Biden to sign order to increase pandemic-related food aid

U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday will sign two executive orders aimed at speeding pandemic stimulus checks to families who need it most and increasing food aid for children who normally rely on school meals as a main source for nutrition.

Biden, who has proposed a $1.9 trillion stimulus package, is using the two orders to try to ease the burden on people while the legislation is negotiated in Congress. He has made fighting the pandemic an early focus of his new administration.

The pandemic recession has hit Americans hard. Some 16 million are now receiving some type of unemployment benefit, and an estimated 29 million don’t have enough to eat. Women, minorities and low-income service workers have been disproportionately impacted, with Black and Hispanic workers facing higher jobless rates than white workers.

“We’re at a precarious moment in our economy,” Brian Deese, director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters in a preview of the orders.

He said the actions are not a substitute for comprehensive legislative relief, “but they will provide a critical lifeline to millions of American families.”

In the first order, Biden will ask the Treasury Department to consider taking steps to expand and improve delivery of stimulus checks, such as establishing online tools for claiming payments.

“Many Americans faced challenges receiving the first round of direct payments and as many as 8 million eligible households did not receive the payments issued in March,” a White House fact sheet said.

Biden will also seek to increase access to food for millions of children who are missing meals because schools are closed due to the pandemic.

He will ask the Agriculture Department (USDA) to consider issuing new guidance that would increase the aid given to families who normally rely on schools to provide a main meal of the day for their children.

It could provide a family with three children more than $100 of additional support every two months.

“USDA will consider issuing new guidance that would allow states to increase SNAP emergency allotments for those who need it most. This would be the first step to ensuring that an additional 12 million people get enhanced SNAP benefits to keep nutritious food on the table,” the fact sheet said.

Biden’s second order will restore collective bargaining power and worker protections by revoking three related orders issued by President Donald Trump during his term, which ended on Wednesday. It also promotes a $15-an-hour minimum wage.

The federal minimum wage has been at $7.25 an hour since 2009.

Biden’s directive also eliminates a Trump order that allowed federal agencies to move many career federal employees into a category without job protections and putting them at risk of being fired.

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The White House fact sheet called the Trump order “nothing more than an attempt to gut the career civil servant class and further marginalize career civil service employees.”

“Its existence threatens the critical protections of career employees and provides a pathway to burrow political appointees into the civil service,” it said.

Former attorney general Jeff Sessions and other senior justice department officials impeded an internal departmental investigation into their role in implementing the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy that separated thousands of children from their parents on the border, according to interviews and government records.

Sessions declined to be interviewed by investigators for the department’s inspector general, who conducted an inquiry of the family separation policy, according to a report made public last Thursday by the IG detailing the findings of its inquiry.

As attorney general, Sessions was one of the Trump administration’s most senior officials who devised and implemented the family separation policy. The inspector general, Michael Horowitz, called Sessions and his top aides a “driving force” behind the policy.

A second senior justice department official, Edward C O’Callaghan, who served as the justice department’s principal associate deputy attorney general during the family separation policy, similarly refused to answer questions from investigators, according to the report.

Former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who now says he regrets his role in implementing the policy, was twice interviewed by investigators, but made misleading statements to them that understated and obscured his role.

As a result of the refusal by Sessions and O’Callaghan to speak to investigators, and Rosenstein having misled the IG, a full historical accounting may never take place into what is perceived as a dark chapter in the nation’s history when more than 3,000 children were separated from their parents. Many of its victims younger than the age of five, some even infants, were held alone at substandard facilities under inhumane conditions.

The Biden administration has promised to reunite families. On 8 January , Biden vowed “our justice department and our investigative arms will make judgements about who is responsible … and whether or not the conduct is criminal”. If such a criminal investigation was undertaken, investigators would have powerful tools available to compel testimony of recalcitrant witnesses.
Signs during a march and rally against the separation of immigrant families on 30 June 2018 outside the detention facility of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Los Angeles, California.
Signs during a march and rally against the separation of immigrant families on 30 June 2018 outside the detention facility of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

A senior federal law enforcement official said that while other former justice officials have refused to cooperate with various other IG’s investigations, they could not recall another instance in which an investigation was impeded because an attorney general refused to cooperate, a second senior department official refused to as well, and the deputy attorney general misled investigators.

That combination raised questions, the official said, as to whether there was a coordinated effort emanating from the highest levels of the justice department to sabotage the investigation.

Sessions and O’Callaghan were the only two government officials asked to provide information who refused to cooperate. Of all the other 45 individuals with whom the IG sought to speak to, all agreed; some sitting for several interviews, others doing so in adverse circumstances because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

O’Callaghan’s potential testimony was crucial to the investigation not only because his own role in implementing the family separation policy was under scrutiny, but also because he was such a close adviser to the attorney general and Rosenstein.

O’Callaghan declined to comment.

Some investigators also concluded Rosenstein misled them by downplaying his own role in the family separation policy.

Rosenstein told the IG that “he did not think he saw the draft of the [family separation] policy before it was issued; and asserted that while “the AG and his staff were intimately involved” in devising and implementing the policy, Rosenstein himself was “less likely to have been engaged”.

But records previously published by the Guardian and the New York Times directly contradict those claims – clearly demonstrating that Rosenstein ratcheted up the policy by pressing US attorneys on the US-Mexico border to detain more children.

The records further indicate that several US attorneys and their aides had severe reservations regarding the inhumanity of the policy, and concerns that by diverting resources to carrying out the policy would interfere with the prosecution of far more serious crimes. One federal prosecutor in Texas complained that, as a result of so much energy and resources being devoted to the effort, “sex offenders were released” who otherwise would have remained imprisoned.

Rosenstein told investigators that he gave prosecutors broad discretion not to bring cases they did not want to: “If somebody got the idea that they were supposed to be just like a soldier, prosecuting every case without regards to the facts, that didn’t come from me.”

But other US attorneys who Rosenstein supervised told the IG that they were ordered to bring cases they did not want to. One, John Bash, of the western district of Texas, wrote in a memo to other prosecutors that he was told by Rosenstein “per the AG’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions … because of the age of the child.” Bash, who recently left the justice department, explained further: “No one] in this office, including me, had any discretion on whether to accept if we were under the zero tolerance requirement from the attorney general.”