxed approach to pandemic restrictions.
Her time in the West Wing, where she keeps an office, elicited broad criticism from public health experts. Senior administration officials said that she ingratiated herself with President Trump and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, often presenting an optimistic picture of the pandemic. She also alienated officials at the C.D.C. with an aggressive campaign to overhaul the way the agency collects data on the spread of the coronavirus. And she clashed with officials on Operation Warp Speed, the administration’s vaccine development program, over the selection of vaccine candidates and the development of antibody treatments.
A colonel in the Army, she began her career in the early 1980s as an immunologist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She spent time training as a fellow in Dr. Anthony Fauci’s lab. The two remain close.
Before she arrived at the White House this year, she spent six years at the State Department, where she oversaw the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, created in 2003 by President George W. Bush when antiretroviral drugs saving lives in developed countries were not available in other nations.
The $900 billion stimulus bill passed by Congress this week is meant to address the needs of millions of Americans who have weathered the effects of the coronavirus pandemic for months, even as many federal programs to provide aid ran thin or expired.
The full text of the bill ran almost 5,600 pages. Here’s a look at what’s included.
Individual payments
Among the most anticipated components of the legislation is the direct payment, with $600 going to individual adults with an adjusted gross income of up to $75,000 a year based on 2019 earnings. Heads of households who earn up to $112,500 and a couple (or someone whose spouse died in 2020) who make up to $150,000 a year would get twice that amount.
Eligible families with dependent children would receive an additional $600 per child.
In a change from the last round, payments will not be denied to citizens married to someone without a social security number, allowing some spouses of undocumented immigrants to claim the benefit this time around.
On Tuesday night, President Trump threatened to veto the bill because he said the payments were too low. He is advocating payments of $2,000. House Democrats planned to bring up an amendment to the bill on Thursday, an aide who was familiar with the proposal said. It is not clear how the House and Senate will act.
Unemployment benefits
With as many as 12 million Americans facing the prospect of losing federal unemployment assistance on Dec. 26, Congress acted to extend multiple programs, albeit at less generous levels than in the spring.
The agreement would revive enhanced federal jobless benefits for 11 weeks, providing a lifeline for hard-hit workers until March 14. The new benefit, up to $300 per week, is half the amount provided by the CARES Act in the spring.
The legislation also extends Pandemic Unemployment Assistance — a program aimed at a broad set of freelancers and independent contractors — for the same period, providing an additional $100 per week.
Targeted aid for small businesses
The agreement sets aside $285 billion for additional loans to small businesses under the Paycheck Protection Program, renewing the program created under the CARES Act.
The latest version includes stricter terms that appear intended to correct some of the unpopular elements of the original program. It caps loans at $2 million and makes them available only to borrowers with fewer than 300 employees that experienced at least a 25 percent drop in sales from a year earlier in at least one quarter. The agreement also sets aside $12 billion specifically for minority-owned businesses. And publicly traded companies will be ineligible to apply this time around.
Funding for vaccines and nursing homes
The legislation sets aside nearly $70 billion for a range of public health measures, including $20 billion for the purchase of vaccines, $8 billion for vaccine distribution and an additional $20 billion to help states continue their test-and-trace programs.
The bill also allows a federal program that insures mortgages for nursing homes to dole out emergency loans aimed at helping hard-hit elder care centers.
Support for climate measures
In an unusual rebuke of the Trump administration’s climate policy, the deal includes new legislation to regulate hydrofluorocarbons, the powerful greenhouse gases common in air-conditioners and refrigerators.
It also allocates $35 billion to fund wind, solar and other clean energy projects.
A ban on surprise medical bills
The bill will make it illegal for hospitals to charge patients for services like emergency treatment by out-of-network doctors or transport in air ambulances, which patients often have no say about.
Rental protections
The compromise would protect tenants struggling with rent by extending a moratorium on evictions for another month, through Jan. 31. The Department of Housing and Urban Development separately issued a similar moratorium on Monday that protects homeowners against foreclosures on mortgages backed by the Federal Home Administration. It runs until Feb. 28.
The bill also provides $25 billion in rental assistance.
Food security
Expanding one of the most reliable channels of aid, the agreement increases monthly food stamp benefits — formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — by 15 percent for six months, beginning on Jan. 1.
Funding for broadband infrastructure
The legislation includes $7 billion for expanding access to high-speed internet connections, nearly half of which will go toward helping cover the cost of monthly internet bills by providing up to $50 per month to low-income families.
The deal also sets aside $300 million for building out infrastructure in underserved rural areas and $1 billion in grants for tribal broadband programs.
A federal judge in Washington has temporarily blocked the start of construction of a planned new helium drilling project partly inside a federally protected wilderness area in Utah, potentially derailing one of the large-scale mining and drilling projects the Trump administration is rushing to finalize.
The unusual action on Tuesday by Judge Rudolph Contreras came even though the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management had not yet issued permits for the Utah drilling project, planned in and around a spot known as the Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness area in the San Rafael Desert region of southeastern Utah.
This would ordinarily mean a quick rejection for environmental groups because the plaintiffs’ motion addresses an “agency decision that has not yet occurred and, as such, there has not yet been final agency action subject to judicial review,” Judge Contreras wrote in his own Tuesday ruling.
But final approval of the project — which was highlighted in an article by The New York Times this month — is expected as soon as Wednesday, and the investors have indicated they planned to start road building and other construction immediately, Judge Contreras said. The goal of the lawsuit was to prevent drilling-related disturbances in the area, famous for its vast wild stretches of canyons and so-called Bowknot Bend on the nearby Green River.
Judge Contreras, who was nominated by President Barack Obama, said he had no choice but to temporarily block the project, even though it had not yet been approved; otherwise, the claims would “become ripe and then moot nearly simultaneously,” he wrote in his three-page ruling.
The environmental groups have argued that the Interior Department violated federal law when it first granted leases to drill in the area in March 2019, just before an act by Congress that designated part of the drilling site as a wilderness area was signed into law.
“Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness is too special to drill,” Landon Newell, a lawyer with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said in a statement on Tuesday.
David Wallace, one of the executives at the Colorado company behind the drilling project, said in an email late Tuesday that he was disappointed with the ruling “to delay development of a helium resource that could be critical to preventing this country’s dependence on foreign sources for helium.” He also said the environmental groups have exaggerated the impact the project would have, as the well pad where the drilling equipment would be set up would be outside the federal wilderness area, and then drill underground into the protected zone.
The restraining order will last until at least Jan. 6, giving both sides in the dispute time to file additional arguments with the court about the project.
On Tuesday night, White House officials sent an email to staff members telling them that they would start to leave their jobs after Jan. 4, as is the case when a new administration begins on Jan. 20.
But on Wednesday, as President Trump continued to insist he didn’t lose an election that he lost, officials sent a new email to the staff.
“Please disregard the below message. Updated information will be shared in the coming days,” read the second email, both of which were obtained by The New York Times.
The conflicting messages will probably create confusion for a staff that is already led by a president who refuses to acknowledge he lost the election, one who continues to try to find ways to upend the results.
On Tuesday night, an email that went out “regarding the departure process” from the White House Executive Office of the President. Under “Departure Dates” was guidance about staff members leaving their jobs on Jan. 4. A second paragraph gave instructions about the final payroll period.
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