Senate confirms Fudge to lead housing agency, Regan for EPA

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development and North Carolina regulator Michael Regan to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, picking up the pace for confirmations in President Joe Biden’s Cabinet.

Fudge, a veteran lawmaker, will lead the housing agency agency just as Congress has passed new benefits for renters and homeowners who have suffered economic losses amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Regan, who has served as North Carolina’s top environmental regulator since 2017, will help lead Biden’s efforts to address climate change and advocate for environmental justice, two of the administration’s top priorities. He is the first Black man to run the EPA.

Fudge, who has represented parts of Cleveland and Akron in the House since 2008, is a former mayor and a longtime advocate for assistance for the needy. She said at her confirmation hearing in January that her first priority would be protecting the millions of people who have fallen behind on rent or mortgages due to loss of income during the pandemic, telling senators that “we cannot afford to allow people in the midst of a pandemic to be put in the streets.”

Shortly after she was confirmed — and minutes before she resigned — Fudge took the last vote of her House career in support of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, which will provide billions in housing assistance to low-income households.

Fudge was confirmed 66-34, while Regan was also approved by a 66-34 vote. The Senate also confirmed federal Judge Merrick Garland

as attorney general Wednesday.

All three nominees won bipartisan support for their nominations, although Republican Leader Mitch McConnell voted against Regan. McConnell backed Fudge and Garland.

“These aren’t the nominees that any Republican would have picked for these jobs,” McConnell said ahead of the votes. “But the nation needs presidents to be able to stand up a team so long as their nominees are qualified and mainstream.”

McConnell voted against Regan’s nomination and announced he will oppose New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, Biden’s choice to be interior secretary. The two nominees both support “farleft policies that crush jobs? in his state and across the country, the Kentucky Republican said.

Regan and Haaland “both report straight to the front lines of the new administration’s left-wing war on American energy” and would “unbalance the balancing act between conservation and the economic comeback we badly need,? McConnell said.

He cited Regan’s support for the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, and Haaland’s support for the Green New Deal, a farreaching, if nonbinding set of proposals to address climate change and reduce economic inequality.

Timing for a vote on Haaland’s nomination has not been set.

Republicans who opposed Fudge’s nomination argued that she was also out of the mainstream. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey criticized some of Fudge’s past comments about Republicans, saying they could have a “toxic and detrimental impact on the working relationship that ought to be a constructive relationship” between Congress and the Biden administration.

Toomey referenced a statement Fudge made last year when GOP senators moved to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg after blocking Obama’s nominee — Garland, the newlyconfirmed attorney general — four years earlier.

Fudge at the time called Senate Republicans “a disgrace to this nation” and said they ”have no decency, they have no honor, they have no integrity.” At her confirmation hearing, Fudge did not walk back any of her previous statements but described herself as “one of the most bipartisan members in the House of Representatives.”

Democrats argued that Fudge’s experience was right for the times. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who lives in Fudge’s district, noted that Ohio suffered a disproportionate number of foreclosures even before the 2008 economic crisis.

“She knows how for decades, communities have watched as factories closed, investment dried up and storefronts were boarded over,” Brown said. “And she knows how many neighborhoods and towns have never had the investment they should — because of discrimination, because of redlining, because of decades of policy that funneled resources and jobs away from Black and brown communities.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Fudge “has a difficult job ahead of her” as millions of American renters are behind on payments and millions of homeowners are in forbearance.

The COVID-19 relief bill provides about $30 billion to help low-income households and the unemployed afford rent and utilities, and to assist the homeless with vouchers and other support. States and tribes would receive an additional $10 billion for homeowners struggling with mortgage payments because of the pandemic.

Regan is known in his home state for pursuing cleanups of industrial toxins and helping low-income and minority communities significantly affected by pollution.

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the chairman of the environment panel, said Regan has a proven record of forging “practical solutions to clean our air and our water, while building a more nurturing environment for job creation and job preservation.”

One of Regan’s biggest challenges will be returning scientific integrity to an agency that under former President Donald Trump frequently allowed business groups and other special interests to “play a large role in crafting the agency’s policies,” Carper said.

West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the top Republican on the environment panel, said Regan would return the EPA to the policy agenda of the Obama administration, an agenda she said “absolutely devastated my state and other energy-producing states.”

Capito also complained that Regan will take cues from Biden’s White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy, a former EPA chief. “For almost two months now unaccountable czar Gina McCarthy has been working both behind the scenes and in front of the press to lay the groundwork for the Biden administration’s agenda,” Capito said. “She’s operating this stronghold office with no transparency, outside of the Senate confirmation process.”

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden on Wednesday directed his administration to order another 100 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine, growing a likely U.S. surplus of doses later this year when much of the rest of the world struggles with deep shortages.

Even before Wednesday’s order, the U.S. was to have enough approved vaccine delivered by mid-May to cover every adult and enough for 400 million people total by the end of July. Enough doses to cover 200 million more people is on order should vaccines from AstraZeneca and Novavax receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The new J&J doses, which would cover another 100 million people, are expected to be delivered in the latter half of the year.

White House aides said that Biden’s first priority is ensuring that Americans are vaccinated before considering distributing doses elsewhere.

“We want to be oversupplied and over prepared,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday, saying Biden wanted contingencies in the event of any unforeseen issues with the existing production timeline.

“We still don’t know which vaccine will be most effective on kids,” she added. “We still don’t know the impact of variants or the need for booster shots. And these doses can be used for booster shots as well as needed. Obviously that’s still being studied by the FDA but again we want to be over-prepared as I noted earlier.”

Biden’s announcement comes as the White House has rebuffed requests from U.S. allies, including Mexico, Canada and the European Union, for vaccine doses produced in the United

States, where months of production runs have produced vaccine solely for use in the country.

Russia and China, whose leaders don’t face voters in free and fair elections, have used their domesticallyproduced shots for strategic leverage. Israel, which has vaccinated more than half of its population with Pfizer vaccines produced in Europe, has also attempted to use vaccine diplomacy to reward allies.

Biden did move to have the U.S. contribute financially to the United Nations and World Health Organization-backed COVAX alliance, which will help share vaccine with more than 90 countries with lower and middle-income nations, but it has yet to commit to sharing any doses.

Biden’s purchasing strategy has come under criticism from nongovernmental organizations who have encouraged the White House to develop clear plans and thresholds for sharing vaccine with the world.

“The only way to defeat this virus for good is to defeat it everywhere — and that requires an immediate plan for sharing excess vaccine doses globally,” said Sarah Swinehart, senior director for communications at The ONE Campaign.

Asked about the surplus Wednesday, Biden told reporters that “if we have a surplus, we’re going to share it with the rest of the world.”

“This is not something that can be stopped by a fence no matter how high you build a fence or a wall. So we’re not going to be ultimately safe until the world is safe,” acknowledged Biden. “So, we’re going to start off making sure Americans are taken care of first, but we’re then going to try to help the rest of the world.”