(WASHINGTON) — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who made history as the first openly gay Cabinet member in U.S. history to be confirmed by the Senate, announced on Tuesday that he and husband Chasten Buttigieg are becoming fathers.
The former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana, mayor revealed on Twitter that the couple, married in 2018, is growing their family.
“For some time, Chasten and I have wanted to grow our family,” the secretary wrote. “We’re overjoyed to share that we’ve become parents! The process isn’t done yet and we’re thankful for the love, support, and respect for our privacy that has been offered to us. We can’t wait to share more soon.”
Pete Buttigieg, 39, spoke about wanting to have children on the campaign trail back in April 2019.
While answering questions about his views on paid family leave at a rally, he revealed that he has a “personal stake in” the issue.
“We’re hoping to have a little one soon, so I have a personal stake in this one, too,” he said. “We should have paid parental leave and find a way to have paid leave for anyone who needs caring.”
Chasten Buttigieg, 32, opened up more recently about their path toward parenthood in a July interview with The Washington Post, detailing their experience getting on adoption waiting lists for babies that have been abandoned or surrendered on short notice.
The couple have had several close calls, leaving them scrambling to purchase baby essentials, before the adoptions fell through, he told the newspaper.
“It’s a really weird cycle of anger and frustration and hope,” he said in the interview. “You think it’s finally happening and you get so excited, and then it’s gone.”
(KABUL, Afghanistan) — At 4:19 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, President Joe Biden concluded a speech defending his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, tapping his binder on a podium in the East Room of the White House for emphasis.
By 4:57 p.m., the presidential helicopter, Marine One, was in the air, headed for the presidential retreat, Camp David. For Biden, there was no looking back.
“I know my decision will be criticized, but I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another president of the United States — yet another one — a fifth one. Because it’s the right one. It’s the right decision for our people,” Biden declared, leaving no doubt about his stance.
But as Biden withdrew to Camp David, his administration officials were left in Washington to field the lingering questions the president did not address: What exactly will be the fate of endangered Afghans struggling to leave the country? And why was the administration so surprised by the speed of the Taliban’s takeover?
For the Afghan interpreters and contractors who have aided U.S. forces during the 20-year war and are now under threat of retaliation from Taliban militants, getting answers is urgent.
More than 1,600 people have been evacuated from Afghanistan so far, State Department Spokesperson Ned Price confirmed Monday, but he declined to specify how many of those people are Special Visa applicants.
“As long as we deem that our public servants serving at [Hamid Karzai International Airport] are safe and secure, we will be engaged in an ambitious, aggressive, and around-the-clock effort to relocate as many as we possibly can,” Price said.
Defense Department Spokesperson John Kirby said Tuesday morning that the Department of Defense is working to ramp up flight departures to one per hour. He hoped to achieve that cadence within the next 24 hours. But for those Afghans who are unable to travel safely through Taliban checkpoints to the airport, solutions are sparse.
“I know that there are concerns about why we did not begin evacuating Afghans — civilians sooner. Part of the answer is some of the Afghans did not want to leave earlier — still hopeful for their country. And part of it was because the Afghan government and its supporters discouraged us from organizing a mass exodus to avoid triggering, as they said, ‘a crisis of confidence,'” Biden said in his remarks Monday, attempting to defend the administration’s slow evacuation pace.
Monday evening, President Biden approved $500 million in State Department funding to aid Afghan refugees who are successfully evacuated.
“We plan on being on the ground there in Afghanistan for the next couple of weeks. It’s not just about moving out Americans, it is very much about meeting our moral and sacred obligations to those Afghans who helped us over the last 20 years getting as many out as we can,” Kirby said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday.
For endangered Afghans, the challenge of leaving the country has been exacerbated by the sudden Taliban blitz.
“The truth is, this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated,” Biden said Monday, admitting that his intelligence briefings did not accurately predict the pace of events. Biden did not directly address whether he considers it an intelligence failure.
While some senior military officials cautioned Biden against withdrawal, presenting him with a litany of possible consequences, Biden chose to move forward. DOD Spokesperson John Kirby defended the president’s choice on “Good Morning America” on Monday.
“The commander in chief is the commander in chief. It’s not about overruling his military leaders or other advisers. He is given options. He is given the pros and cons for each option, and then it’s up to him to decide. He was advised by the Defense Department, we had a voice. We had a seat at the table. We provided our advice and counsel. The president made his decision and now we’re in execution mode,” Kirby said.
Even members of Biden’s own party are raising questions about the intelligence on Afghanistan. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.,chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, proposed investigating what led to the government’s underestimation of the Taliban advance.
“I hope to work with the other committees of jurisdiction to ask tough but necessary questions about why we weren’t better prepared for a worst-case scenario involving such a swift and total collapse of the Afghan government and security forces,” Warner said in a statement Monday.
For those looking to carry out those investigations, the answers might be disheartening. The government’s nonpartisan watchdog on operations in Afghanistan, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, on Monday released a report compiled just before the Taliban takeover, analyzing 20 years of U.S. efforts there. The report delivers a blunt verdict.
“Twenty years later, much has improved, and much has not in Afghanistan. If the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that can sustain itself and pose little threat to U.S. national security interests, the overall picture in Afghanistan is bleak,” it concludes.
(WASHINGTON) — In an address to the nation on the crisis in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden conceded that the Taliban takeover of the country unfolded faster than anticipated, but insisted that he remains “squarely behind” his decision to withdraw American troops.
“I will not repeat the mistakes we’ve made in the past — the mistake of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interests of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country, of attempting to remake a country through the endless military deployments of U.S. forces,” Biden said.
While Biden said he ultimately bore responsibility for the situation in Afghanistan, declaring “I am president of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me,” he also faulted Afghan forces for the Taliban’s rapid advance.
“We gave them every chance to determine their own future. (What) we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future,” he said.
“There are some very brave and capable Afghan special forces units and soldiers,” the president continued. “But if Afghanistan is unable to mount any real resistance to the Taliban now, there is no chance that one more year, five more years or 20 more years of U.S. military boots on the ground would have made any difference.”
Biden also blamed his predecessor for the current situation in Afghanistan, claiming an agreement former President Donald Trump cut with the Taliban while he was in office left him with only two options: End the U.S. military mission or reignite the conflict.
Biden has repeatedly pointed out that he is the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan and adamantly insisted he won’t pass it on to a fifth commander-in-chief.
“So I’m left again to ask of those who argued that we should stay, how many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when Afghan troops will not? How many more lives — American lives — is it worth?” Biden said.
Biden also argued that ending the military mission in Afghanistan would free up counterterrorism resources to address broader threats to the homeland posed by jihadist groups throughout Africa and the Middle East.
But concerns within the intelligence community that Afghanistan will revert to an incubator for extremism remains. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators during a briefing that the Pentagon would reassess the threat posed by Al -Qaida now that the Taliban have retaken the country.
As conditions in Afghanistan deteriorate, Republicans are pouncing on the White House, calling the drawdown an embarrassment for the nation.
“What we have seen is an unmitigated disaster — a stain on the reputation of the United States of America,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday.
Few Democrats have rushed to publicly defend the Biden administration. In a statement released before the president’s remarks, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called the images being broadcast out of Afghanistan “devastating” and vowed “to ask tough but necessary questions about why we weren’t better prepared for a worst-case scenario involving such a swift and total collapse of the Afghan government and security forces.”
Biden denied that national security officials were caught off guard, insisting “we were clear-eyed about the risks. We planned for every contingency.”
He also offered little in the ways of an explanation as to why the planned withdrawal had unraveled into a chaotic evacuation effort.
Biden did not take any questions from the reporters gathered in the East Room following his speech, his first public remarks on Afghanistan in nearly a week.
The president was previously scheduled to remain at Camp David until Wednesday, but returned to the White House to deliver the address. He departed again for Camp David shortly after he concluded his remarks.
The White House said Biden had been receiving regular updates from his advisors throughout the weekend and released a photo of Biden being briefed in a video conference Sunday.
(WASHINGTON) — The Taliban’s return to power has ended America’s two-decade effort to build a democratic society in its mold in Afghanistan. But that effort, despite its billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives, was doomed virtually from the start by a galling failure to understand the country and a willful disregard for local realities on the ground, according to a scathing new report.
The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, blasted successive U.S. administrations for lacking the “necessary mindset, expertise, and resources to develop and manage the strategy to rebuild Afghanistan,” in its latest report released Tuesday.
The report, prepared before Kabul’s fall, found that while the U.S. achieved some important successes for the Afghan people, those gains would be lost if the Taliban took control.
“The U.S. government struggled to develop a coherent strategy, understand how long the reconstruction mission would take, ensure its projects were sustainable, staff the mission with trained professionals, account for the challenges posed by insecurity, tailor efforts to the Afghan context, and understand the impact of programs,” the report said.
More than 140 pages long, the report details how 20 years and $145 billion of effort were often wasted because projects weren’t tailored to the complex realities on the ground. Essentially, the U.S. government kept trying to force Afghanistan into a box that it didn’t — and couldn’t — fit into, the report found.
“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan,” Douglas Lute, who oversaw the war for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2007 to 2013, told SIGAR. “We didn’t know what we were doing.”
“It’s really much worse than you think,” he added. “There (was) a fundamental gap of understanding on the front end, overstated objectives, an overreliance on the military, and a lack of understanding of the resources necessary.”
This is the 11th annual lessons-learned report released by SIGAR, which has 13 years of oversight work now. John Sopko, the special inspector general, has highlighted failures throughout the U.S. war in Afghanistan, from waste and fraud to a lack of transparency.
These failures in reconstruction, in particular, had critical impacts on a local level, according to the report, undermining U.S. efforts to erode support for the Taliban and build faith in the Afghan government.
“In the majority of districts, we never even heard the real problems of the people,” Jabar Naimee, who served as governor of three Afghan provinces, told SIGAR. “We made assumptions, conducted military operations, brought in government staff, and assumed it would lead to security and stability.”
But it did not. The report argued that since the U.S. government did not pay attention to the local context when projects were implemented, they often stoked local conflicts because one interest group was prioritized over another, which allowed insurgents to create alliances.
Staffing failures exacerbated those problems, according to the inspector general’s report. U.S. reconstruction projects were created and funded — and then officials were ordered to find individuals to carry them out — leading to unqualified workers and construction efforts that were often abandoned before completion.
“DOD police advisors watched American TV shows to learn about policing, civil affairs teams were mass-produced via PowerPoint presentations, and every agency experienced annual lobotomies as staff constantly rotated out, leaving successors to start from scratch and make similar mistakes all over again,” the report said.
Those failures at the program-level and below were mirrored by “policymakers’ ignorance of the Afghan context at the highest strategic levels,” according to the report, with the influence of politics always behind the scenes.
“U.S. officials also prioritized their own political preferences for what they wanted reconstruction to look like, rather than what they could realistically achieve,” the report said.
Afghan officials are to blame as well, the report said, especially for corruption. But the vast amount of American money flowing to reconstruction projects would often fuel that problem.
“The ultimate point of failure for our efforts wasn’t an insurgency,” Ryan Crocker, who served as ambassador to Afghanistan, told SIGAR. “It was the weight of endemic corruption.”
Because the U.S. government refused to create a successful peace process, “the Taliban soon rebuilt itself as a powerful insurgency,” according to the report.
That may now doom the Afghan people to a return to darker days.
“There is no doubt, however, that the lives of millions of Afghans have been improved by U.S. government interventions,” the report said, including gains in life expectancy, the mortality of children under five, GDP per capita, and literacy rates. But the report argued that these gains were neither proportional to the massive U.S. investment nor sustainable with the U.S. military now leaving.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden “absolutely” bears responsibility for the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan as does former President Donald Trump and his administration, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said Sunday.
“What we’re watching right now in Afghanistan is what happens when America withdraws from the world,” Cheney told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Jonathan Karl. “So everybody who has been saying, ‘America needs to withdraw, America needs to retreat,’ we are getting a devastating, catastrophic real-time lesson in what that means.”
Taliban militants were ordered to enter Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, as plans to form a new reconciliation council were announced and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country on Sunday.
On Thursday, the State Department announced it was reducing its staff levels at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and the Pentagon began sending in troops to help facilitate those departures. The president on Saturday authorized an additional 1,000 U.S. troops for deployment to Afghanistan, raising the number of troops to 5,000 to assist with “orderly and safe drawdown.”
Cheney, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee, said Sunday on “This Week,” that the Taliban’s rapid takeover did not have to happen, as “everyone was warned.”
“I think if you look at where we were, if you look at what it would have taken in terms of maintaining the status quo, 2,500 to 3,500 forces on the ground, conducting counterterrorism, counterintelligence operations, this disaster, the catastrophe that we’re watching unfold right now across Afghanistan did not have to happen,” Cheney said. “And it’s not just that people predicted that this would happen, everyone was warned that this would happen.”
The ramifications of the current situation extend further than just Afghanistan and the war on terror, but globally, Cheney told Karl.
“Our allies are questioning this morning whether they can count on us for anything,” Cheney said.
Karl pressed Cheney on the argument made by Republicans and Democrats, including former Rep. Justin Amash, that no matter when the U.S. were to withdraw, the results would be the same.
“This is not ending the war, what this is doing actually is perpetuating it,” Cheney responded. “What we’re seeing now is a policy that will ensure — ensure, that we will in fact have to have our children and our grandchildren continuing to fight this war at much higher costs.”
“So everybody — the Rand Paul, Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Joe Biden view of the world here is fundamentally dangerous and irresponsible and wrong,” Cheney added.
Karl also asked Cheney about the fact the majority of Americans supported the U.S. withdrawal.
“As you know, poll after poll, for the last several years, have shown that most Americans wanted us out of Afghanistan,” Karl said. “So can you really maintain for the long term a military operation that most of the American people do not support?”
“As leaders we have an obligation no matter what the issue is to tell the American people the truth, and we have an obligation to explain what’s necessary,” Cheney responded. “If American security requires that our enemies can’t establish safe havens to attack us again, then our leaders across both parties have the responsibility to explain to the American people why we need to keep the deployment of forces on the ground.”
“This has been an epic failure across the board, one we’re going to pay for for years to come,” Cheney added.
(WASHINGTON) — A group of House moderates is threatening to blow up Democrats’ plans of passing a $3.5 trillion budget resolution when the chamber is set to return the week of Aug. 23 unless the chamber also votes on the $1.1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.
House Democrats intended to vote on the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint in late August after the Senate approved the measure this week. The budget blueprint allows both the House and the Senate to craft a reconciliation bill, filled with progressive priorities, that can be passed with a simple majority and without Republican support.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said the House will not vote on the $1.1 trillion infrastructure bill until the larger $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill has also cleared the Senate, a condition which is wholeheartedly approved by progressives in her party.
“We have been clear for three months that we are not going to vote for the bipartisan package unless there is a reconciliation package that has passed that includes sufficient funding for our five priorities,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters earlier this month.
In the letter sent to Pelosi on Friday, moderate lawmakers insisted on a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill and have said their districts can’t afford “months of unnecessary delays.”
Democrats have just a three-seat majority in the House. Any handful of members can be potential roadblocks if they are determined enough to challenge Pelosi and the White House.
“The country is clamoring for infrastructure investment and commonsense, bipartisan solutions,” the letter states. “With the livelihoods of hardworking American families at stake, we simply can’t afford months of unnecessary delays and risk squandering this once-in-a-century, bipartisan infrastructure package. It’s time to get shovels in the ground and people to work.”
The letter was spearheaded by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., a co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, and endorsed by eight other moderate Democrats: Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas, Jim Costa of California, Kurt Schrader of Oregon, Filemon Vela of Texas, Vicente Gonzalez of Texas, Jared Golden of Maine, Ed Case of Hawaii and Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia.
A senior Democratic aide downplayed the threat Friday and said the moderates represent a small fraction of the larger caucus that approves of Pelosi’s original plan.
“This is 9. There are dozens upon dozens who will vote against the [bipartisan infrastructure bill] unless it’s after the Senate passes reconciliation,” the aide told ABC News.
The aide added that there are “not sufficient votes” to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill this month and noted Pelosi’s comments to her caucus during a private call earlier this week, when she said her plan reflected a “consensus” of House Democrats.
“The president has said he’s all for the bipartisan approach … bravo! That’s progress, but it ain’t the whole vision,” she said. “The votes in the House and Senate depend on us having both bills.”
(WASHINGTON) — The war of words between President Joe Biden, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other GOP governors escalated Thursday, raising new questions about how much politics and politicians should be involved in potentially life or death public health decisions.
At the White House, Biden addressed the ongoing debate — and in some cases, outright cultural war — around children being required to wear masks in school, arguing it shouldn’t be a “political dispute” even though that’s clearly what much of it has become.
“This isn’t about politics. This is about keeping our children safe,” he said. “To the mayors, school superintendents, educators, local leaders, who are standing up to the governors politicizing mask protection for our kids, thank you.”
Under pressure to act more forcefully as the delta variant rages across the South, Biden said earlier this week the White House is “checking” into how much power the federal government has to intervene as DeSantis threatened to withhold state funding from schools and officials adopting mask mandates in Florida — the state with the highest number of pediatric COVID-19 cases as kids head back to school.
It comes after weeks of growing tensions as some Republican governors — particularly in Florida and Texas — continue to fight against mask and vaccine mandates as COVID-19 cases skyrocket in their states. It also follows the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issuing new guidance recommending indoor masking across-the-board for all staff, students and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist expert and founder of the Division of Medical Ethics at the New York University School of Medicine, told ABC News that while the federal government has the authority to intervene — and should — it’s the responsibility of elected officials at the state and local level to rely on experts and not make public health decisions colored by appeals to their political base.
“Politicians have to, in a plague, yield to the best science and medical opinion, consensus opinion, that they can get,” Caplan said. “People who often did not take any science classes past high school should not be telling us how best to manage an infectious disease outbreak.”
Even the most scientific minds, however, can be influenced by politics. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expert Dr. Rochelle Walensky, in an interview published Thursday, hinted at regretting her decision in May to ditch masks if you’re vaccinated.
“There was an enormous pressure for vaccinated people to be able to do things that they wanted to get back to doing,” she told the Wall Street Journal.
Under pressure to follow the science, but also no doubt aware of polls showing what Americans want, Biden has often repeated he’s leaning on health experts like the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci in making his decisions, putting the onus on local leaders to take precautions, and not, as some critics have urged, using his presidential powers and influence to take more actions at the federal level.
DeSantis has taken a different approach with his political base, sending fundraising emails in recent weeks exploiting the conservative animosity toward the president and Fauci.
Speaking on ABC’s “GMA3” on Thursday, Fauci said it’s “so unfortunate” that an “ideological divide” is stopping some people from getting vaccinated.
“We’re dealing with a public health crisis, and you address a public health crisis by public health principles,” Fauci said. “Ideology, divisiveness has no place in this and yet, in many areas, it seems to dominate.”
Caplan also said it’s political — and the result, in the case of DeSantis, is harming the people of Florida and beyond.
“The core of his party is still anti-mandates, whether it’s vaccine or masks, and has never shown any enthusiasm for tough public health measures, that’s just political and it is true, despite the fact that Trump is vaccinated, Abbott is vaccinated,” Caplan said. “It’s not like conservative GOP leadership hasn’t been vaccinated.”
But thousands of their constituents are not.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll from July illustrates how partisanship has infected pandemic attitudes and behavior.
Ninety-three percent of Democrats say they either have been vaccinated or definitely or probably will do so; that plummets to 49% of Republicans. Independents are between the two at 65%. And while Republicans are far less likely to get a shot, just 24% see themselves as at risk for infection.
“The bottom line is, look at a map, see where the dead and hospitalized people are, then ask yourself, if the governor’s policies in Texas and Florida make any sense,” Caplan said.
Some Republican governors who have issued orders effectively forbidding local officials from requiring masks in schools, continued with a firing exchange of words with the White House this week as kids, many too young to be vaccinated, head back to the classrooms across the country.
Asked on Wednesday about a recent New York Post headline framing Biden as “kneecapping” DeSantis, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the administration is not out to get DeSantis but wants him to participate in their efforts to combat COVID-19 — which, she said, he has not.
“Our war is not on DeSantis. It’s on the virus, which we’re trying to kneecap, and he does not seem to want to participate in that effort to kneecap the virus — hence our concern,” she said at an afternoon press briefing.
DeSantis slammed the White House earlier Wednesday and vowed that he would “fight back vociferously” against any attempt by the administration to find a way to pay the salaries of school officials that defy his state ban on mask mandates as he threatens to withhold state funding from those that adopt them.
“If you’re talking about the federal government coming in and overruling parents and our communities, that would be something that we would fight back vociferously against,” DeSantis told reporters in St. Petersburg outside of an elementary school.
The governor is facing at least two lawsuits from parents, and several school districts in Florida have already voted to mandate masks despite his executive order, citing data in their lawsuits that masks are proven to help slow the spread and noting that most kids are still too young to be eligible for vaccinations.
“It is a common sense, reasonable accommodation for a vulnerable child who is immunocompromised or at risk of a serious disease to require a public entity to implement simple precautions to ensure that the most vulnerable children are safe,” one lawsuit said, adding the order allegedly “harms the children who the disability discrimination laws were enacted to protect.”
The White House has praised the “courage” of school officials who have chosen to defy the order and said it’s looking into whether unused funding from the federal government’s American Rescue Plan could be used to make up the difference in funds DeSantis threatens to withhold. Texas, meanwhile, is dealing a similar hand.
Since Biden last week called out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott by name, along with DeSantis, as leaders who need to “help or get out of the way,” Abbott has also stuck defiantly behind his order banning mask mandates — despite hospitals becoming so overwhelmed that Abbot has called for out-of-state medical personnel to come help mitigate the surge of COVID-19 cases there.
Under Abbott’s order, institutions that defy the governor’s mask mandate ban are subject to a $1,000 fine. At least two school districts there have announced they still will require masks, and the tides appear to be turning in their favor.
“Any school district, public university, or local government official that decides to defy GA-38—which prohibits gov’t entities from mandating masks—will be taken to court,” Abbott said in a tweet.
Amid the growing concerns with sending kids back to school amid a surge in pediatric COVID-19 cases, it’s not clear under what authority the White House will actually step in when it comes to fines to educators. Psaki reiterated on Wednesday they are “looking into ways we can help the leaders at the local level who are putting public health first continue to do their jobs,” and speaking with the Department of Education.
Biden took a shot at those governors restricting schools’ abilities to issue mandates on Tuesday, without naming names, saying, “I find that totally counterintuitive and, quite frankly, disingenuous” but admitted he didn’t currently believe he had the authority under law to directly intervene on any state government’s mask mandate.
“I don’t believe that I do, thus far. We’re checking that,” Biden said.
Caplan told ABC News that the federal government “can and should” look at ways in which Texas and Florida are gaining certain federal benefits and suspend them — “until they drop these absurd prohibitions and return to solid public health advice.”
“I would try to turn up the pain on the governors in terms of economic consequences of their ill-thought-out, morally wrong policies, and the justification is you’re putting the rest of the country at risk,” Caplan said. “Because not only are they endangering their own state residents, they’re putting the rest of us at risk.”
(WASHINGTON) — The State Department will begin reducing its staff levels at the U.S. embassy in Kabul and the Pentagon will send troops in to help facilitate those departures, as Taliban forces advance on more provincial capitals.
There wasn’t any specific event that led President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to execute the plan, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Thursday afternoon, but rather the overall worsening trend in Afghanistan.
“There wasn’t one precipitating event in the last couple of days that led the president and the secretary to make this decision. It’s a confluence of events, and as I’ve been saying for now for several weeks, we have been watching very closely with concern the security situation on the ground — and far better to be prudent about it and be responsible and watching the trends to make the best decisions you can for safety and security of our people than to wait until it’s too late,” Kirby said.
The events in Afghanistan over the last 24 hours with the Taliban pressuring major Afghan cities was a significant factor in the decision to go forward with the reduction in staffing and the new military mission, a U.S. official told ABC News.
Biden held a meeting with his team Wednesday night and tasked them to come up with recommendations, according to a senior administration official. Then, at a meeting Thursday morning with Austin and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, the recommendations were presented to Biden and he gave the order to move forward.
The official also said the president separately spoke with Secretary of State Antony Blinken Thursday morning to discuss a diplomatic strategy and that Biden continues to be engaged on this issue and is staying in close contact with his team on the situation.
State Department Spokesman Ned Price said that while the embassy in Kabul will remain open, they will be reducing their civilian footprint due to the “evolving security situation.” He added that they expect to draw down to a core diplomatic presence in Afghanistan.
“What this is not — this is not abandonment. This is not an evacuation. This is not the wholesale withdrawal,” Price said Thursday. “What this is, is a reduction in the size of our civilian footprint. This is a drawdown of civilian Americans who will, in many cases, be able to perform their important functions elsewhere, whether that’s in the United States or elsewhere in the region.”
The United Kingdom is also sending military personnel — about 600 paratroopers — to Kabul on a short-term basis to provide support to British nationals leaving the country, according to a joint press release from the Ministry of Defence and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. The number of staffers working at the British Embassy in Kabul has also been reduced to a core team focused on providing consular and visa services for those needing to rapidly leave the country.
In a briefing at the Pentagon, the Defense Department’s top spokesman announced that it’s sending 3,000 troops from three infantry battalions — two Marine and one Army — to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to help out with the removal of American personnel from the U.S. embassy.
The State Dept. will begin reducing its staff levels at the U.S. embassy in Kabul and the Pentagon will send troops in to help facilitate those departures, as Taliban forces advance on more provincial capitals. @IanPannell & @LMartinezABC report. https://t.co/PILkULaxcqpic.twitter.com/FR2OTOLFNt
They’ll be there “temporarily” and will begin shipping out in the next 24 to 48 hours. These numbers are on top of the 650 already in Kabul protecting the airport and the embassy.
An additional 1,000 personnel will be sent to assist with the processing of Afghans who worked as interpreters, guides and other contractors and applied for Special Immigrant Visas.
“I want to stress that these forces are being deployed to support the orderly and safe reduction of civilian personnel at the request of the State Department and to help facilitate an accelerated process of working through SIV applicants,” Kirby said. “This is a temporary mission with a narrow focus. As with all deployments of our troops into harm’s way, our commanders have the inherent right of self defense, and any attack on them can and will be met with a forceful and appropriate response.”
Furthermore, a brigade of 3,000 to 3,500 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne will be sent to Kuwait to pre-position in case they are needed further.
Kirby called it a “very temporary mission for a very temporary purpose,” and said the DOD expects to keep no more than 1,000 troops in Kabul to protect the airport and embassy after the Aug. 31 deadline — a number that has notably crept up from the 650 troops originally set to remain.
Price said they will continue to relocate qualified Afghans who assisted the American mission, such as interpreters and others who worked for the U.S. government, and flights will ramp up in the coming days.
Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters that after a meeting with business leaders Thursday afternoon she would leave to “continue the briefings that we’ve been receiving.”
The U.S. embassy in Kabul has also urged Americans to evacuate Afghanistan immediately, amid fears that the capital could fall into Taliban hands in a matter of weeks.
A military analysis said the city could be isolated in 30 to 60 days and be captured in 90 days, a U.S. official told ABC News, but that timeline seemed even more accelerated Thursday as the Taliban claimed Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city.
This is a developing news story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — The Census Bureau on Thursday released the first district-level 2020 census results, setting off redistricting battles that could help determine whether Republicans or Democrats win control of the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterm elections.
The data will not only trigger a rush to redraw congressional and state legislative districts across the country, amid voting rights fights, but also are expected to show how the United States has grown more diverse.
Populations of people of color have grown, while the white population of the United States has shrunk, according to the Washington Post’s preview of the data. Six states and the District of Columbia may now have majority-minority populations.
“Republicans enter this redistricting cycle with the power to redraw 187 congressional districts to Democrats’ 75, which means redistricting could hand control of the House of Representatives back to Republicans in 2022 all by itself,” FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich writes.
Many state legislatures and commissions have already begun to discuss the maps of new congressional and legislative districts, but were waiting for the census data — delayed by the pandemic — before drawing maps.
According to FiveThirtyEight’s redistricting tracker, developed in conjunction with ABC News, at least nine states have upcoming preliminary or final deadlines in fall 2021 for either drafts of or final congressional district maps.
Six states are set to add congressional seats, seven states will each lose one seat and the remaining 37 states will keep the same number of congressional districts, the Census Bureau’s acting director announced in April.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ Quinn Scanlan and Rick Klein to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — As the delta variant spreads nationwide, the Department of Health and Human Services will require vaccination from more than 25,000 of its employees that directly work with patients, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra announced Thursday.
Going a step beyond the general guidelines for the federal workforce — which is to get vaccinated or be required to wear a mask and do frequent testing — the Department of Health and Human Services is mandating the vaccine for its employees who deal directly with patients. The Department of Veterans Affairs has called for the same policy for its 115,000 health care workers.
Both agencies employ doctors or nurses that could be directly exposed to the virus at work, or directly expose vulnerable patients to it.
The roughly 25,000 HHS employees will have until the end of September to be vaccinated, an HHS official said.
“To increase vaccination coverage and protect more people from COVID-19, including the more transmissible Delta variant, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will require more than 25,000 members of its health care workforce to be vaccinated against COVID-19,” the department said in a statement.
The 25,000 HHS employees who will be required to get vaccinated are concentrated within the Indian Health Service and National Institute of Health, as well as the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
“Staff at the Indian Health Service (IHS) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) who serve in federally-operated health care and clinical research facilities and interact with, or have the potential to come into contact with, patients will be required to receive the COVID-19 vaccine,” HHS said in a statement.
The department will allow exemptions for religious or medical reasons.
