Today I’m gonna…
I’m not getting a real job though…
When Biden Bits was posted for Monday, President Biden had tweeted 1 time. He added 4 tweets giving him a Monday Tweeting Total of 5 tweets and 0 retweets.
At the State of the Union; March 1st, 2022, President Biden said:
And tonight, I’m announcing that, this year, we will start fixing over 65,000 miles of highway and 1,500 bridges in disrepair.
White House.gov. 03/01/2022.
On March 2nd, 2022, President Biden offered remarks from Wisconsin where he said the same thing:
As I announced last night, this year we’re going to start fixing 65,000 miles of highway and 1,500 bridges in disrepair.
White House.gov. 03/02/2022.
Ahead of the State of the Union the White House published a fact-sheet; Background on President Biden’s Remarks on the Economy During His First State of The Union Address
Snip:
President Biden will also announce specific goals for implementation of his landmark Bipartisan Infrastructure law (BIL), a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s economic competitiveness that will strengthen supply chains and move goods to market faster and more efficiently, encouraging more companies to choose America. Over the next year:
White House.gov. 03/01/2022.
- States, territories, Tribes and local governments will start to improve 65,000 miles of roads and 1,500 bridges with federal funding, representing a 44% and 50% increase respectively from average annual improvement levels over the past six years.
The YouTube is 24 minutes and 45 seconds long. His full remarks can be found here.
His last two tweets for Monday came from the remarks he gave Friday to announce new actions against Russia for their invasion of Ukraine. YouTube is 8 minutes and 40 seconds long. His full remarks can be found here.
President Biden: On the humanitarian front, we’re working closely with the U.N. and humanitarian organizations to support the people of Ukraine who have been displaced by the violence in Ukraine. We’re providing — we’re providing tens of thousands of tons of human supplies — excuse me, humanitarian supplies — food, water, medicines — coming via truck and train every single day.
President Biden: And I also want to be clear though: We will make sure Ukraine has weapons to defend against an invading Russian force. We will — we will send money and food and aid to save the Ukrainian people. And I will welcome the Ukrainian refugees. We should welcome them here with open arms if they need access.
For Tuesday, March 15th, 2022, President Biden has received his daily brief. This afternoon he signs H.R. 2471, the “Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022,” into law. This evening; The President, The Vice President, and The First Lady deliver remarks at an event on Equal Pay Day to celebrate Women’s History Month. The Second Gentleman, the Secretary of Energy, the Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Director of National Intelligence, the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the Administrator of the Small Business Administration, and members of the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team attend.
H.R. 2471; Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022 summary:
Haiti Development, Accountability, and Institutional Transparency Initiative Act
This bill revises reporting and strategy requirements related to recovery and assistance efforts for Haiti.Specifically, the bill repeals existing reporting and strategy requirements related to earthquake recovery and economic assistance for Haiti.
Further, the bill directs the Department of State to undertake specific initiatives that prioritize and assess the protection and preservation of human rights, the promotion of press and assembly freedoms and the protection of journalists, anticorruption efforts, and a strategy of post-disaster and post-pandemic recovery and development efforts.
The State Department must also submit a report concerning the July 7, 2021, assassination of former Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.
Congress.gov. 01/13/2022.
H.R. 2471 passed the House, the first time on June 29th, 2021;
Passed/agreed to in House: Pursuant to section 8 of H. Res. 504, and the motion offered by Mr. McGovern, the following bills passed under suspension of the rules: H.R. 1500, as amended; H.R. 2471, as amended; H.R. 3261; H.R. 3283, as amended; and H.R. 3385, as amended; and the following resolutions were agreed to under suspension of the rules: H. Res. 186; and H. Res. 402, as amended.(consideration: CR H3258-3262; text: CR H3258-3260)
Congress.gov. 06/29/2021.
It passed the Senate by Voice Vote on 01/13/2022.
This next part is complicated:
03/09/2022 Resolving differences — House actions: On motion to agree in Senate amendment with amendment (remaining divisions) Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: 260 – 171, 1 Present (Roll no. 66).
Congress.gov. 03/09/2022.
03/09/2022 Resolving differences — House actions: On motion to agree in Senate amendment with amendment (divisions B, C, F, X, Z, titles 2 and 3 of division N) Agreed to by the Yeas and Nays: 361 – 69 (Roll no. 65).
On the same day the Senate; Resolving differences — House actions: On motion that the House agree with an amendment to the Senate amendment Agreed to by voice vote.
There was another vote in the Senate on March 10th, 2022, where the measure passed; yea’s 68, nay’s 31, and 1 Senator did not vote.
President Biden has tweeted 1 time so far for Tuesday…
The full Proclamation on National Equal Pay Day, 2022:
Equal pay is a matter of justice, fairness, and dignity — it is about living up to our values and who we are as a Nation. For over 25 years, Equal Pay Day has helped draw attention to gender-based pay disparities by highlighting how far into a new year a woman must work, on average, to earn what a man did in the previous year.
This year, Equal Pay Day falls on March 15, the earliest we have ever marked the occasion. The earlier that Equal Pay Day arrives, the closer our Nation has come to achieving pay fairness. But while we should celebrate the progress we have made, as I have said in the past, we should not be satisfied until Equal Pay Day is no longer necessary at all.
In 2020, the average woman working full-time, year-round, for wages or a salary earned 83 cents for every dollar paid to their average male counterpart. And once again, the disparities are even greater for Black, Native American, Latina, and certain subpopulations of Asian women when compared to white men. Disabled women also continue to experience significant disparities and make 80 cents for every dollar compared to men with disabilities. The pay gap reflects outright discrimination as well as barriers that women face in accessing good-paying jobs and meeting caregiving responsibilities — including a lack of affordable child care, paid family and medical leave, and fair and predictable scheduling — which often prevent women from joining and staying in the workforce.
Over the course of a career, the pay gap can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost earnings, particularly for women of color, significantly impacting retirement savings and uniquely burdening households led by single mothers.
The Biden-Harris Administration has moved quickly to deliver results for women and working families and to dismantle the barriers that women face in the workplace. In our first full year in office, we saw the largest calendar year decline in unemployment. We also saw the strongest economic growth in nearly 4 decades, rising wages, and an estimated nearly 40 percent decline in child poverty. We have turned the tide on women’s labor force participation, which the COVID-19 pandemic had pushed to a more than 30-year low. In addition, my Administration has taken key steps to address pay discrimination, including issuing an Executive Order directing the Office of Personnel Management to take appropriate steps to advance equal pay at Federal agencies. And I have raised the minimum wage for Federal contractors, which has significantly benefitted women — especially women of color — who are disproportionately represented in minimum-wage and low-wage jobs.
We can be proud of that progress — but there is more we need to do. My Administration is fighting to ensure that women have the free and fair choice to organize and collectively bargain for the wages and benefits they deserve and to access training for good-paying jobs in sectors where they have historically been underrepresented. We are working to eliminate anticompetitive barriers that keep women from bargaining for better pay and demanding dignity and respect in the workplace. I have continued to call on the Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would help mitigate sex-based pay discrimination while ensuring greater transparency and reporting of disparities in wages. And I am continuing to work with the Congress to pass critical legislation that would lower the cost of child care, elder care, home-based health care, and other major barriers to working families, while raising compensation for care workers, who are disproportionately women of color and who have been underpaid and undervalued for far too long.
If we are going to continue our record-breaking recovery and build a truly strong and competitive economy for the future, we have to address the barriers that have long held women back from full participation and fair treatment in the workforce. The founding promise of our Nation is that all people are created equal — and my Administration is committed to ensuring that all Americans have a fair and equal opportunity to get ahead, so that one day soon we can render Equal Pay Day a relic of the past.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 15, 2022, as National Equal Pay Day. I call upon all Americans to recognize the full value of women’s skills and their significant contributions to the labor force, acknowledge the injustice of wage inequality, and join efforts to achieve equal pay.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fourteenth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-two, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-sixth.
White House.gov. 03/14/2022.
The White House posted the following fact-sheet on the: Biden Harris Administration Announces Commitments to Advance Pay Equity and Support Women’s Economic Security
President Biden and Vice President Harris have long championed equal pay as a cornerstone of their commitment to ensuring all people have a fair and equal opportunity to get ahead. Closing gender and racial wage gaps is essential to building an equitable economy and addressing the barriers that have long hampered women from fully participating in the labor force. But we still have work to do. In 2020, the average woman working full-time, year-round earned 83 cents for every dollar paid to their average male counterpart. Compared with the average man working full-time, year-round, disparities are even greater for Black women, Native American women, and Latinas, as well as certain subpopulations of Asian women.
This Equal Pay Day, the Vice President is hosting a virtual summit, bringing together partners across the country who are taking critical steps to tackle pay discrimination, create good-paying jobs, and support families’ access to care.
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing new actions to promote women’s employment and support working families across the country. These actions will:
White House.gov. 03/15/2022.
• Advance pay equity for the Federal workforce. The Office of Personnel Management announced that they anticipate issuing a proposed regulation that will address the use of prior salary history in the hiring and pay-setting process for Federal employees, consistent with the President’s Executive Order on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce. Banning the use of prior salary history can help break the cycle of past arbitrary and potentially discriminatory pay that can follow women and workers of color from job to job, entrenching gender and racial pay gaps over time.
• Promote efforts to achieve pay equity for job applicants and employees of Federal contractors. President Biden will sign an Executive Order directing the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council to consider enhancing pay equity and transparency, including by limiting or prohibiting federal contractors from seeking and considering information about job applicants’ and employees’ existing or past compensation when making employment decisions, and appropriate accountability measures. The Department of Labor will consult with the FAR Council on the efficiency, economy, and effectiveness in Federal contracting that would be promoted by potential regulatory changes, and the most effective implementation strategy for any subsequent rulemaking.
• Strengthen pay equity audits by Federal contractors. The Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs issued a new directive clarifying federal contractors’ annual obligation to analyze their compensation practices. Conducting these pay equity audits helps address and prevent pay disparities based on gender, race, or ethnicity.
• Ensure equitable access to good-paying jobs. The Department of Labor issued a report analyzing the impact that women’s concentration in low-wage sectors – and their relative underrepresentation in many good-paying occupations – has on their overall economic security and gender and racial wage gaps. The report finds that, in 2019, Black women lost $39.3 billion and Hispanic women lost $46.7 billion in wages compared to white men due to differences in industry and occupation. This segregation intensified the COVID-19 pandemic’s disproportionate impact on women, in part due to the overrepresentation of women in hard-hit industries such as hospitality.
• Address discrimination against caregivers. Yesterday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published technical assistance on caregiver discrimination, addressing the circumstances under which discrimination against applicants and employees based on pandemic-related caregiving responsibilities may violate federal employment discrimination laws.
The actions announced today build on steps the Administration has taken to advance pay equity, including:
White House.gov. 03/15/2022.
• Provided immediate relief through the American Rescue Plan (ARP) to millions of women who have borne the brunt of the pandemic. This work includes: standing up a historic vaccination program that has fully vaccinated more than 215 million Americans; reopening schools; providing direct payments to individuals; expanding nutrition programs for families; providing paid leave tax credits for small and midsize employers; distributing the majority of emergency rental assistance to female-headed households; and expanding the Child Tax Credit, which last year helped reduce child poverty to its estimated lowest level in recorded American history.
• Helped keep child care providers open and boosted pay for child care workers. States have already delivered American Rescue Plan stabilization grants to more than 150,000 child care providers serving more than 5 million children and their families. One survey finds that 92% of providers receiving funds relied on them to help stay open and nearly half used them to repay debt incurred during the pandemic. Many states also used funds to help boost compensation of the child care workforce. For example, Minnesota is requiring providers to increase compensation, while North Carolina and Connecticut offered bonus payments to providers who increased compensation of the workforce. Increasing compensation for child care workershelps narrow gender and racial pay gaps, as more than nine in ten are women and more than four in ten are women of color. While ARP funds allowed child care programs to provide temporary bonuses, they need long-term funding asthe President has proposed to sustainably increase wages.
• Provided tax relief to help families with child care costs during the pandemic by delivering a historic increase in the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) to support millions of working families this tax season. The ARP increased the maximum CDCTC for a median income family with two children under age 13 by more than sixtimes—providing up to $8,000 towards child care expenses in 2021. It will reimburse most families for up to half of their child care expenses. And the ARP CDCTC is fully-refundable, helping lower-income parents fully benefit regardless of their tax liability. Even before the pandemic, families struggled to afford child care, forcing parents and especially mothers to forego higher paying jobs, work fewer hours, or take time out of the workforce, leading to lower pay over their career. The President has urged Congress to pass his plan for child care, which could lower child care costs for nine in ten families with young children.
• Increased the minimum wage to $15 per hour for Federal workers and contractors, benefiting manywomen and people of color. The President issued Executive Orders directing the Administration to work toward ensuring that employees working on federal contracts and federal employees earned a $15 per hour minimum wage. Those directives went into effect in January, raising the wages of about 370,000 federal employees and employees of federal contractors. In addition to helping the government do its work more efficiently, these directives take a step towards narrowing racial and gender disparities in income, as many low-wage workers are women and people of color. The order also eliminates the subminimum wage for workers with disabilities. The President has called on Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, so that American workers can have a job that delivers dignity, and to make greater strides towards pay equity.
• Signed into law the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Administration investments through this law will increase access to good-paying jobs, including for women, people of color, and members of other communities who are currently underrepresented in the sectors where these jobs will be created, such as transportation, clean energy, and broadband.The Department of Transportation and the Department of Labor signed a memorandum of understanding to promote the creation of good infrastructure and transportation jobs with a focus on equitable workforce development using funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
• Issued an Executive Order to promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility across the federal government – the nation’s largest employer – including by prioritizing efforts to close gender and racial wage gaps, address workplace safety and harassment, including in our national security workforce, and advance equity for LGBTQI+ public servants.
• Issued an Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy. This established the Administration’s policy of addressing anticompetitive behavior in labor markets, which can fall heavily on women and workers of color. The Order includes specific initiatives to promote competition in labor markets, including encouraging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to ban or limit non-compete agreements, and encouraging the FTC and the Department of Justice to strengthen antitrust guidance to prevent employers from collaborating to suppress wages or reduce benefits by sharing wage and benefit information with one another.
The daily press briefing is scheduled for 1:00 p.m. D.C., time.
President Biden is expected to sign H.R. 2471 at 2:15 p.m. D.C., time.
The Women’s History Month Event is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. D.C., time.
This is an Open Thread.
