Biden says ‘America is on the move again’ as he touts latest jobs report, credits his policies

President Biden released more details from his conversations Friday with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), revealing that Capito presented a Republican counteroffer to Biden’s infrastructure plan that consisted of about a $50 billion increase in spending across a number of infrastructure programs.

Ultimately, the president told Capito that the revised counteroffer “did not meet his objectives,” according to a statement from White House press secretary Jen Psaki.

Brandon Wolf says that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) made him a promise when he visited Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, where Wolf survived a shooting that killed 49 and injured dozens of others.

“He looked me in the eyes and told me that he would always support those of us who had been impacted by the shooting,” Wolf told The Washington Post of their 2019 meeting.

So Wolf said he felt betrayed when DeSantis used a line-item veto this week to nix $150,000 that would have funded a program offering mental health services for Pulse survivors and their families at an Orlando LGBT center.

Halfway through an April markup on the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, Rep. Frederick B. Keller (R-Pa.) appeared on the Zoom screen with a practical question:

How would D.C. pay for statehood?

“Democrats say the city is now financially self-sufficient. But the numbers do not add up,” Keller said, referring to the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government spends each year on the city’s court system and education programs.

In congressional hearings, D.C. officials have provided scant detail on how they would absorb those costs, instead remaining more focused on the moral argument that 700,000 people should not be denied representation.

President Biden and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) spoke by phone Friday about the infrastructure package but apparently did not reach any agreements, according to a statement on the call from Capito’s office.

The two will speak again Monday, the readout said, signaling that negotiations between Democrats and Republicans will continue, despite increasing pressure on Democrats to consider moving forward on their infrastructure proposal without GOP support.

“This afternoon, Senator Capito participated in a phone conversation with President Biden where they continued negotiating a bipartisan infrastructure package,” Capito spokeswoman Kelley Moore said in a statement. “During the call, the two discussed the Republican infrastructure framework and the Biden administration’s proposal. Senator Capito and President Biden agreed to connect again on Monday.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that the administration was taking concerns about unexplained aerial phenomena coming within the United States’ airspace seriously and that government officials are actively working on a report with updated information on sightings of UFOs.

“We take reports of incursions into our airspace by any aircraft, identified or unidentified, very seriously and investigate each one. Safety and security of our personnel, of our operations, are of paramount concern,” she said during a news briefing. “There’s a requirement to put out this report, and certainly our appropriate teams are working on finalizing it.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday called Anthony S. Fauci a “renowned … career civil servant” and said she could not envision any scenario in which Biden would fire the nation’s top infectious-disease official in the wake of the disclosure of hundreds of his emails from a key juncture of the pandemic.

During a White House news briefing, Psaki was asked about criticism, primarily from Republicans, that the emails suggest that Fauci sometimes would say different things publicly from what he said privately as he sought to help guide the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that social media companies have a “responsibility” to combat disinformation on their platforms, hours after Facebook announced that it plans to suspend Trump for two years over his comments inciting violence in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

At a White House news briefing, Psaki declined to answer directly when asked whether she believes Facebook’s action was a “reasonable consequence” of the former president’s words. She argued that, more broadly, social media companies must take steps to address false information that is spreading online.

The Biden administration announced plans Friday to reverse policies implemented under President Donald Trump that weakened the Endangered Species Act, a half-century-old law credited with the recovery of the bald eagle, humpback whale, grizzly bear and dozens of other species.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service are both moving to undo much of the Trump administration’s work altering the ways habitats of plants and animals on the verge of extinction are kept from total collapse.