Biden Administration News: Live Updates

The Biden administration on Monday announced it will designate an area between the South Shore of Long Island and the New Jersey coast as a priority offshore wind zone, in an effort to accelerate a burgeoning industry that has long struggled to gain a foothold in the United States.

Officials also announced $3 billion in loan guarantees available to offshore wind projects. The moves come as President Biden prepares an approximately $3 trillion economic recovery package that rests heavily on the construction of electric vehicle charging stations, improved power grids and other infrastructure key to cutting planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

Separately, the White House is setting a goal of deploying 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind in the United States by 2030 — a goal it claimed will create about 75,000 jobs — and devoting funding already approved by Congress to port infrastructure and transmission development.

Republicans said they were skeptical of Mr. Biden’s promise of millions of “green jobs” and have criticized his earlier moves to suspend new oil and gas leases and revoke permits for the Keystone XL pipeline as responsible for killing well-paying jobs in their states.

The White House on Monday said the offshore wind plan would avoid 78 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Officials estimate it will create 44,000 jobs directly in the offshore wind sector, like building and installing turbines, and 33,000 indirect jobs.

“We have an enormous opportunity in front of us to not only address the threats of climate change, but use it as a chance to create millions of good-paying, union jobs,” Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate adviser, said in a statement.

She called offshore wind a “new, untapped industry” that “will create pathways to the middle class for people from all backgrounds.”

Last month the Biden administration took a key step in approving the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind farm, off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts — a project that stagnated under the Trump administration. The proposal for 84 large turbines with 800 megawatts of electric generating capacity is slated to come online by 2023.

Vineyard Wind is one of 13 offshore wind projects proposed along the East Coast, and the Interior Department has estimated that as many as 2,000 turbines could be rotating in the Atlantic Ocean by 2030.

The Biden administration will investigate Trump-era political interference in science across the government, the first step in what White House officials described as a sweeping effort to rebuild a demoralized federal work force and prevent future abuses.

In a letter to the leaders of all federal agencies, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced Monday the formation of a task force aimed at identifying past tampering in scientific decisions. It will review the effectiveness of policies that were supposed to protect the science that informs policy decisions from inappropriate political influence and develop policies for the future.

“We know that there were blatant attempts to distort, to cherry pick and disregard science — we saw that across multiple agencies,” Jane Lubchenco, the new deputy director for climate and the environment at the White House science office, said in an interview. The Biden administration, she said, is “ushering in a new era.”

Kelvin K. Droegemeier, who led the White House science office during the Trump administration, declined to comment on the Biden administration’s plans when reached through a former aide.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s disregard for science was regularly on display in his various efforts to belittle masks, dismiss the need for social distancing and declare cold snaps to be evidence against global warming. Behind the scenes, federal scientists said Mr. Trump and his top political officials also routinely sidelined researchers who worked on issues the administration disliked, like climate change; disregarded studies that identified serious health risks from certain chemicals; and meddled in scientific decision making, particularly around the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Alondra Nelson, deputy director for science and society at White House science office, said that scientists across the government would review “Trump-era policies that eschewed science for politics” and develop new safeguards.

While the review may uncover or substantiate more instances of political tampering in science, White House officials acknowledged that there are few avenues for holding Trump administration officials to account for past actions. They also said that was not the point.

“The goal won’t be to look backward,” Dr. Nelson said. “The goal will be to try to implement practices and policies that prevent anything that might be uncovered from happening again.”

She and Dr. Lubchenco said it remained unclear whether the office would develop one new governmentwide scientific integrity policy or move to strengthen rules at individual agencies around things like improving transparency or prohibiting abuses like suppression and distortion of findings.

“Citizens need to trust the information from the federal government.” Dr. Lubchenco said.

The move follows on an plan already underway at the Environmental Protection Agency to create a public accounting of decisions in which politics undermined science.

Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the E.P.A. under the Trump administration, maintained that all the agency’s decisions were rooted in scientific advice from career staff and criticized the effort as an attempt to delegitimize work done over the past four years.

President Biden and his administration will lay out a sweeping array of proposals for increased federal spending this week, including the first look at his budget plans for the year and the details of his much-anticipated infrastructure plan.

The president will travel to Pittsburgh on Wednesday to detail a “Build Back Better” proposal that aides say will include $3 trillion in new spending and up to $1 trillion more in tax credits and other tax incentives.

It will feature investments in traditional infrastructure projects like rebuilding roads, bridges and water systems; spending to advance a transition to a lower-carbon energy system, like electric vehicle charging stations and the construction of energy-efficient buildings; investments in emerging industries like advanced batteries; education efforts like free community college and universal prekindergarten; and measures to help women work and earn more, like increased support for child care.

Mr. Biden’s agenda is expected to be offset, at least in part, by a wide range of tax increases on corporations and high earners.

The president said at a news conference last week that his next initiative would be “to rebuild the infrastructure — both physical and technological infrastructure in this country — so that we can compete and create significant numbers of really good-paying jobs. Really good-paying jobs.”

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget is also expected this week to release Mr. Biden’s discretionary funding request for the next fiscal year — detailing spending that is separate from the infrastructure plan. White House officials say it will lay out agency-by-agency funding levels and other information to help congressional committees begin to write next year’s appropriation’s bills, which for the first time in a decade will not be limited by spending caps imposed by Congress. (Lawmakers have agreed to break those caps in recent years.)

That request will not include Mr. Biden’s tax plans, the officials said. The administration’s full budget will be presented to Congress later this spring.

Mr. Biden has already signed $1.9 trillion of new spending into law, a coronavirus relief bill that included direct payments to individuals, expansions of the safety net for the unemployed and low-income workers, and new tax credits meant to lift people, particularly children, out of poverty.

Aides presented Mr. Biden last week with a plan to break his infrastructure proposal in two, in order to maximize its chances of clearing a Congress where Democrats hold a narrow majority. On Sunday, a reporter asked Mr. Biden if he had chosen whether to split up the package or push a single bill.

“I have,” he said, “but I ain’t telling you.”

The Biden administration suspended trade with Myanmar on Monday following one of the deadliest weekends in the country since the military ousted the civilian leadership and began a killing spree on civilians.

United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai said in a statement that the halt on a 2013 trade agreement with the country would remain in place until a democratically elected government is restored.

“The killing of peaceful protesters, students, workers, labor leaders, medics and children has shocked the conscience of the international community,” Ms. Tai said in a statement. “These actions are a direct assault on the country’s transition to democracy and the efforts of the Burmese people to achieve a peaceful and prosperous future.”

The suspension is largely a symbolic move to condemn the violence in Myanmar, where more than 100 people were killed on Saturday during protests against the Tatmadaw, the country’s military, according to the United Nations.

Myanmar, formerly Burma, is the United States’ 84th-largest trade partner, with the two countries exchanging $1.4 billion worth of goods during 2020. And the country was the United States’ 100th-largest goods export market last year, according to the Trade Representative’s office.

The Tatmadaw has killed more than 420 people and assaulted, detained or tortured thousands of others since the Feb. 1 coup, according to a monitoring group.

Many of the civilians killed on Saturday were bystanders, including teenagers and a 5-year-old boy. A baby girl in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, was also struck in the eye with a rubber bullet.

President Biden called for an “alliance of democracies” at his first presidential news conference on Thursday, presenting a foreign policy based on geopolitical competition between models of governance.

China is making it clear that it has alliances of its own.

After a rancorous encounter between American and Chinese officials in Alaska, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, joined his Russian counterpart last week to denounce Western meddling and sanctions.

He then headed to the Middle East to visit traditional American allies, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as well as Iran, where he signed a sweeping investment agreement on Saturday. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, reached out to Colombia one day and pledged support for North Korea on another.

Although officials denied the timing was intentional, the message clearly was. China hopes to position itself as the main challenger to an international order, led by the United States.

A U.S.-dominated system “does not represent the will of the international community,” Mr. Wang told his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, when they met in the southern Chinese city of Guilin.

In a joint statement, they accused the United States of bullying and interference and urged it to “reflect on the damage it has done to global peace and development in recent years.”

The threat of a United States-led coalition challenging China’s authoritarian policies has only bolstered Beijing’s ambition to be a global leader, one that not only refutes American criticism of its internal affairs but that presents its own values as a model for others.

“They’re actually trying to build an argument like, ‘We’re the more responsible power. We’re not the spoilers or an axis of evil,’” John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, said of China’s strategy.

It is the United States dividing the world into blocs, China’s leaders argue. Mr. Xi recently said multilateralism should be based on consensus among many countries, not a view advanced by “one or the few.”

China and Russia have drawn closer since Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. While the possibility of a formal alliance remains remote, the People’s Liberation Army and the Russian military now routinely hold exercises together.

Still, Mr. Xi’s outreach to North Korea and Mr. Wang’s visit to Iran could signal China’s interest in working with the United States to resolve disputes over those two countries’ nuclear programs.

Mr. Biden’s administration may be open to that. But in other areas, a chasm is widening.

Since Mr. Biden’s election, China appealed to the new administration to resume cooperation after the confrontations of the Trump years. It made trade and investment agreements, including one with the European Union, hoping to box out Mr. Biden.

It didn’t work. The first results of Mr. Biden’s strategy emerged last week, when the United States, Canada, Britain and the European Union jointly announced sanctions on Chinese officials over Xinjiang.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has extended its nationwide moratorium on evictions through June 30, pushing it back from the end of March, when it had been scheduled to lapse.

The move, while widely expected, comes at a precarious moment in the pandemic as the increasing vaccine availability accelerates reopening plans by businesses and local governments — even as millions of families continue to struggle with hardships that might have led to mass evictions.

The C.D.C. issued the moratorium last fall, citing its jurisdictional authority to implement measures needed to promote public health, and agency officials cited those same powers in extending the moratorium on Monday.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has presented a historic threat to the nation’s public health,” the agency’s director, Rochelle P. Walensky, said in a statement. “Keeping people in their homes and out of crowded or congregate settings — like homeless shelters — by preventing evictions is a key step in helping to stop the spread.”

Under Mr. Biden, the Department of Housing and Urban Development earlier this year extended its own moratorium on federally financed housing to June 30. (A previous version of this item misstated the status of that moratorium. It was extended in February.)

The new housing secretary, Marcia L. Fudge, has signaled she would like to extend her agency’s eviction freeze even longer. Department officials have reached out to community groups to elicit suggestions on how to streamline the new rule.

The administration’s $1.9 trillion relief package, passed earlier this month, includes $21.5 billion for emergency rental assistance, $5 billion in emergency housing vouchers, $5 billion for homelessness assistance and $850 million for tribal and rural housing. But that aid will take months to be disbursed.

Initially, the C.D.C. ban was riddled with loopholes that allowed some landlords to evict some tenants. But overall, it helped to create a significant drop in eviction applications filed in the local housing courts.

The federal moratorium is part of a patchwork of federal, state and local efforts to prevent a national health and economic emergency from turning into a monumental housing collapse.

Most states — 43 in all, plus Washington, D.C. — have temporarily halted evictions during the crisis. But the range of protections varies wildly and some tenants, including in the New York City neighborhoods hit hardest by Covid, have been displaced because they were unaware of the protections.

As many as one in five renters said they did not pay last month’s rent, according to Census Bureau surveys, with a third of Black renters reporting a recent missed payment.

By the end of Monday, thousands of yellow envelopes mailed to a squat brick building in Birmingham, Ala., will hold the fate of one of the most closely watched union elections in recent history, one that could alter the shape of the labor movement.

The envelopes contain the ballots of workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer. Almost 6,000 workers at the building, one of Amazon’s largest, are eligible to decide whether they form the first union at an Amazon operation in the United States, after years of fierce resistance by the company.

The ballots were mailed out to workers in early February and must be signed and received by the labor board by the end of Monday. On Tuesday, the vote counting begins — a process that could take many days.

The organizers have made the case in a monthslong campaign that Amazon’s intense monitoring of workers infringes on their dignity, and that its pay is not commensurate with the constant pressure workers feel to produce. The union estimates that roughly 85 percent of the work force at the warehouse is Black and has linked the organizing to the struggle for racial justice.

Amazon has countered that its $15 minimum wage is twice the state minimum, and that it offers health insurance and other benefits that can be hard to find in low-wage jobs.

Whatever the outcome of the vote, the union drive has already succeeded in roiling the world’s biggest e-commerce company and spotlighted complaints about its labor practices.

The vote comes at a delicate time for the company, which faces increasing scrutiny in Washington and around the world for its market power and influence, which have grown during the pandemic as consumers flocked online to avoid stores. President Biden has signaled his support for the workers, as have many progressive leaders.

If the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union succeeds, it would be a huge victory for the labor movement, whose membership has declined for decades. If the union loses, particularly by a large margin, Amazon will have turned the tide on a unionization drive that seemed to have many winds at its back.

“Obviously, we want to win,” Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, said Friday when he visited Alabama. “But I think a major point has already been proven. And that is that workers, even in the Deep South, are prepared to stand up and organize and fight for justice.”

Mr. Sanders’s visit appeared to have struck a nerve with Amazon. After he announced the trip, Dave Clark, who runs Amazon’s operations and worldwide consumer business, attacked Mr. Sanders in a series of messages on Twitter, as did the company’s official social media account.

“I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace,” Mr. Clark wrote in one tweet.

New Jersey is expanding voting rights, countering a push among conservative state legislators in Georgia and elsewhere to restrict voting access after Democratic gains in recent elections.

In Trenton on Tuesday, the Democratic governor, Philip D. Murphy, will sign a bill authorizing early in-person voting in a ceremony laden with symbolism.

Mr. Murphy will be joined in a videoconference by Stacey Abrams, whose decade-long effort to enroll voters in Georgia helped Democrats win two runoff elections in January, winning them control of the Senate and handing President Biden an important victory.

New Jersey lawmakers’ final approval of two bills that expand voter access was not surprising. Democrats control the State House and Democratic voters outnumber Republican voters by more than one million in the state.

The legislation requires each of the state’s 21 counties to open three to seven polling places for machine voting in the days before an election. For the Nov. 2 contest, there would be nine days of early in-person voting, including two weekends, ending the Sunday before Election Day. The bill calls for fewer days of early voting before primaries.

New Jersey will become the 25th state to allow voters to cast ballots in person before elections for a period that includes a weekend day.

“Our accountability over government, opportunities to better our lives and the chance to elect our representatives all depend upon our ability to access the ballot,” said Senator Nia Gill, a Democrat who represents parts of Essex and Passaic Counties and was a sponsor of the bill.

Separate legislation that was also approved on Thursday calls for drop boxes for vote-by-mail ballots to be spaced out more evenly throughout counties, ensuring that there are access points closer to residential neighborhoods.

Some county elections leaders, while supportive of the intent of the early-voting bill, had urged lawmakers to delay implementation until after November’s election, when the governor and all members of the Legislature are up for re-election. The bill will require most counties to purchase new voting machines and electronic poll books, and could cost upward of $50 million.

Thursday’s final votes in New Jersey came on the same day that Georgia adopted a law that added voter identification requirements for absentee voting, limited drop boxes and expanded the Legislature’s power over elections. In a statement on Friday, Mr. Biden condemned the Georgia law as “un-American” and “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”

Republicans have already passed a similar law in Iowa, and are moving forward with efforts to limit voting in states including Arizona, Florida and Texas.

President Biden, charged as vice president under President Barack Obama to oversee the implementation of the 2009 stimulus bill, is preparing a new, vastly larger, economic recovery plan that would once again unite the goals of fighting climate change and restoring the economy.

While clean energy spending was just a fraction of the Obama stimulus bill, Mr. Biden wants to make it the centerpiece of his proposal for trillions of dollars — not billions — of government grants, loans, and tax incentives to spark renewable power, energy efficiency and electric car production.

Mr. Biden’s plan, for example, is expected to call for funding at least half a million electric vehicle charging stations.

But the failures of the Obama stimulus and Mr. Biden’s role in them — he oversaw Recovery Act spending — could haunt the plan as it makes its way through Congress. The risk to taxpayers could be much higher this time around, and Republicans for years have proven adept at citing Solyndra — a solar panel company that went defunct after securing federal subsidies — to criticize federal spending.

Mr. Biden’s advisers, many of whom worked on the Obama stimulus, say the situation is very different this time around.

For one, the market demand for electric vehicles is much higher, and the cost of the cars much lower than in 2009, the year after Tesla Motors produced its first roadster. Solar power is more economically competitive. The use of wind power is expanding rapidly.

“You have to step up to the plate and take a swing in order to hit the ball, and sometimes you swing and you miss,” said Jennifer Granholm, the energy secretary, who served as governor of Michigan during the Obama years.

Advisers to Mr. Obama concede they fell short, especially on electric cars. The recovery act was supposed to put a million plug-in hybrids on the road by 2015, but mustered fewer than 200,000. Even today, fewer than 1 percent of vehicles on the road are electric.

Republicans are already weaponizing the losses of the Obama green stimulus in their political attacks against the Biden plan.

“The Obama administration promised thousands of green energy jobs,” said Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy Committee. “These jobs never materialized.”

Most economists say that, on balance, the Obama green stimulus spending did lift the economy, and had a long-lasting impact. Clean energy spending created nearly a million jobs between 2013 and 2017, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

It also made money for taxpayers: The Energy Department’s loan guarantee program ultimately made $2 billion.

That is why Democrats say that one of the biggest lessons from the Obama stimulus is to go bigger — much bigger.

One element of the spending in Mr. Biden’s bill that was not in the Obama plan could draw bipartisan support: Mr. Biden has spoken explicitly of the need to adapt the nation’s roads and bridges to a changing climate, which will bring stronger storms, higher floods and more intense heat and drought.

In interviews broadcast on CNN Sunday night, former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic officials confirmed in stark and no uncertain terms what was already an open secret in Washington: The administration’s pandemic response was riddled with dysfunction, and the discord, untruths and infighting most likely cost many lives.

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, Mr. Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, suggested that hundreds of thousands of Americans may have died needlessly, and Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the testing czar, said the administration had lied to the public about the availability of testing.

The comments were among a string of bombshells that emerged during a CNN special report that featured the doctors who led the government’s coronavirus response in 2020.

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accused Mr. Trump’s health secretary, Alex M. Azar III, and the secretary’s leadership team of pressuring him to revise scientific reports. “Now he may deny that, but it’s true,” Dr. Redfield said in an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent. Mr. Azar, in a statement, denied it.

Dr. Stephen K. Hahn, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said his relationship with Mr. Azar had grown “strained” after the health secretary revoked the agency’s power to regulate coronavirus tests. “That was a line in the sand for me,” Dr. Hahn said. When Dr. Gupta asked him if Mr. Azar had screamed at him, Dr. Hahn replied: “You should ask him that question.”

But it was Dr. Birx, who has been pilloried for praising Mr. Trump as being “so attentive to the scientific literature” and for not publicly correcting the president as he made outlandish claims about unproven therapies, whose disclosures may have been the most compelling.

As of Sunday, more than 548,000 Americans have died from infection with the coronavirus. “I look at it this way,” she said. “The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge.”

“All of the rest of them,” she said, referring to almost 450,000 deaths, “in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially” had the administration acted more aggressively.

In what was one of her first televised interviews since leaving the White House in January, she also described a “very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult” phone call with Mr. Trump after she spoke out about the dangers of the virus last summer. “Everybody in the White House was upset with that interview,” she said.

After that, she decided to travel the country to talk to state and local leaders about masks and social distancing and other public health measures that the president didn’t want her to explain to the American public from the White House podium.

Dr. Gupta asked if she was being censored. “Clearly someone was blocking me from doing it,” she said. “My understanding was I could not be national because the president might see it.”

Several of the officials, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci — who unlike the others is a career scientist and is now advising President Biden — blamed China, where the virus was first detected, for not being open enough with the United States. And several, including Dr. Redfield and Admiral Giroir, said early stumbles with testing — and the attitude within the White House that testing made the president look bad by driving up the number of case reports — were a serious problem in the administration’s response.

And the problems with testing went beyond simply Mr. Trump’s obsession with optics. Admiral Giroir said that the administration simply did not have as many tests as top officials claimed at the time.

“When we said there were millions of tests — there weren’t, right?” he said. “There were components of the test available but not the full deal.”

Fox News just hired a Trump. But not Donald.

Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of former President Donald J. Trump, is joining the cable channel as a paid on-air contributor, the network announced on Monday. The move was not exactly a surprise, as Ms. Trump acknowledged during a morning appearance on “Fox & Friends.”

“I sort of feel like I’ve been an unofficial member of the team for so long,” Ms. Trump told the show’s co-hosts, Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade. “Over the past five years, I would come there so often that the security guards were like, ‘Maybe we should just give you a key.’”

Mr. Doocy, Mr. Earhardt and Mr. Kilmeade welcomed their new colleague with an on-air round of applause.

Ms. Trump, who is married to the former president’s younger son Eric, was a frequent guest on Fox News during the 2020 campaign, when she served as a surrogate for her father-in-law. Recently, Ms. Trump floated the possibility of running for a U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina, her home state. On Monday, she told “Fox & Friends” that she had not “officially made a decision, but hopefully sometime soon.”

She is the second member of Donald Trump’s inner circle to join the Fox News payroll in recent weeks. Kayleigh McEnany, the former White House press secretary, signed on earlier this month as a contributor.

The Federal Reserve’s independence from partisan politics is essential and must be protected, Christopher Waller, a member of Fed’s Board of Governors, said in his first speech as a top central bank official.

Mr. Waller, who previously worked in research at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, was nominated to the Fed by President Donald J. Trump and confirmed to the job late last year.

He used his first extensive public remarks in the role to push back on the idea that the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates, might keep them steady just to make interest costs on the government’s huge debt pile low in the wake of the economic downturn caused by the pandemic.

“Going forward, the monetary policy choices of the F.O.M.C. will continue to be guided solely by our mandate to promote maximum employment and stable prices,” Mr. Waller said. “Partisan policy preferences or the debt-financing needs of the Treasury will play no role in that decision.”

Mr. Waller noted that the government’s pandemic response spending packages — which totaled more than $5 trillion — have pushed the U.S. debt to a level last seen in World War II, relative to the nation’s output.

At the same time, the Fed has been keeping short-term policy interest rates near zero while buying up huge amounts of government debt to make financing of all kinds cheaper, helping to stoke demand and fuel an economic recovery.

That has contributed to a narrative that “the Federal Reserve will succumb to pressures” to keep rates low and continue buying bonds, Mr. Waller said, policies that would make it easier for the government to borrow and spend.

“It is simply wrong,” he said. “Monetary policy has not and will not be conducted for these purposes.”

Instead, the Fed will focus on fostering maximum employment and price stability — its two Congress-given goals. The Fed is politically independent, and although it has traditionally cooperated with the Treasury Department during times of crisis, elected officials and those with close ties to the presidential administration do not have a say in how it sets monetary policy to achieve its targets.

Mr. Waller’s remarks do not mean interest rates are poised to rise soon, though. The Fed has signaled that it will leave them near rock-bottom until inflation has moved higher and looks poised to stay there, and until the economy has returned to what they see as full employment.

Mr. Waller’s comments come at a time when the Fed’s prized independence has faced questions from a different direction: Republican lawmakers have begun to ask whether Fed research into climate change and racial equity, especially at a regional level, has been too partisan and oversteps the central bank’s intended role.

Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in a letter on Monday that the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco has had a “seemingly sudden and alarming inclusion of social research that risks being of a bitterly partisan nature” and asked for both a briefing and documents related to the regional branch’s climate and racial equity work and expenses.

The Fed has received and is reviewing Mr. Toomey’s letter, said a spokesman for the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, who indicated that officials would discuss its contents with Mr. Toomey’s office.