Politics

Good morning and welcome to On Politics, a daily political analysis of the 2020 elections based on reporting by New York Times journalists. Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday. Where things stand The Senate finally passed its $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill late Wednesday night — putting the largest […]

WASHINGTON — Of the 75 senior positions at the Department of Homeland Security, 20 are either vacant or filled by acting officials, including Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary who recently was unable to tell a Senate committee how many respirators and protective face masks were available in the United States. The National Park Service,

Unite the Country, a super PAC supporting Joe Biden, released an ad late Tuesday night that was critical of Mr. Trump’s stewardship of the response to the virus, highlighting the president’s previous statements minimizing the crisis. The ad includes a narrator saying, “Donald Trump didn’t create the coronavirus, but he is the one who called

WASHINGTON — An effort by the Department of Veterans Affairs to prevent some veterans from seeking health care outside its centers drew heavy criticism from lawmakers and a vocal Fox News ally of the president, who suggested the department’s bureaucracy could undermine a signature program of President Trump’s term. That program, known as the Mission

WASHINGTON — If you want to shut down an economy to fight a pandemic without driving millions of people and businesses into bankruptcy, you need the government to cut some checks. The coronavirus response deal that the Senate passed late Wednesday will get a lot of checks into the mail, but it will soothe only

At a Washington bookstore appearance that year, the author said that Reagan deserved credit for helping to win the Cold War, but he added that “he made us pay a very, very high price for his triumphs” by neglecting some domestic issues and by creating “a new populism” in which government was the enemy. Mr.

WASHINGTON — The $2 trillion stimulus package barreling toward passage by the Senate on Wednesday will send about $14 billion to colleges and universities that are hemorrhaging money as they close their campuses and try to stay afloat with distance learning. But higher education leaders say that is far short of what they need in

Mnuchin: Checks will arrive for most Americans within three weeks. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, at a news briefing Wednesday evening at the White House, predicted a $2 trillion rescue package would pass the Senate on Wednesday night and said that Americans would receive stimulus checks “within the next three weeks.” Under the bill, Americans with

A man suspected of planning to attack a Missouri hospital was killed during a shootout with F.B.I. agents, the authorities said on Wednesday. The deadly encounter took place on Tuesday afternoon in suburban Belton, Mo., after agents on a tactical team tried to arrest the man as part of a domestic terrorism investigation. It was

WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials have concluded that Robert A. Levinson, the retired F.B.I. agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007 on an unauthorized mission for the C.I.A., died while in Iranian custody, his family announced on Wednesday. Newly revealed intelligence pointed to Mr. Levinson’s death, top national security officials told his relatives inside White