Biden Speaks With Macron for First Time Since Diplomatic Feud

The joint announcement issued by the two countries referred vaguely to common European defense projects, but those did not appear to be new — the wording seemed to be drawn out of past NATO statements. Nonetheless, American officials were belatedly searching for special projects they could announce to reaffirm the relationship with France, including new projects in the Indo-Pacific, though some senior officials said they are concerned that anything they put together might look like a transparent, face-saving effort, especially when compared to the scope of the Australian, American and British partnership.

The core of last week’s announcement was a plan to build nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines, to be operated by the Australian navy, that are clearly being designed to counter China’s growing influence in the Pacific. The submarines would have a far larger range than the diesel-electric models that France was planning to build, under a deal announced in 2019.

But the true import of the new arrangement was far larger: It tied Australia firmly to the Western defense camp in challenging China, after years in which Australian leaders tried to carefully balance between their most important defense and intelligence ally in Washington and their huge customer for natural resources in Beijing. Now, after the Chinese government overplayed its hand with both political bullying and major disinformation campaigns in Australia, the country has declared itself a full partner in the Western effort to counter China’s growing influence.

But the move came as a shock to French leaders, who knew the submarine deal was in trouble but were kept in the dark about secret negotiations between Britain, the U.S. and Australia that began last spring.

A statement before the meeting from the Élysée Palace said Mr. Macron had agreed to hold the conversation at Mr. Biden’ request, and that he expected “clarifications on the American decision to keep an ally out of exchanges establishing cooperation in the Indo-Pacific.”

The statement, again reflecting Mr. Macron’s anger at what is seen in France as a betrayal, added: “We expect from our allies that they recognize that the discussions and consultations that should have taken place did not, and that this poses a question of confidence whose consequences must be reviewed together.”

The French president did not succeed in securing a reference to “European sovereignty” — a sensitive term for the United States as well as several of France’s partners in the European Union — but he did seem to gain American agreement for most of what he sought. He faces a presidential election in a little over six months and it was important for him to appear to stand firm.

The statement also called for the United States to recognize the strategic importance of French and European engagement in the Indo-Pacific, saying that the United States should fully recognize “the necessity of reinforcing European sovereignty, as well as the importance of the growing European engagement in their defense and their security.”

Mr. Macron was particularly offended, Western diplomats said, that Mr. Biden made no mention of it when they met in June during another summit meeting. The same day as that meeting, Mr. Biden also met with the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, and Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, to put some finishing touches on the deal.

American officials insisted that Mr. Biden was not seeking to deceive the French, but instead was said relying on Australia to break the news to Mr. Macron. It was not up to the United States, they insisted, to disentangle Australia from its contract with France.

Mr. Biden met with both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Morrison, separately, on Tuesday.

In a statement, Mr. Scott blamed Democrats for the collapse, accusing them of letting their “misguided idea of perfect be the enemy of good, impactful legislation.”

In reality, a wide array of issues had dogged the negotiations for months, including restrictions on deadly use of force, the creation of a national database to track police misconduct and whether victims of misconduct could more easily sue officers or their departments in court.

Their efforts were complicated by internal squabbling among police unions, as Republican lawmakers were reluctant to cross the National Sheriffs’ Association, a more conservative union. On Wednesday, Mr. Booker vented frustration that their opposition to the bill had superseded the progress that he and other Democrats had made in winning support from other police union groups, including the powerful Fraternal Order of Police.

“The painful thing for me is we pulled off some pretty big accomplishments,” Mr. Booker said. “We got the F.O.P. and International Association of Chiefs of Police to agree on some pretty incredible things that would have improved the profession, that would have protected police officers.”

President Biden said in a statement on Wednesday that he still hoped “to sign into law a comprehensive and meaningful police reform bill that honors the name and memory of George Floyd.” He signaled that his administration would continue to work with Democrats “and other members of Congress who are serious about meaningful police reform.”

“The White House will continue to consult with the civil rights and law enforcement and civil rights communities, as well as victims’ families to define a path forward,” he said, “including through potential further executive actions I can take to advance our efforts to live up to the American ideal of equal justice under law.”

Mr. Biden, she said, “sees his role as uniting and as working to bring together people over common agreement and on a path forward.”

The lawmakers invited to negotiate with Mr. Biden in the Oval Office on Wednesday included centrist Representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Mike Thompson of California and Stephanie Murphy of Florida, as well as Representative Pramila Jayapal, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Senator Bernie Sanders, the liberal independent from Vermont who chairs the Budget Committee; Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chairman of the Finance Committee; and Patty Murray of Washington, a member of Democratic leadership, were also slated to head to the White House, as were Senators Jon Tester, from conservative-leaning Montana, and Mark Warner of Virginia.

Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, centrists who have balked at the price tag of the social safety net plan, also planned to attend, according to their offices.

“We’ve got to do some negotiating moving forward,” Mr. Tester said on Wednesday. “I don’t think that’s a big secret.”

Liberal Democrats in the House remain adamant that they will withhold their votes for the infrastructure bill, which passed the Senate earlier this year, until that chamber approves the $3.5 trillion package. Without the Liberals backing, Democrats are almost certain to fall short of the votes they need to win approval of the infrastructure measure in the House, where Ms. Pelosi has committed to bringing it up by Monday.

Returning to the Capitol after meeting with Mr. Biden, neither Ms. Pelosi nor Mr. Schumer shared many details about the discussions, although they projected confidence that Congress would be able to deliver the measures.

“We are on schedule — that’s all I will say,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters. “We’re calm, and everybody’s good and our work’s almost done.”

Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said Wednesday morning that liberals could not negotiate a final package if more conservative Democrats would not present a counteroffer to the $3.5 trillion measure they have agreed to.

At the very least, he said, Democrats of all stripes need an ironclad, public agreement on a total spending number over 10 years and some core elements that would be in the package, such as an expanded, permanent child care tax credit, a per-child tax credit, and some aggressive climate change provisions, such as a clean energy standard.

Ms. Jayapal is preparing to make the case to Mr. Biden that linking the infrastructure bill to the social policy measure is not a matter of political horse-trading, but a substantive demand.

Liberal lawmakers, she argues, would not have agreed to a traditional infrastructure package funding roads, bridges and tunnels that will promote fossil fuel usage unless they knew a substantial climate change measure would also be enacted, to ensure the vehicles on those new highways would be electric, with a bolstered electricity infrastructure to support them.

For weeks, progressives have insisted that their support for the infrastructure package was contingent on the scope and success of the larger package, which carries most of their ambitions. Democrats plan to push through that bill under a fast-track budget process known as reconciliation that shields it from a filibuster, but because of their slim margins of control in the House and Senate, it can only pass if virtually every member of their party supports it.

With Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin warning that they will not back a package so large, and moderates in the House reluctant to vote on a measure that will not become law, Ms. Pelosi has said she will not proceed with infrastructure bill until it is clear what the Senate can pass.

But Mr. Podesta also had harsh words for moderates who have resisted the social safety net package, pushing instead for the passage of a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that has passed the Senate, and is due for a House vote next week.

“You are either getting both bills or neither — and the prospect of neither is unconscionable,” he wrote. “It would signal a complete and utter failure of our democratic duty, and a reckless abdication of our responsibility. It would define our generation’s history and show that, when our time came, we failed, both for Americans now and in the years to come.”

A large group of Democratic lawmakers is heading to the White House on Wednesday to strategize with Mr. Biden about the fate of both bills, which is likely to be determined in the next few weeks. Mr. Podesta’s warnings reflect a growing fear among some Democrats on and off Capitol Hill that the entire effort could collapse, leaving the party with little to run on in midterm elections and no chance for years to enact ambitious legislation.

“The historical trend makes it clear that Democrats will face severe headwinds next November,” Mr. Podesta wrote, “but nothing will guarantee a political reckoning faster than if the Democrats fail to pass anything.”

Mr. Podesta singled out the bill’s climate provisions, in particular, as critical for a moment when hurricanes and wildfires have slammed people across the nation and laid bare the realities of a warming planet.

“On the climate crisis in particular, the screen is blinking ‘code red,’” he wrote. “There is no time. There is no next time.”

“Reports that thousands of migrants are being deported to Haiti despite turmoil in that country raise serious concerns about whether the federal government is failing to treat migrants — including those fleeing violence, political instability, and natural disasters — with respect and dignity and affording them a meaningful opportunity to seek asylum,” the lawmakers wrote.

Photographs and the widely circulated video footage this week of border agents’ interactions with Haitian migrants offer a view into the chaos unfolding in Del Rio, where large groups of Haitians crossed the Rio Grande and illegally entered the United States.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said on Wednesday afternoon that the administration was investigating the border agents’ actions and would finish its work by next week.

“As it relates to those photos and that horrific video, we’re not going to stand for that kind of inhumane treatment and obviously we want this investigation to be completed rapidly,” Ms. Psaki said.

Also on Wednesday, members of the Congressional Black Caucus met at the White House with Susan Rice, the president’s domestic policy adviser, as well as with the president’s director of public engagement, Cedric Richmond, and the vice president’s chief of staff, Tina Flournoy.

“We were able to express our concern for people who look like us,” Representative Joyce Beatty, Democrat of Ohio and the caucus’s chairwoman, said afterward. “We had not seen the horses and the whips with any other population of people, so that to us goes to racism.”

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Representative Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, also wrote a letter to Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security, to “express serious concern regarding the ongoing repatriation of Haitian migrants and urge a humanitarian moratorium on these repatriations.”

The Biden administration has flown more than 1,000 people to Haiti since Sunday and plans to run seven flights a day starting Wednesday, with room for 135 migrants on each plane, according to an official familiar with the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategies.

The deportations are the latest example of the Biden administration, in its attempts to assert control over soaring numbers of border crossings, belying a campaign pledge to restore an asylum program for vulnerable families fleeing persecution and poverty.

Leaders of civil rights organizations, including the N.A.A.C.P., sent a letter to Mr. Biden on Tuesday condemning the treatment of the Haitians, and other allies of Mr. Biden denounced the actions, comparing the events at the border to those seen under his predecessor as president, Donald J. Trump.

Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.

Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with the secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, on Tuesday. Ms. Harris’s spokeswoman, Symone Sanders, said the vice president told Mr. Mayorkas about “the need of all C.B.P. agents to treat people with dignity, humanely and consistent with our laws and our values,” referring to Customs and Border Protection.

And a new security concern emerged on Tuesday when some Haitian migrants on a deportation flight “caused two separate disruptions on the tarmac” when they deplaned in Port-au-Prince, said Marsha Espinosa, spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department. She said three Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and an unspecified number of members of the flight crew suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

The Biden administration is using an emergency rule that the Trump administration put in place at the beginning of the pandemic to deport the migrants, who are being flown back to Haiti. The administration has sought to continue the rule — issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — which critics say is less about preventing the spread of Covid-19 and more about keeping migrants out of the country. For a range of reasons, the rule is not always consistently enforced across the border, which immigration advocates have said is leading to confusion among migrants about trying to enter the United States.

Eduardo Maia Silva, a Homeland Security spokesman, said the migrants who are not deported under the public health rule and do not have a legal reason to stay, “are placed in expedited or full removal proceedings.”

He said, “Individuals who are not immediately repatriated are either placed in ‘Alternatives to Detention,’ detained in an ICE facility, or released with a legal document,” referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Neither the Homeland Security Department nor Customs and Border Protection answered a question on Wednesday about how many of the migrants arriving in Del Rio are being allowed into the country and how many are being deported.

One woman, Joselyne Simeus, a native Haitian who had been living in Chile for seven years, was among the migrants who waded across the Rio Grande last week and crossed illegally into the country with her 5-year-old son, joining the thousands waiting under the bridge. She claimed asylum and called herself “lucky,” because she and her son were not forced to immediately return to Haiti but instead planned to travel to Florida to stay with family.

The Haitian government has asked the United States for a deportation moratorium out of concerns that the country, battered from natural disasters and political upheaval, cannot handle the number of Haitians being repatriated.

Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting from Del Rio, Texas.

Eight hours later, a Hellfire missile slammed into the sedan, killing Mr. Ahmadi and nine other people in what American officials now acknowledge was a tragic case of mistaken identity.

“Clearly our intelligence was wrong on this particular white Toyota Corolla,” General McKenzie told reporters on Friday. “We thought this was a good lead. We were wrong.”

“To even have to ask the question whether these critically important Fed guardians of the economy are profiteering off their official knowledge, expertise and activity is devastating to the public confidence,” said Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was an ethics adviser to former President Barack Obama.

Mr. Powell has asked the Fed’s staff to review ethics rules around what senior officials are allowed to invest in and buy or sell, a spokesperson for the central bank said last week. And Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Rosengren have pledged to sell their individual security holdings and to invest in broad indexes and cash instead.

But outside groups are calling for more, saying those changes are an inadequate response to the deficiencies the episode laid bare.

The trading by the officials “reveals how grossly deficient their ethical standards and the code of conduct are,” Dennis Kelleher, president and chief executive at Better Markets, wrote in a letter to Mr. Powell this week, calling for external investigations of what happened. “This requires you to take immediate, concrete and meaningful action, not just P.R. pronouncements of internal investigations and an internal review of the ethics code.”

Mr. Kaplan bought and sold millions of dollars in individual stocks and invested in stock futures, which can allow investors to make bets on whether the market will go up or down, according to his 2020 financial disclosures. Mr. Rosengren traded in financial products tied to real estate, during a year in which he regularly warned the public about risks to that sector. Both said in statements that their investments had complied with Fed ethics rules.

A Fed spokesperson said the Fed’s ethics rules were consistent with what most government agencies followed and in some cases more stringent. But given the special role the Fed plays in finance, many have questioned whether it should have stricter requirements.

Fed officials tend to be sophisticated economists and bankers themselves, and their comments can have an outsize impact on financial markets. The central bank has also taken on an increasingly expansive role: Last year, it rescued or aided the short-term corporate debt market, the long-term corporate debt market, the municipal bond market and money market mutual funds.

That raises questions about what sort of securities its officials should be allowed to own. Mr. Powell, for instance, was heavily invested in index funds and municipal debt last year, based on his own disclosures. His municipal bond holdings had not been widely criticized in years past, but they have received negative attention in recent days because the Fed helped that market for the first time last year.

Mr. Powell said he had cleared all of his holdings with the Fed’s ethics officials.

“Munis were always thought be a safe place for a Fed official to invest,” Mr. Powell said, noting that the idea was that the Fed would never buy munis. He added that the Office of Government Ethics had checked his muni holdings and said he did not have a conflict.

All this poses a conundrum for the Fed, which must weigh what its officials can reasonably invest in, given that its actions influence everything from home prices to the broad stock market.

While there are examples of very high-level officials in government who have put their savings into blind trusts — in which independent money managers buy and sell securities without communicating with the beneficiary about the details of the transactions — those are typically discouraged by the Office of Government Ethics, which calls them “highly restrictive and usually burdensome.” Ethicists tend to instead recommend divesting from individual asset holdings and investing in mutual funds or other broad-based funds.

Many Fed officials, but clearly not all, already do that.

“The system is foolish in the leeway that it gives,” said Mr. Eisen, the former ethics adviser. “The trust system is a recipe for eventual scandal.”

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Biden Presses Global Partners to Amplify Pandemic Response

President Biden called for a heightened, unified global response to the pandemic as he convened a virtual Covid-19 summit in conjunction with the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York.

Nothing is more urgent than all of us working together to defeat Covid-19, and that world is going to be much better prepared for future pandemics — we have to do both. This summit is about supercharging our efforts in three key areas: vaccinating the world by dramatically ramping up vaccine production, donations, delivery and administering the vaccine, which is a logistical — it’s a logistical challenge. Addressing the oxygen crisis in many hospitals around the world, making other treatments more accessible and increasing the availability of public health tools like masks and tests, and building back better so that our global health security infrastructure is more resilient than it is today. We’ve all suffered. The United States has lost more than 670,000 of our fellow Americans, worldwide, the death toll is above 4.5 million people — 4.5 million people. And this is a global tragedy, and we’re not going to solve this crisis with half measures or middle of the road ambitions. We need to go big and we need to do our part, governments, the private sector, civil society leaders, philanthropists. This is an all hands on deck crisis. And the good news is we know how to beat this pandemic — Vaccines, public health measures and collective action.

Still, some activists say that Mr. Biden’s new plan for donating doses is not fast enough to meet the World Health Organization’s targets for raising vaccine coverage in poorer nations. Of the 1.1 billion doses that the United States has committed to donating, only 300 million are expected to be shipped this year.

And critics of the administration had low expectations for the gathering.

“This summit deserves to be, needs to be, a debate of historic dimensions,” Peter Maybarduk, access to medicines director for Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy organization, which has been urging the administration to adopt a $25 billion plan to scale up vaccine manufacturing around the world.

“But it won’t be that kind of debate,” he added, adding that he thought the hosts would unlikely to be significantly challenged by less powerful governments and vulnerable people. “It will not produce the transformative response needed to end the pandemic,” he said.

The summit began with Mr. Biden and other world leaders, including António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, gathering virtually for a small panel discussion entitled “Call the World to Account and Vaccinate the World,” moderated by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Mr. Biden’s ambassador to the United Nations. Participants included other presidents and prime ministers, including President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, according to an agenda obtained by The New York Times.

White House officials have said that Mr. Biden’s message to the group will be that the United States cannot fight the pandemic, or address the global vaccine shortage, on its own. Earlier Wednesday, Pfizer-BioNTech announced that it had struck a deal with the Biden administration to sell the United States an additional 500 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine, to be donated to nations that need them.

Mr. Biden heralded the deal in his opening remarks, saying it would bring to 1.1 billion the total number of doses his administration has purchased for donation. “Put another way, for every one shot we’ve administered to pay in America, we have now committed to do three shots to the rest of the world,” he said.

Drug company executives, philanthropists and leaders of nonprofit organizations have also been invited to the summit, which administration officials say is the largest gathering of heads of state to date to address the global pandemic.

Mr. Biden has been under intense pressure from global health experts to do more to address the vaccine shortage — and in particular expand manufacturing around the world. Mr. Biden said the U.S. is doing so, through a partnership with India, Japan and Australia that, he said, “is on track to produce at least 1 billion vaccine doses in India to boost the global supply by the end of 2022.”

Asked on Wednesday about criticism of the United States moving to provide booster doses to some already inoculated people while much of the world lacks vaccines, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, reiterated the administration’s view that “we can do both, and it’s a false choice.”

Ms. Psaki said the United States had already donated more vaccines to other countries than every other nation combined, and would continue to share doses and scale manufacturing abroad.

“But we also need the world to do more, especially developed countries” to battle the pandemic, Ms. Psaki said.

Drug manufacturers are also under pressure to do more. The Biden administration has urged both Pfizer and Moderna to enter into joint ventures where they would license their technology to contract manufacturers with the aim of providing vaccines to low- and middle-income countries, according to a senior administration official.

Those talks led to the Pfizer donation, but the talks with Moderna have not borne fruit, the official said.

At a briefing held by Physicians for Human Rights earlier this week, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist of the World Health Organization, sounded a note of urgency and issued a plea for nations to work together to distribute vaccines in a coordinated — and equitable — fashion. She also urged countries to share their excess supplies.

“A country by country approach, a nationalistic approach, is not going to get us out of this pandemic,” she said. “And that’s where we are today.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Some experts pleaded for more aggressive action by Mr. Biden to pressure American vaccine makers to share their formulas with nations that desperately need more shots.

“Where is the monthly calendar of what each wealthy country is going to deliver?” said Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign. She added, “Where are the announcements about meeting the calls of regions and middle-income countries that are begging to be self-sufficient?”

It was not immediately clear how the administration was planning to allocate the new money for vaccine distributions. Some countries have been struggling to train and pay vaccinators and to transport doses. Pfizer doses present especially steep challenges: They must be stored at ultralow temperatures, requiring the installation of freezers and, in many cases, backup generators.

Early this year, supply shortages represented the most pressing problem for global vaccinations. Rich nations had raced to secure doses while slow-walking pledges of money and supplies to Covax, the United Nations-backed program to immunize the world.

But as those manufacturing difficulties have eased, different problems emerged. One was blatant inequality: More than 5.9 billion shots have been given globally, but overwhelmingly in wealthier nations. Another was that poorer countries had been left without the money needed to move shots from airport tarmacs into people’s arms.

Although the Biden administration’s pledges have outpaced those of most Western nations, analysts said other wealthy countries were setting an extraordinarily low bar.

And even as countries have promised to donate more doses, they have been slow to follow through, with the World Health Organization saying that only 15 percent of promised donations have been delivered. The W.H.O. has set a target of vaccinating 40 percent of every country’s population this year, requiring wealthy nations to share doses significantly more quickly.

There remains considerable excess supply: Wealthy nations will have 1 billion more vaccines than they need by the end of 2021, even if they administer booster shots, according to Airfinity, a science analytics company.

Global health officials have urged wealthy nations to let go of those supplies before they expire. Some countries have donated vaccines so close to their expiration dates, and in such small quantities, that poorer countries have struggled to use them.

Some 11 billion doses are needed globally, and activists said on Wednesday that the wealthy world’s response remained far too piecemeal. The new Pfizer doses purchased by the U.S. will be shipped through Covax starting in January.

In a statement detailing a joint strategy with the United States to have 70 percent of the global population vaccinated by next September, the European Union said it would donate 500 million coronavirus vaccine doses and ramp up coordination efforts with its American counterparts to deliver and administer them. The European Union has pledged to donate 200 million doses by the end of 2021, but its member countries had only donated 21 million doses as of early September, according to official figures.

Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm, has named global vaccination the bloc’s most urgent priority for the year ahead: “The scale of injustice and the level of urgency are obvious,” Ms. von der Leyen said in a speech on the state of the union last week.