In The News
Top House Democrats have sent a letter demanding that General Services Administration Chief Emily W. Murphy brief lawmakers on why she has yet to ascertain Joe Biden's election win — a necessary first step before the president-elect can receive resources for a transition of government.
House Democrats on Thursday ratcheted up pressure on the head of the General Services Administration to grant President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. the money and government access set aside by law for the presidential transition process, demanding that she brief lawmakers and possibly testify in public.
The director of the Census Bureau said Thursday that irregularities have been found during the numbers-crunching phase of the 2020 census, a development that jeopardizes the statistical agency’s ability to meet a year-end deadline for handing in numbers used for divvying up congressional seats.
The U.S. Census Bureau has determined it cannot put together the first set of results from this year's census by its Dec. 31 deadline. The bureau says it needs to resolve routine "processing anomalies."
In an effort to alleviate some of the stress of the months-long cooking gas outage at an entire building in Astoria Houses, Queens Together, community members and local elected officials joined forces to distribute items to tenants of Astoria Houses on Sunday, Nov. 15.
The Trump administration has hit a new roadblock in its quest to exclude undocumented immigrants from being counted in census numbers for apportionment: The Census Bureau now says it will be unable to produce state population counts from the 2020 survey before President Trump leaves office on Jan. 20.
During a hearing on Thursday, members of Congress generally thanked Rep. Carolyn Maloney for bringing the issue forward with The Pandemic Risk Insurance Act of 2020, while expressing skepticism about the current state of that proposal and others.
The Health and Human Services department has scrapped a planned ad campaign featuring celebrities discussing Covid-19, a senior HHS official told a congressional oversight panel in a letter shared with POLITICO.
Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money's newsletter. You can sign up here.
House Democrats are urging the Trump administration to refrain from a last-minute deluge of new rules and regulations that could saddle the incoming Biden administration and Congress with months of work to unravel.