At least $191 billion in pandemic unemployment benefits could have been improperly paid, with a “significant portion” attributable to fraud, according to a new estimate from the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General.
That’s up from the office’s projection last year of at least $163 billion in improper payments.
The updated estimate was released Wednesday as part of a House Ways and Means Committee hearing entitled, “The Greatest Theft of Taxpayer Dollars – Unchecked Unemployment Fraud.”
House Republicans, who gained control of the chamber last month, are highlighting the widespread fraud that permeated the Covid-19 relief programs that Congress enacted in the early years of the pandemic. The House Oversight Committee held a lengthy hearing last week about fraud in two pandemic business assistance measures, the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loan, as well as in the enhanced jobless benefits.
At the Ways and Means Committee hearing, GOP lawmakers repeatedly called out the size of the fraud, the loss to taxpayers and the trouble the theft has wrought on employers and Americans whose identities were stolen. Many, however, agreed with their Democratic peers that the enhanced jobless benefits were needed when the economytanked at the start of the pandemic.
“While many Americans who actually qualified for these benefits were left struggling to reclaim their benefits and their identity, upwards of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been stolen,” said Missouri Rep. Jason Smith, who chairs the committee.
The pandemic relief packages that created these programs in 2020 passed Congress with bipartisan support and were administered that year by the Trump administration.
The extent of the fraud in the pandemic jobless benefits program is not yet known, and estimates vary widely.
Inspector General Larry Turner told the committee that fraud accounts for at least $76 billion in improper payments, but stressed that the figure is likely to rise once the office has more data.
The Labor Department’s estimated improper payment rate does not include the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which Congress hastily created in 2020 and was the target of much of the fraud. The agency is expected to release an improper payment rate for that program by the end of the year, Turner said.
Improper payments consist of both fraud and incorrect benefit amounts paid to legitimate claimants.
The US Government Accountability Office last month pegged the fraud figure at more than $60 billion. The watchdog agency, however, warned that the estimate has limitations and should be interpreted with caution. The actual amount of pandemic unemployment benefits fraud may be “substantially higher.”
The GAO is working on a higher-end estimate, which should be released later this summer, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told the committee.
Both Turner and Dodaro noted that improper payments have long been a problem in the unemployment benefits system, which is administered separately by each state. They also criticized the Department of Labor and state agencies for not fully putting the watchdogs’ anti-fraud recommendations in place.
“If we can’t deal at the federal government and states level to reduce improper payments in normal times, then you’re bound to have problems when there are emergencies,” Dodaro said. “I’d urge this committee to continue their oversight to make sure the Labor Department and the states take action on our recommendations so that we’re much better prepared next time to deal with these emergency situations.”
In his State of the Union speech Tuesday, President JoeBiden called on Congress to beef up anti-fraud resources in an effort to find criminals and crack down on the schemes to steal relief money.
Fraud within the nation’s unemployment system skyrocketed after Congress enacted a historic expansion of the program in March 2020. State unemployment agencies were overwhelmed with record numbers of claims and relaxed some requirements in an effort to get the money out the door quickly to those who had lost their jobs.
The enhanced payments and lax controls quickly attracted criminals from around the world.
States and Congress subsequently tightened their verification requirements in an attempt to combat the fraud, particularly in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which allowed freelancers, gig workers and others to collect benefits for the first time.
A key component of the relief effort was a federal weekly supplement for out-of-work Americans. The jobless received a $600-a-week boost from April through July of 2020. Congress then revived the enhancement in late December 2020 but reduced it to $300 a week. That supplement expired in September 2021, though many states led by Republicans and one with a Democratic governor ended it earlier.
Lawmakers also created the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which extended payments for those who exhausted their regular state benefits. Both pandemic unemployment programs also ended by September 2021.
More than $888 billion in federal and state unemployment benefits were paid from the end of March 2020 through early September 2021, according to the Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General.
President Joe Biden brought his State of the Union populist economic messaging to Wisconsin on Wednesday, firing back at Republicans and highlighting US manufacturing in a preview of an expected 2024 argument in the battleground state.
Biden made clear that he was willing to continue the fight as he hit the road, reigniting the social safety net argument with Republicans that sparked one of the most memorable moments in Tuesday’s speech. The argument highlighted Biden’s attempts to shift his message away from the “extreme MAGA” and “mega-MAGA” talking points of the 2022 midterm election.
“Last night, I reported on the State of the Union: It is strong, it is strong,” Biden told the room of union workers at a LiUNA training facility in DeForest, Wisconsin, reiterating much of his economic messaging and highlighting key legislative accomplishments.
But as he quipped that he had a “spirited debate last night” with Republicans on Social Security and Medicare, Biden offered a new warning to the GOP.
“Look – a lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare. Well, let me just say this: It’s your dream, but I’m gonna have my veto pen make it a nightmare,” he said.
Republicans repeatedly heckled Biden during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, ignoring the occasional shushes from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In moments throughout the address, Republicans in the House chamber shouted at Biden, protesting his approach to a wide range of issues such as immigration, Social Security and Medicare spending and the debt ceiling.
‘Liar!’: Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupts Biden during State of the Union address
Biden said that some Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, “seemed shocked” when he highlighted their colleagues’ efforts to cut those social safety net programs, holding up a “brochure” with Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott’s plan to require all federal legislation – including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – to be authorized every five years. He referenced quotes on the matter from Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who received boos and hisses, and Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee.
“There’s a senator named Mike Lee who was also yelling, ‘Liar, liar, house on fire’ kind of stuff last night. … They played last night, something I didn’t even know existed, a video of him saying, ‘I’m here right now to tell you one thing you’ve probably never heard from a politician: It’ll be my objective to phase out Social Security,’” he said.
Biden continued, “Sounds pretty clear to me – how about you? But they (Republican lawmakers) sure didn’t like me calling him on it.”
Shortly after Biden’s remarks near Madison, PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff asked him if he was expecting the kind of reaction he got in the House chamber.
“From the folks that did it, I was,” Biden said. “The vast of majority of Republicans weren’t that way, but you know, there’s still a significant element of what I call the ‘MAGA Republicans.’”
The president told Woodruff that McCarthy “was gracious,” and so were “a lot of the members.”
As for last night’s “conversion” of some Republicans, he offered skepticism during his speech: “I sure hope that’s true. I’ll believe it when I see it when their budget’s laid down with the cuts they’re proposing. But looks like we negotiated a deal last night on the floor of the House of Representatives.”
Earlier in the speech, Biden attempted to make a broader argument for working together with GOP lawmakers, touting the successes of his first two years in office.
“Why can’t we do it again?” he asked.
“People sent us a clear message: Fighting for the sake of fighting gets us nowhere. We’re getting things done,” he said, before going on to draw clear arguments against his Republican colleagues.
And he again called on Congress to raise the nation’s debt limit during his earlier remarks, warning against the “chaos” he said Republicans are “suggesting.”
Biden also fired back at a television commentator he heard aboard Air Force One lamenting his focus on junk fees: “Junk fees may not matter to the wealthy people, but they matter of most folks like the home I grew up in. They add hundreds of dollars a month to make it harder to pay your bills or afford that family trip. I know how unfair it feels when a company overcharges you and think they can get away with it.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
Republicans grilled the social media executives – including former Twitter deputy counsel James Baker – over Twiter’s handling of the laptop story and broader complaints about censorship at the first high-profile hearing in front of the House Oversight Committee for the new Republican majority investigating President Joe Biden’s administration and family.
While Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk has suggested that the internal communications released as part of his so-called “Twitter files” show government censorship – suggesting Twitter acted “under orders from the government” when it suppressed the laptop story – the executives told Congress they did not receive any requests from the government to temporarily suppress the story.
Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth testified there was a lot of confusion over how to handle the story amid an increased emphasis on tackling misinformation – specifically from malign foreign actors – on their platform.
“It isn’t obvious what the right response is to a suspected but not confirmed cyberattack by another government on a presidential election,” Roth said. “I believe Twitter erred in this case because we wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2016.”
House Oversight Chairman James Comer – a Kentucky Republican who has launched a broad investigation into the Biden family’s business dealings – is probing the social media giant in the wake of Musk releasing internal communications from Twitter staff about the decision to temporarily block users from sharing the New York Post story in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election campaign season.
The “Twitter files” have fueled Comer’s belief that the government may have been involved in the suppression of the story.
“America witnessed a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and de-legitimized the existence of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents,” Comer said, adding that Twitter “worked hand-in-hand with the FBI to monitor the protected speech of Americans, receiving millions of dollars to do so.”
CNN has previously reported, however, that allegations the FBI told Twitter to suppress the story are unsupported, and a half-dozen tech executives and senior staff, along with multiple federal officials familiar with the matter, all denied any such directive was given in interviews with CNN.
“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” Baker said in his opening statement. “Even though many disagree with how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden matter, I believe that the public record reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully consistent with the First Amendment.”
The Twitter executives argued that the social media platform made mistakes in its handling of the New York Post story, but emphasized that the heightened focus on combating disinformation complicated the company’s decision-making process.
Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s former chief legal officer, testified that, looking back, Twitter should have immediately reinstated the New York Post’s account after the company reversed its decision to block the Hunter Biden story.
Roth said he personally disagreed with the decision to temporarily supress the laptop story, but said that the company’s judgment was colored by the “real Russian activities they we saw play out that year.”
But Republicans blasted the witnesses for suppressing the story because they thought it may have been a Kremlin effort to influence the 2020 election.
“You all led the American people to believe (it) was Russian disinformation, when in fact it was not,” Comer said. “This is something this committee should be concerned about.”
Rep. Dan Goldman, the New York freshman Democrat who was the lead counsel for the House’s 2019 impeachment inquiry into Trump, argued there were legitimate reasons for Twitter and ex-intelligence officials to suspect the laptop story was Russian disinformation.
For one, it was being pushed by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and the corruption claims overlapped with Russia’s previous disinformation operations. Goldman pointed out that Giuliani had coordinated some of his past anti-Biden efforts with a known Russian agent, who was later sanctioned by the Treasury Department for meddling in the 2020 election.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, said in his opening statement that Republicans were trying to “whip up” a scandal involving a private company rather than focusing on issues that matter to voters.
“The majority has called a hearing to revisit a two-year-old story about a private editorial decision by Twitter not to allow links to a single New York Post article made for a two-day period that had no discernible influence on anyone or anything” Raskin said. “Instead of letting this trivial pursuit go, my colleagues have tried to whip up a faux scandal about this two-day lapse in their ability to spread Hunter Biden propaganda on a private media platform. Silly does not even begin to capture this obsession.”
Navaroli argued Wednesday that Congress should really be focusing on “Twitter’s failure to act before January 6,” 2021.
“Twitter leadership bent and broke their own rules in order to protect some of the most dangerous speech on the platform” in the months leading up to January 6, Navaroli said.
In an effort to rebut the Republican criticisms, Democrats asked Navaroli about the Trump White House making requests to Twitter to take down tweets. Navaroli told the committee that she had heard the White House in 2019 flagged an expletive-laden tweet critical of then-President Donald Trump from model and TV personality Chrissy Teigen for removal.
Teigen, a prolific Twitter user, called Trump a series of expletives in the September 2019 tweet in response to Trump describing her as the singer John Legend’s “filthy mouthed wife.” Navaroli, who worked on Twitter’s safety policy team, told the committee she had heard about the White House request. Navaroli said she heard about the request from her supervisor.
Twitter did not remove the tweet. CNN has reached out to representatives for Trump for comment.
Democrats also featured Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to push back on the Republican criticisms of Twitter. The New York Democrat criticized Twitter for allowing misinformation against the LGBTQ community and people of color to continue – citing one specific example that inspired violent threats, including a bomb threat, at Boston Children’s Hospital over its care for transgender children.
Ocasio Cortez specifically referenced how the harassment followed a series of posts made by the Twitter account LibsofTikTok, which has shared a series of anti-LGBTQ messages with its followers. The congresswoman emphasized that those attacks were shared broadly by far-right Twitter accounts, and asked if the account was still active.
“Regrettably, yes it is,” Roth said.
The hearing marks the second-straight election where social media companies and the FBI have faced scrutiny for decisions made in the final weeks of a presidential election. After 2016, social media companies like Twitter were under fire for doing too little to police their platforms for misinformation campaigns, particularly from foreign governments like Russia.
Now they’re back in the hot seat for taking that policing too far, according to Republicans.
When the New York Post published its story on Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020, Twitter executives were hyper suspicious of anything that looked like foreign influence and were primed to act, even without direction from the government. Roth had spent two years meeting with the FBI and other government officials and was prepared for some kind of hack and leak operation.
For Republicans, the testimony of Twitter’s former executives gives them the opportunity to raise questions not just about the laptop story but other long-running conservative complaints about the social media company that Musk purchased last year. The Oversight Committee’s Republican ranks are full of the conference’s conservative hardliners who have complained about alleged suppression of conservative voices on Twitter.
GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and serves on the House Oversight panel, claimed that the former Twitter employees were “played by the FBI” and argued that Twitter executives looked for reasons to take down posts about the New York Post story about Hunter Biden.
Jordan has long claimed the FBI has been politicized, and his line of questioning underscores his approach to the Judiciary subcommittee he chairs that is designated to investigate the alleged weaponization of the federal government. House Oversight members have repeatedly yielded their time back to Jordan, who is widely known for his aggressive line of questioning.
“I think you guys wanted it to be taken down,” Jordan said.
Jordan suggested Twitter was duped by a group of former national security officials who wrote in a public letter that the emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop may have been fake and had “earmarks” of a Russian intelligence plot. Since then, news outlets have been able to verify some of the emails as authentic.
“The information operation was run on you guys,” Jordan said.
Roth said Wednesday that – despite GOP claims – he never believed the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation.
“I never held that belief,” Roth said, adding “I didn’t then and I don’t now.”
Twitter justified its decisions at the time by saying the article contained personally identifiable information and hacked materials – and that it’s against Twitter rules to spread that material on the platform.
Jordan and Comber both questioned Baker – who previously served as the FBI’s top lawyer – about whether he spoke with anyone at the FBI about the Hunter Biden laptop.
Baker said he did not recall speaking with anyone at the FBI, but also spoke carefully in his answer, with some lawyerly hedging, and did not offer a direct denial.
“To the best of my recollection, I did not talk to the FBI about the Hunter Biden story before that day,” Baker said, referring to when the New York Post’s account was restricted for posting about the laptop.
But Comer and Jordan were frustrated when they unsuccessfully tried to override Baker’s claims of attorney-client privilege in response to Jordan’s questions about the FBI’s interest in enforcement of Twitter’s policy or whether he suppressed documents while at Twitter.
Comer argued that Baker appeared under subpoena and that Congress “does not recognize the common law attorney client privilege.” Baker responded he tried to resolve this issue with Twitter ahead of time but defended his use of attorney-client privilege, saying, “I don’t have anything in writing that clears me in my ethical responsibilities to my former client with respect to answering questions that I think fall squarely within the attorney-client privilege.”
Other Republicans criticized the executives for their treatment of conservatives. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, railed against the Twitter executives for banning her account, one of several Republicans who was critical Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policy during Wednesday’s hearing.
Greene’s account was suspended last January for repeated violations of Twitter’s Covid-19 misinformation policy, the company said at the time. Her account was restored in November after Musk purchased Twitter.
Ahead of the hearing, Musk traveled to Capitol Hill and met with a number of House Republicans, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Comer. The Kentucky Republican said that Musk offered him tips on lines of questioning, though Comer declined to offer more details ahead of the hearing.
“We’re going to save it,” Comer said. “Thank God for Elon Musk.”
This story and headline have been updated with additional developments Wednesday.
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify that Navaroli testified that she heard about the request to delete the Chrissy Teigen tweet from her supervisor.
President Joe Biden delivered his second State of the Union address on Tuesday.
Here is a fact check of some of the claims from Biden and the Republican response by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
Biden claimed his administration cut the federal deficit by “more than $1.7 trillion.”
Facts First: Biden’s boast leaves out important context. It is true that the federal deficit fell by $1.7 trillion under Biden in the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, including a record $1.4 trillion drop in 2022 – but it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for this reduction. Biden did not mention that the primary reason the deficit fell so substantially was that it had skyrocketed to a record high under then-President Donald Trump in 2020 because of bipartisan emergency pandemic relief spending, then fell as expected when the spending expired as planned. Independent analysts say Biden’s own actions, including his laws and executive orders, have had the overall effect of adding to current and projected future deficits, not reducing those deficits.
Dan White, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics – an economics firm whose assessments Biden has repeatedly cited during his presidency – told CNN’s Matt Egan in October: “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, wrote in September that Biden’s actions will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits from 2021 through 2031, or $2.5 trillion if you don’t count the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill of 2021.
National Economic Council director Brian Deese wrote on the White House website in January that the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill “facilitated a strong economic recovery and enabled the responsible wind-down of emergency spending programs,” thereby reducing the deficit; David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds, told CNN in October that the Biden administration does deserve credit for the recovery that has pushed the deficit downward. And Deese correctly noted that Biden’s signature legislation, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, is expected to bring down deficits by more than $200 billion over the next decade.
Still, the deficit-reducing impact of that one bill is expected to be swamped by the deficit-increasing impact of various additional bills and policies Biden has approved.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden touted American small business applications.
Facts First: This is true. There were about 5.4 million business applications in 2021, the highest number since 2005 (the first year for which the federal government released this data for a full year), and about 5.1 million business applications in 2022. Not every application turns into a real business, but the number of “high-propensity” business applications – those deemed to have a high likelihood of turning into a business with a payroll – also hit a record in 2021 and saw its second-highest total in 2022.
Former President Donald Trump’s last full year in office, 2020, also set a then-record for total and high propensity applications. There are various reasons for the pandemic-era boom in entrepreneurship, which began after millions of Americans lost their jobs in early 2020. Among them: some newly unemployed workers seized the moment to start their own enterprises; Americans had extra money from stimulus bills signed by Trump and Biden; interest rates were particularly low until a series of rate hikes that began in the spring of 2022.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden touted low unemployment rates.
Facts First: Biden’s claims are accurate.
The Black or African American unemployment rate was 5.4% in January 2023, just above the record low of 5.3% set in August 2019. (This data series goes back to 1972.) The rate was 9.2% in January 2021, the month Biden took office.
The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate was 4.5% in January 2023, not too far from the record low of 4.0% that was set in September 2019 – though the 4.5% rate in January 2023 was a jump from the 4.1% rate in December 2022. (This data series goes back to 1973.) The rate was 8.5% in January 2021.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden criticized the fiscal management of former President Donald Trump’s administration.
Facts First: Biden’s claim is correct. The national debt, now more than $31 trillion, increased by just under $8 trillion during Trump’s four years in office, in part because of Trump’s major tax cuts. It’s important to note, though, that some of the increase in the debt during the Trump era was because of the trillions in emergency Covid-19 pandemic relief spending that passed with bipartisan support. The national debt spiked in the first half of 2020 after increasing gradually during Trump’s first three years in office, and because of spending required by safety-net programs that were created by previous presidents. A significant amount of spending under any president is the result of decisions made by their predecessors.
Charles Blahous, a researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University who authored the 2021 paper “Why We Have Federal Deficits,” wrote that the impact of recent legislation on the long-term structural fiscal imbalance is dwarfed by the creation of Medicare and Medicaid and increases to Social Security, all of which occurred between 1965 and 1972.
“Despite all the political rhetoric expended today to cast blame for skyrocketing federal deficits on either the Joseph R. Biden Jr. administration or the Donald J. Trump administration, on either congressional Democrats or congressional Republicans, the largest drivers of the structural federal fiscal imbalance were enacted roughly a half-century ago,” Blahous wrote.
From CNN’s Katie Lobosco and Daniel Dale
Biden claimed that a new law, the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, will produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
Facts First: Biden’s prediction about future job creation is obviously beyond the scope of a fact check. But his claim about companies having announced $300 billion in manufacturing investments during his presidency is accurate; the White House provided CNN with a list of these publicly announced investments. (It’s worth noting that companies sometimes end up investing less than they initially announce.)
Facts First: This is true. The unemployment rate was 3.4% in January 2023, the lowest figure since the rate also hit 3.4% in May 1969. The unemployment rate was 6.3% in January 2021, the month Biden took office.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden, speaking about the Inflation Reduction Act, said:
Facts First:This claim needs context. While Inflation Reduction Act tax credits will help save families money on their energy bills, it could take years for EV tax credits to become fully available.
Biden’s claim about energy savings is similar to an estimate from clean electricity nonprofit Rewiring America – which estimated last year that a US household could save $1,800 per year if they installed electric heat pumps to heat their water and heat and cool their air, replaced a gas car with an EV, and installed solar.
Ultimately, new electric vehicles will be eligible for up to $7,500. But there’s a big catch: in order to qualify for these tax credits, the vehicles’ final assembly must happen in North America. At the insistence of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the IRA has strict requirements for how many electric vehicle and EV battery components must be made in the US or countries that have a free trade deal with the US.
The US Treasury Department is expected to issue guidance on critical minerals and batteries in March. But the complex requirements for these tax credits could take years to fully kick in as companies must move their supply chain to North America.
Starting this year, 40% or more of the critical minerals used to create a vehicle’s battery must be extracted or processed in the United States, or a country that has a free trade deal with the US, for the vehicle to qualify for tax credits. That number will gradually rise to 80% of the battery minerals by 2027 and reach 100% by 2029.
This provision passed because Manchin wanted the US to compete with China on electric vehicles, and it will eventually have the impact of bringing more EV and battery jobs to the US or countries it has a free trade agreement with. The measure has already resulted in several companies announcing new factories in the US.
But it’s also a complex provision that will take time to implement, likely meaning vehicle manufacturers won’t be able to offer the credit in the next couple years as they move their supply chains to the US and North America.
From CNN’s Ella Nilsen
In calling to revive the Democrats’ enhancement of the child tax credit in 2021, Biden pointed to the fact that the provision helped slash the child poverty rate that year.
Facts First: This is true. The child poverty rate was cut nearly in half in 2021, and the expanded child tax credit was the major factor. The enhancement accounted for the bulk of the reduction.
The child poverty rate fell from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021, according to the US Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which takes into account certain non-cash government assistance, tax credits and needed expenses.
That’s a reduction of 46%, sending the rate to the lowest level since the supplemental measure began in 2009.
The child tax credit – both the traditional credit and the enhancement – reduced the child poverty rate from 9.2% to 5.2%, or 43%, according to the Census Bureau. Without the beefed-up credit, the rate would have only fallen from 9.2% to 8.1%, or 12%.
As part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act that passed in March 2021, Congress enhanced the child tax credit for one year, beefing up payments to $3,600 for each child up to age 6 and $3,000 for each one ages 6 through 17, for lower- and middle-income families. For the first time, half the credit was paid in monthly installments from July through December, while parents could claim the other half when they filed their 2021 taxes this year.
Also, more low-income parents became eligible for the full amount because lawmakers made it fully refundable.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
Biden touted progress against inflation.
Facts First: Biden’s claim is correct. He didn’t mention, however, that gas prices are still significantly higher today than they were when he took office. And it’s important to note that presidential policy has a limited impact on gas prices, which are determined by a complex global interplay of supply and demand factors.
As of the day of the State of the Union, the national average for a gallon of regular gas was $3.457, per data from the American Automobile Association. That was indeed down more than $1.50 from a record high of $5.016 in mid-June. But it was still up from a national average of $2.393 on Biden’s Inauguration Day in January 2021.
Biden has taken steps to lower gas prices. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, which contributed to a spike in gas prices, the Biden administration released 180 million barrels of oil from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The administration also issued an emergency waiver that allowed the sale of E15 gasoline, a blend that contains 15% ethanol, last summer. A White House official noted Wednesday that the price of gas today is lower than it was when the Russian invasion began.
But as we regularly note – whether a president is boasting about a decline in gas prices or his critics are blasting him for an increase in gas prices – presidential policy is not a primary factor in the price of gasoline.
“Similar to why the primary reason for rise in price isn’t due to the President, the same holds true for declines,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told CNN in a message this week. Asked about the role of the president in the decline since the peak of mid-2022, De Haan said: “While the president may have had a minimal role in lowering prices through easing regulation, and occasionally using waivers, the bulk of the decline is simply due to supply and demand changes, and Russian oil and refined products that are still being exported, providing needed supply to the global market.”
De Haan said Biden’s releases of oil from the strategic reserve “put some downward pressure on the price of oil, but I would not call it materially significant.”
The White House official responded Wednesday by pointing to an analysis from the administration’s Treasury Department that estimated that the releases of reserve oil by the US and its allies could have reduced the price of gas by 40 cents a gallon.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
Biden claimed to have created more jobs “in two years than any president has ever created in four years.”
Facts First: Biden’s number is accurate: the US economy added 12.1 million jobs between Biden’s first full month in office, February 2021, and January 2023. That number is indeed higher than the number of jobs added in any previous four-year presidential term. However, it’s important to note that Biden took office in an unusual pandemic context that makes meaningful comparison to other periods very difficult.
Biden became president less than a year after the economy shed nearly 22 million jobs over two months, March and April 2020, because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The jobs recovery then began immediately after that, under then-President Donald Trump, but there was still an unprecedented hole to fill when Biden took office.
Biden is free to argue that his stimulus legislation and other policies have helped the country gain jobs faster than it otherwise would have. (As always, it’s debatable precisely how much credit the president deserves for job-creation.) Nonetheless, it is clear that there could only be such an extraordinary number of jobs added in 2021 and 2022 because there was such an extraordinary number of jobs lost in early 2020.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale
While touting his efforts to stand up to authoritarian leaders in China and Russia, Biden painted himself as a champion of freedom and inaccurately claimed that democracy was spreading under his watch.
Facts First:This claim is at odds with data from Freedom House, a leading nonprofit that tracks democracy and human rights around the world. They say democracy has been in global decline over the past few years.
The group’s most recent annual report on the state of global democracy, released in February 2022, was aptly titled, “The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule.” Their 2021 report was called, “Democracy under Siege.”
Getting into the data, Freedom House says 60 countries experienced democratic backsliding in the previous year, while only 25 countries improved their position. The group highlighted backsliding in Sudan, Nicaragua and Afghanistan, where the Taliban reclaimed power when Biden withdrew all American troops from the country.
Freedom House’s most recent report is one year old, with a new report likely coming out soon. And to be fair, Biden could merely be expressing his view that autocratic regimes have lost prestige on the world stage.
But the trends appear to be holding. For instance, after Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last year, he initiated a domestic crackdown that rolled back the few remaining civil liberties that existed in Russia.
Freedom House is largely funded by grants from the US government.
From CNN’s Marshall Cohen
Biden highlighted his administration’s work to build more electric vehicle charging stations.
Facts First:This is more of a promise than a fact, but even so, it needs context. For a few reasons, it’s questionable whether the Biden administration will be able to meet its goal of installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations on US roads.
Installing 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations has long been one of Biden’s goals. The president initially proposed Congress spend $15 billion to make it a reality, but just half of that – $7.5 billion – passed as part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Though the administration has said that could be backfilled by private investment, that change in funding could hinder the administration’s ability to meet the goal. States can now unlock more than $900 million in funding for fiscal years 2022 and 2023, which the administration estimated will “help build” chargers across approximately 53,000 miles of US highways. Over the next five years, the full $5 billion will be spent to build out a network of EV chargers on major highways. Another pot of $2.5 billion in grant funding is also available for states to apply to.
There is also a wide range in how much different types of chargers cost, and individual states have a lot of leeway in deciding what kinds of chargers will go on their roads. DC fast chargers can charge a car to mostly full in 20 minutes to an hour and are meant to go on major highways and roads. Another kind of charger known as an L2 charger can take hours to charge a car to full. But DC fast chargers are much more expensive, costing around $100,000 compared to around $6,000 for an L2, Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior resident fellow at the think tank Third Way, has told CNN.
In an interview with climate publication Grist last year, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said that ultimately the number of EV chargers on the roads “really depends on how the states decide to mix the fast chargers and different types of technology.”
From CNN’s Ella Nilsen
In another claim about the economy, Biden claimed to have created “800,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs.”
Facts First: Biden’s figures are correct; however, the “good-paying” qualifier is subjective and can’t be independently verified for each of those 800,000-plus positions.
The US economy added 803,000 manufacturing jobs from Biden’s first full month in office, February 2021, through January 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The job growth rate during Biden’s first two years in office was 6.58%. The last time a comparable growth rate was higher was in 1979.
The average hourly wage in the manufacturing industry was $31.57 for all employees and $25.84 for production and non-supervisory positions in January, preliminary BLS data shows. Nationally, the average hourly wage was a projected $33.03. From CNN’s Alicia Wallace
Biden said 30 million workers had to sign non-compete agreements, illustrating his point with an example of a cashier at a burger place being unable to cross the street to take a similar job at a restaurant that pays more money.
Facts First: This is partially true. Millions of rank-and-file employees and independent contractors, in addition to business executives across industries, have signed non-compete agreements that critics say suppress competition, wages and entrepreneurship. The Federal Trade Commission in January proposed a rule to ban employers from imposing those agreements on workers and to rescind all existing noncompete agreements. But are burger chain workers really subject to those noncompete agreements? It’s not likely – not anymore, anyway.
An investigation in Washington state in 2017 revealed that several fast-food chains, including Arby’s, Auntie Anne’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Carl’s Jr., Cinnabon, Jimmy John’s, and McDonald’s, had been enforcing no-poaching rules that prevented employees from moving between franchises within the same chain – not, as Biden suggested, between rival chains. By 2018, all those chains agreed to end their no-poach practices at roughly 25,000 restaurants nationwide.
From CNN’s David Goldman
Biden also addressed inflation.
Facts First: Biden’s claims are true that inflation has come down, but take home pay has only recently started to see gains over inflation.
Food prices were up 10.4% in December 2022 from the year-before period, according to the latest available Consumer Price Index report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Food price inflation, as measured by the CPI, has slowly declined since hitting a 40-year high of 11.4% in August 2022.
Overall inflation, as measured by the CPI, was 6.5% in December 2022. The headline inflation rate has declined for six consecutive months since hitting a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022.
The CPI, which measures the average change in the prices over time of a basket of consumer goods, is one of several closely watched inflation barometers that also have showed price increases to have moderated in recent months. Within CPI and other indexes, there are various measures to gauge inflation. Most notably, “core” inflation excludes items with more volatile price increases.
Biden’s claim that take-home pay has gone up is true if you start the calculation seven months ago; “real” wages, which take inflation into account, started rising in mid-2022 as inflation slowed. However, real wages are lower today than they were both a full year ago and at the beginning of Biden’s presidency in January 2021. That’s because inflation was so high in 2021 and the beginning of 2022.
There are various ways to measure real wages. Real average hourly earnings declined 1.7% between December 2021 and December 2022, while real average weekly earnings (which factors in the number of hours people worked) declined 3.1% over that period.
From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Alicia Wallace
Biden once again took aim at Republicans in Congress over Social Security and Medicare, accusing some of them of wanting to make changes to the programs. His remarks elicited cheers from Democrats but loud jeers from Republicans, including GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who shouted “liar.”
Facts First: Biden was referring to Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott, who last year issued “An 11 Point Plan to Rescue America.” As the president said, Scott’s proposal would sunset all federal legislation – including the two entitlement programs – every five years and require Congress to pass them again. Another GOP senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, last year suggested while campaigning for a third term that entitlement programs, like Social Security and Medicare, should be shifted to discretionary spending that Congress has to approve annually.
Scott’s plan didn’t make it far. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly dismissed it, also saying that the GOP will not include in its agenda a bill that sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.
Also, the Republican Study Committee last year put out a budget plan that calls for making several changes to Social Security and Medicare that would amount to cutting the programs’ benefits for future senior citizens.
For instance, the conservative lawmakers proposed raising Medicare’s eligibility age to be in line with the normal retirement age for Social Security, which currently is 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later, and then indexing it to life expectancy. But they would also raise the normal retirement age for Social Security, as well as trim benefits for higher-income earners.
Biden has repeatedly said that GOP lawmakers want to cut Social Security and Medicare. The drama has flared up again in recent weeks amid the debt ceiling debate. House Republicans are demanding that lifting the borrowing cap be tied to spending reductions.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, however, reiterated in remarks on Monday that “cuts to Medicare and Social Security are off the table” in the debt ceiling discussions.
From CNN’s Tami Luhby
In the official Republican rebuttal to the State of the Union, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested the Biden administration and Democrats have largely called to defund the police.
Facts First: While some Democrats have joined calls for a radical shift in police policy, including a reduction in police budgets, Biden and top congressional Democrats have not supported and even rejected calls to “defund the police.”
It’s worth noting that the slogan “defund the police” means different things to different activists – from the dissolution of police forces to partial reductions in funding.
That being said, Biden in particular has explicitly stated his opposition to abolishing or defunding the police several times.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden told CBS, “No, I don’t support defunding the police.” Rather, he said, “I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness. And, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”
Attacking Biden and Democrats on police funding is not a new tactic from Republicans. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, several ads from Republican candidates attempted to create the inaccurate impression that the Democratic candidates they were targeting supported defunding the police. Some of the Republican ads simply made things up. Other ads falsely described bills the Democratic candidates have supported. Still other ads tried guilt by association, noting that the candidates have supporters who have called to defund the police but not mentioning that the candidates themselves rejected defunding the police.
From CNN’s Tara Subramaniam
Sanders claimed that after Trump left office, Biden inherited “a world that was stable and at peace.”
Facts First:It’s obviously ridiculous to claim that there was world peace when Trump’s tenure ended, and calling the world “stable” is a subjective claim.
When Trump left the White House in 2021, there were still plenty of wars ongoing around the world – albeit not as many as under previous presidents, and very few of those conflicts directly involved American armed forces.
For instance, Trump did not end the war in Afghanistan, which was still ongoing when Biden took office. There were thousands of US troops in the country when Biden was sworn in, before he withdrew them all in 2021.
The long-running Yemeni civil war was still happening when Trump left office. (Under Trump and Obama, the US supported Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in the war through arms sales. Biden ended that policy in 2021.)
The Syrian civil war was also ongoing, though at a more isolated level than in past years. And a war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region was in full swing. The drug war in Mexico was still leading to deaths and disappearances.
Additionally, the war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region was still unresolved. The war began in 2014, but had settled into a “frozen conflict,” with Russian proxies occupying a large chunk of the eastern Donbas region, and Ukrainian troops dug into trenches. It escalated into a full-blown war when Russia invaded in February 2022, after Biden had already taken office.
From CNN’s Marshall Cohen
Sanders said that the US is experiencing the “worst border crisis in American history.”
Facts First: It’s true that the Biden administration is facing record levels of apprehensions along the border, but Democrats and Republicans have defined the crisis on their own terms.
In fiscal year 2022, US Border Patrol encountered migrants more than 2.2 million times attempting to unlawfully cross the US southern border, according to federal data, marking a new record.
Those figures include repeat crossers and reflect shifting migration patterns. For example, there has been an increasing number of Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Haitians journeying to the US-Mexico border amid deteriorating conditions at homeexacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. That’s posed a unique challenge to the Biden administration because the US is largely limited from removing some of those nationalities.
Republicans and Democrats each define crises differently. Republicans have argued that the increase in migrants at the border is evidence of an “open border” under President Joe Biden despite the administration still using a Trump-era Covid restriction, whereas Democrats have described it as a humanitarian crisis reflective of the poor conditions at home. From CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez
Facts First: This is partially true, but it lacks context. The US economy was bouncing back from the steepest job losses America had ever faced from the Covid shutdowns at the beginning of the pandemic.
The economy shrank at an annual adjusted rate just shy of 30% in the second quarter of 2020, the sharpest economic contraction on record.
The economy quickly recovered that summer, growing at an annualized rate of 35.3% in the third quarter of 2020, the fastest pace on record. But the pace of economic growth began to stall in the winter before Biden took office.
America’s gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.9% in the fourth quarter of 2020 and America lost jobs in December 2020. Biden’s stimulus bill helped juice the economy in 2021, although that helped stoke an inflation crisis caused in part by pandemic-related supply chain disruptions and exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – a war that continues to impact the global economy to this day.
From CNN’s David Goldman
This story has been updated with additional information.
Bed Bath & Beyond, America’s quintessential home furnishings’ chain, is fighting to stay in business.
The company has avoided a bankruptcy filing for now by completing a complex stock offering that will give it an immediate injection of $225 million in funds and a pledge for $800 million in the future to pay down its current debt load.
Bed Bath & Beyond is also shrinking to save money. The company said it plans to close around 400 of its roughly 760 Bed Bath & Beyond stores. It will keep open its most profitable stores in key markets.
The moves are a lifeline for Bed Bath & Beyond. They will give the company time to pursue a turnaround without a bankruptcy filing, which can be costly, out of its control and wind up in a liquidation.
“They are essentially doing a reorganization outside of bankruptcy court,” said Daniel Gielchinsky, an attorney at DGIM Law specializing in bankruptcy. “Slow the cash burn is the name of the game for the next 6 to 12 months and allow the company to pivot into a profitable position.”
It will be a complicated turnaround and the company’s future remains uncertain. If Bed Bath & Beyond comes up short in the current version of its turnaround plan, the likelihood of a liquidation increases.
Here’s how Bed Bath & Beyond, once a retailer pioneer, veered to the edge of bankruptcy and where it turns next.
Bed Bath & Beyond had been a crown jewel of the era of so-called “category killers”: chains that dominated a category of retail, such as Toys “R” Us, Circuit City and Sports Authority. Those companies, too, ultimately filed for bankruptcy.
Bed Bath & Beyond became known for pots and pans, towels and bedding stacked from the floor to the ceilings at its cavernous stores — and for its ubiquitous 20%-off coupons. The blue-and-white coupons became something of a pop culture symbol, and millions of Americans wound up stashing them away in their cars, closets and basements.
The retailer attracted a broad range of customers by selling name brands at cut-rate prices. Brands coveted a spot on Bed Bath & Beyond’s shelves, knowing it would lead to big sales. Plus, the open-store layout encouraged impulse buying: Shoppers would come in to buy new dishes and walk out with pillows, towels and other items.
Stores were a fixture for shoppers around the winter holidays and during the back-to-school and college seasons, and Bed Bath & Beyond also had a strong baby and wedding registry business.
Founded in 1971 by two veterans of discount retail in Springfield, New Jersey, the chain of small linen and bath stores — then called Bed ‘n Bath — first grew around the northeast and in California selling designer bedding, a new trend at the time. Unlike department stores, it didn’t rely on sales events to draw customers.
“We had witnessed the department store shakeout and knew that specialty stores were going to be the next wave of retailing,” co-founder Leonard Feinstein reportedly said in 1993. “It was the beginning of the designer approach to linens and housewares and we saw a real window of opportunity.”
In 1987, the company changed its name to Bed Bath & Beyond to reflect its expanded merchandise and bigger “superstores.” The company went public in 1992 with 38 stores and around $200 million in sales.
By 2000, those figures leaped to 241 stores and $1.1 billion in sales. The 1,000th Bed Bath & Beyond store opened in 2009, when the chain had reached $7.8 billion in sales.
The company was something of an iconoclast. It spent little on advertising, relying instead on print coupons distributed in weekly newspapers to attract customers.
“Why not just tell the customer that we’ll give you a discount on the item you want — and not the one that we want to put on sale? We’ll mail a coupon, and it will be a lot cheaper,” Bed Bath & Beyond co-founder Warren Eisenberg, now 92, said in a 2020 New York Times interview.
The chain was known for giving autonomy to store managers to decide which products to stock, allowing them to customize their individual stores, and for shipping products directly to stores instead of a central warehouse.
But as brick-and-mortar began to give way to e-commerce, Bed Bath & Beyond was slow to make the transition — a misstep compounded by the fact that home decor is one of the most commonly bought categories online.
“We missed the boat on the internet,” Eisenberg said in a recent Wall Street Journal interview.
Online shopping weakened the allure of Bed Bath & Beyond’s fan-favorite coupons, too, because consumers could find plenty of cheaper alternatives on Amazon or browse a wider selection on sites like Wayfair
(W).
It wasn’t just Amazon and online shopping that sank Bed Bath & Beyond, however.
Walmart
(WMT), Target
(TGT) and Costco
(COST) have grown over the past decade, and they have been able to draw Bed Bath & Beyond customers with lower prices and a wider array of merchandise. Discount chains such as HomeGoods and TJ Maxx and have also undercut Bed Bath & Beyond’s prices.
Without the differentiators of the lowest prices or widest selection, Bed Bath & Beyond’s sales stagnated from 2012 to 2019.
The company was hit hard during the pandemic, closing stores temporarily during 2020 while rivals remained open. Sales sunk 17% in 2020 and 15% in 2021.
What’s more, Bed Bath & Beyond has rotated through several different executives and turnaround strategies in recent years.
Former Target executive Mark Tritton took the helm in 2019 with backing from investors and a bold new strategy. He scaled back coupons and inventory from national brands in favor of Bed Bath & Beyond’s own private-label brands.
But this change alienated customers who were loyal to big brands. The company also fell behind on payments to vendors and stores did not have enough merchandise to stock shelves. Tritton left as CEO in 2022.
As of late November the company had 949 stores, including 762 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and 137 buybuyBaby stores.
It said Tuesday that it will ultimately have about half that number – 360 Bed Bath & Beyond stores and 120 buybuyBaby locations.
Bed Bath & Beyond will close stores that drain the most cash out of its business.
But the closures will mean Bed Bath & Beyond will give up on stores that brought in $1.2 billion in annual sales, Michael Lasser, an analyst at UBS, said in a note to clients Tuesday. Bed Bath & Beyond will recapture a portion of those sales from its other stores and online, Lasser said, but the majority will go to other retailers.
But, to survive, the company needs to grow sales at its remaining stores. Otherwise, too much of Bed Bath & Beyond’s revenue will go toward repaying debt that it won’t be able to turn a profit.
Reversing sales declines won’t be easy given challenges with waning customer demand, online traffic and rising competition in Bed Bath & Beyond product categories, Lasser said. Bed Bath & Beyond will have to overcome its significant hurdles to become a healthy, profitable company.
Bankruptcy lawyer Daniel Gielchinsky, however, said it was an encouraging sign that Bed Bath & Beyond was able to raise enough cash through a public offering to stay afloat. The offering was reportedly backed by investment firm Hudson Bay Capital. (Hudson Bay did not respond to a CNN Business request for comment.)
Still, liquidators will be watching closely, he said, eager to pounce.
“They are assuredly waiting on the sidelines to dismantle the company at the ready.”
David Hasselhoff walked daughter Taylor Hasselhoff done the aisle last weekend.
Hasselhoff married her fiancé Madison Fiore in Escondido, California.
“It was so great being able to bring everybody together from our families and friends, and have everybody in the same room,” she told People of their wedding, adding that guests traveled from all over the world to attend.
The father and daughter walked down the aisle to “Bittersweet Symphony” and the newlyweds later later danced their first dance to “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” performed by a live band.
Hasselhoff revealed she was engaged in December 2021, writing on Instagram, “If someone told me I would meet my future fiancé on a dating app, I’d say bet! Madison, you are my best friend and soulmate & I absolutely cannot wait to spend the rest of my life with you. You are my rock, my light and now fiancé! We did it baby!! I LOVE YOU!!” she wrote on Instagram alongside pictures of the couple surrounded by rose petals.
The two are now heading off to their honeymoon in Costa Rica.
Recent telescope data revealed that a small planet in the far reaches of our solar system has a dense ring round it. And scientists are baffled as to why.
The planet, Quaoar, is one of roughly 3,000 small planets that orbit the sun beyond Neptune, and at 690 miles (1,110-kilometers) wide, it’s about the seventh largest, with Pluto and Eris ranking as the biggest.
Observations of Quaoar made between 2018 and 2021 revealed that the planet has a ring sitting farther away from it than scientists previously believed to be possible, according to a news release from the European Space Agency, which used ground-based telescopes and a new space-based telescope called Cheops to collect the data.
Based on conventional thinking, all the material that makes up Quaoar’s dense ring should have condensed and formed a small moon. But it didn’t.
“Early results suggest that the frigid temperatures at Quaoar may play a role in preventing the icy particles from sticking together but more investigations are needed,” according to the news release.
Before these new observations of Quaoar, scientists largely believed that it was impossible for planets to form rings beyond a certain distance. It’s a generally accepted rule of celestial mechanics that material in orbit around a planet will form a spherical object — or a moon — if it orbits at a far enough range away from the planet. But that moon will be ripped apart if it moves closer than what’s called the “Roche limit,” a point at which the planet’s tidal forces would be stronger than the gravity holding the moon together.
All the rings around Saturn, for example, lie inside of the planet’s Roche limit. What’s puzzling about Quaoar, however, is that its ring lies well beyond the planet’s Roche limit, in an area where the material should form a moon.
“As a result of our observations, the classical notion that dense rings survive only inside the Roche limit of a planetary body must be thoroughly revised,” said Giovanni Bruno of INAF’s Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, Italy, in a statement.
Collecting the data that revealed Quaoar’s puzzling ring was in itself a cause for celebration, according to ESA. Because of the planet’s small size and distance from Earth, researchers wanted to observe it using an “occultation” — a means of observing a planet by waiting for it to be essentially backlit by a star, illuminating its silhouette.
That can be an extremely difficult process, according to ESA, because the telescope, planet and star must all be in perfect alignment. This observation was made possible by the space agency’s recent efforts to provide an unprecedentedly detailed map of the stars.
ESA also used Cheops, which was launched in 2019. Cheops typically studies exoplanets, or bodies that lie outside of Earth’s solar system. But for this instance, it set its sights on the nearer target of Quaoar, which orbits the sun even farther than Neptune — about 44 times farther than Earth’s orbit.
“I was a little skeptical about the possibility to do this with CHEOPS,” said Isabella Pagano, the director of the INAF’s Astrophysical Observatory of Catania, in a statement.
But it worked. And Cheops’ observation marked the first ever of its kind — an occulation of one of the most distant planets in our solar system by a space-based telescope, according to ESA.
Researchers then compared data collected by Cheops with observations by Earth-based telescopes, leading to their surprising revelation.
“When we put everything together, we saw drops in brightness that were not caused by Quaoar, but that pointed to the presence of material in a circular orbit around it. The moment we saw that we said, ‘Okay, we are seeing a ring around Quaoar,’” said Bruno Morgado, a professor at The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, who led the analysis, in a statement.
Theoreticians — scientists who are experts in various theories — are now at work attempting to surmise how Quaoar’s ring survived, according to ESA.
The spectacle of Biden smiling and offering a pointed riposte through multiple rounds of heckling from some House Republicans was, in many ways, an apt illustration of his presidency and a useful preview of his likely 2024 candidacy.
A majority of Americans say he hasn’t accomplished much, many Democrats aren’t thrilled at the prospect of him running for reelection and he faces clear disdain from most Republicans.
But Biden powered through. Delivering what was widely viewed as a test run for his reelection announcement, Biden claimed credit for progress made during his first two years in office while stressing the job isn’t finished.
He faced sometimes-unruly Republicans, with whom he spiritedly sparred from the podium on spending cuts. The feisty display drew cheers inside the White House and offered the best preview to date of the energy Biden hopes to bring to the campaign trail soon.
Pelosi says this is the real reason GOP members were heckling Biden
The speech carried a strain of populism rooted in strengthening the middle class – vintage Biden, but delivered at a pivotal moment for his political future.
No president enters his State of the Union wanting to recite a laundry list of accomplishments and proposals, but – almost inevitably – the speech often veers in that direction. Biden’s was no different, even as the president sought to tie everything together with a refrain of “finish the job” – a phrase that appeared 12 times in his prepared text.
Rather than tout any one accomplishment, however, Biden hoped to address the national mood, one that remains downbeat even as the economy improves and the country attempts to return to normal amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Here are six takeaways from Biden’s State of the Union:
In a room full of elected officials, identifying an adult shouldn’t be difficult. But heading into Tuesday’s speech, both Republican leaders and Biden’s team telegraphed a desire to act as the night’s “adult in the room” – the mature voice seeking common ground and lowering the temperature.
For the first 45 minutes of Biden’s address, that appeared to be the play for both sides. But when Biden began castigating Republicans for plans that would slash Social Security and Medicare, the decorum dropped.
His accusations seemed to provoke Republicans, who lobbed accusations of “liar” from their seats in the chamber.
That in itself wasn’t unprecedented. What happened next was rarer: Biden leaned into the opening, responding and engaging his hecklers.
“I enjoy conversion,” he quipped, suggesting they were in agreement on the need to protect the programs for senior citizens.
For Biden, House Republicans act as a useful foil as he prepares to announce his intentions for 2024. His jousting on Tuesday was the best glimpse of how he’ll approach his candidacy, at least until a Republican opponent emerges from the GOP primary process.
White House officials were thrilled by the off script back and forth.
“Couldn’t have written a better moment,” one official said.
More than the substantive back and forth, one official noted how it appeared to animate Biden in real time.
“He gets energy from his audience,” the official said. It’s not a new view on how Biden operates – his advisers constantly talk about how he finds his energy from engaging with people.
Biden and his team believe a serious focus on governing contrasts favorably with House Republicans, who they accuse of threatening to send the nation into default and piling up distractions as they investigate the president and his family.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy entered the speech vowing to treat Biden respectfully – and urging his Republican colleagues to do the same. It was a tall order, given the loose grasp he has on his conference and the propensity from certain Republicans for stunts.
As lawmakers like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted Biden, McCarthy was silent – but his glare into the crowd spoke for itself. Later he found himself shushing his conference multiple times at outbursts interrupted the president.
For the third year in a row, Biden set the record for the oldest president to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress. It’s an underlying fact of his presidency: No one older has ever served.
As Biden prepares to ask voters to keep him in office until he is 86, it was critical he look and sound like someone who is able to keep doing the job.
His delivery was energetic, even if he stumbled over a few of his prepared lines. When Republicans interrupted him, he responded quickly, deftly turning their heckles back around into challenges.
Over the weekend at Camp David, aides set up a podium, microphone, lights and teleprompter in a conference room inside the Laurel Lodge for Biden to practice his speech with his team. The potential for hecklers was something White House officials had in mind as they prepared for the speech.
At the White House, a similar set up has been used in the Map Room to practice the address.
Aides were focused on the message – but also the language, ensuring the speech lent itself to a vigorous presentation. After all, for many in Biden’s television audience, Tuesday’s speech was one of the only times they actually heard and saw the president this year.
Perhaps more than his previous two addresses to Congress, Tuesday’s speech was salted with riffs and lines that appear nearly every time he speaks: inherited wisdoms from his father, anecdotes about inequality and his views of the middle class.
“So many of you feel like you’ve just been forgotten,” he said, directly appealing to a demographic that used to vote reliably for Democrats but has more recently turned to the GOP.
“Amid the economic upheaval of the past four decades, too many people have been left behind or treated like they’re invisible. Maybe that’s you, watching at home,” he said. “You wonder whether a path even exists anymore for you and your children to get ahead without moving away.”
“I get that,” he said.
Appearing for the first time in front of a divided Congress, Biden also leaned into his record working across the aisle – even as he faced heckling from Republicans.
In many ways, both Biden and McCarthy hoped a more mature showing would set the tone for the next two years of divided government, even if they remain sharply divided on policy.
“Mr. Speaker, I don’t want to ruin your reputation but I look forward to working together,” Biden said as he launched into his speech.
He acknowledged that over the first years of his presidency “we disagreed plenty.” But he appealed to his political rivals for cooperation.
“To my Republican friends, if we could work together in the last Congress, there is no reason we can’t work together in this Congress as well,” he said.
If there is one political conundrum Biden’s advisers are urgently working to solve, it is why so many Americans seem to believe he has accomplished so little. By all accounts, Biden has passed large, historic pieces of legislation that could have transformational effects on the US economy. But polls show large majorities aren’t feeling them.
Biden hoped in his speech to bridge that gap, to demonstrate he cares about what Americans care about and to identify the problems he’s looking to fix.
His focus on highly specific issues – like eliminating “junk fees” for consumers or reining in tech companies – are areas the White House believes will resonate with Americans who aren’t necessarily attuned to the ins-and-outs of Washington.
At moments, his speech seemed tailor-made for a nation of annoyed consumers, down to annoyances about baggage fees on airlines and fine print on hotel bills.
“Americans are tired of being played for suckers,” he said, listing off the litany of common grievances.
But Biden and his team are acutely aware that simply telling people their lives are improving won’t cut it – they have to actually feel it. Many of the accomplishments Biden helped passed over the past two years are still in the implementation phase, making their effects elusive for now.
Biden seemed to acknowledge that when he urged lawmakers to extend a price cap on insulin – a benefit that is still coming into effect.
The furious Republican backlash to Biden’s handling of a suspected Chinese spy balloon proved illustrative for many at the White House.
Biden: ‘If China threatens our sovereignty, we will act’
China was included in the text of Biden’s speech well before the balloon slipped into American airspace. But the incursion, which has generated a diplomatic backlash from China and drawn second-guessing from Republicans, lent new urgency to Biden’s message about competing with Beijing.
“Make no mistake: As we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did,” Biden said in his speech.
Biden and his aides believe steps to counter China are one of the rare areas where he could find bipartisan support. He saw some success on that front with the passage of a law boosting US semiconductor production last year.
Biden is sensitive to accusations he is weak on China, according to people around him, while still intent on stabilizing the world’s most important bilateral relationship.
The GOP’s choice to deliver their response to Biden’s speech, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is – at 40 years old – the nation’s youngest governor. Half the president’s age, her selection was a clear choice to contrast a different generation of leaders.
In part because she lacked an audience and in part because Biden was energetically provoked by Republicans in his own address, her speech was a far more staid affair than the State of the Union. Delivered solemnly from the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, the speech was instead a somewhat dark warning against Democratic policies she deemed “crazy,” a descriptor she used three times.
“The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left,” she said. “The choice is between normal or crazy.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders: It’s time for a new generation to lead
She accused the Biden administration of appearing “more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day” and leaned heavily on culture war issues that she claimed her party “didn’t start and never wanted to fight.”
And while she cited her tenure as White House press secretary to Donald Trump, she did not rely heavily on her association with the former president.
Instead, she appeared to call for a changing of the guard – an appeal for generational change that could apply as much to Democrats and Biden as it could to Republicans and Trump.
“It’s time for a new generation to lead. This is our moment. This is our opportunity,” she said.
Twitter temporarily suspended Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines’s account for violations of the company’s sensitive media policy.
For several hours on Tuesday, Daines’ Twitter profile displayed messages indicating the account was “temporarily unavailable because it violates the Twitter Media Policy.”
According to an aide to the senator, Daines’ account was suspended due to his profile picture, which had shown Daines and his wife posing while hunting. A separate campaign account for Daines with a different profile picture was unaffected.
A message from Twitter notifying Daines of his suspension, obtained by CNN, showed the company had determined the profile picture violated Twitter’s rule against “graphic violence or adult content in profile images.”
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a statement, Rachel Dumke, a spokesperson for Daine, called the suspension “preposterous” and said Twitter had informed Daines’ office that the suspension would last until the profile picture was removed.
“This is insane. Twitter should immediately reverse this suspension,” said Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in a statement.
According to an email sent by Twitter Trust and Safety VP Ella Irwin to Daines’ office and obtained by CNN, the company’s policy on graphic profile images exists due to a technical limitation of Twitter’s platform.
“We don’t allow images of dead animals or blood in profile photos because we are unable to label them as NSFW and keep them from being seen by users who specifically don’t want to see graphic images,” Irwin wrote.
Daines’ profile picture had included an animal showing what appeared to be small flecks of blood on its coat, and that were difficult to discern without expanding the image.
Addressing the situation on Tuesday, new Twitter owner Elon Musk said Twitter’s sensitive media policy was “being fixed.”
“Policy against showing blood in profile pic is being amended to ‘clearly showing blood without clicking on the profile pic’,” he tweeted. “The intent is to avoid people being forced to see gruesome profile pics.”
Dumke later told CNN on Tuesday that Musk personally reached out to Daines by phone and reinstated his account.
Bed Bath & Beyond is closing 150 more stores — just a week after the struggling retailer announced the closure of 87 locations.
The company’s brick-and-mortar footprint has already shrunk dramatically, a regulatory filing showed late Monday, and the new closings mean it will have shuttered 400 stores in the past year — almost half the 950 or so stores it had open in February 2022.
That includes last week’s announcement that it was also closing all 49 remaining Harmon Face Value stores, which sold cosmetics; plus 5 buybuy Baby locations. A list of the new store closures wasn’t immediately available.
A turnaround doesn’t look imminent: The embattled home goods chain forecasts first quarter sales to be down by 30% to 40% with “sequential, quarterly sales improvement thereafter” the filing said.
The company said Tuesday it raised some $1 billion through an offering of preferred stock and warrants in a last-ditch effort to stave off bankruptcy. On Monday, the company said it appointed Holly Etlin, a bankruptcy expert, as interim chief financial officer.
Bed Bath & Beyond said Tuesday it will ultimately have 360 stores and 120 buybuyBaby stores. That means that the company will have announced plans to close nearly 500 of the stores it had just a year ago, and the new company will be about half of the size of the old one
Bed Bath and Beyond has been part of the meme stock phenomenon, with shares skyrocketing as much as 400% last year when activist investor and GameStop chairman Ryan Cohen took a stake and sought changes.
Shares of the retailer, which closed up 92% at $5.86 in a rollercoaster session Monday, were down 40% in in pre-market trading Tuesday.
Founded in 1971, Bed Bath & Beyond became a staple for affordable home decor, kitchenware and college dorm room furniture. It’s also known for its ubiquitous 20% off blue coupons, and cavernous stores with merchandise stacked high to the ceilings.
But the company struggled to make the transition to online shopping and fend off larger chains such as Walmart and Target
(TGT). Many shoppers switched to those competitors as the novelty of Bed Bath & Beyond’s coupons faded.
The company was also hit hard during the pandemic, closing stores temporarily during 2020 while rivals remained open. The company lost 17% of its sales in 2020 and 14% in 2021.
– CNN’s Nathaniel Meyersohn and Reuters contributed to this report
