The COVID-19 National Emergency Finally Set to End

Happy Monday! Things that can bring a grown man to tears: Chris Stapleton singing the national anthem, referees calling the softest holding penalty in football history, and stepping on a scale the morning after a Super Bowl party. 

Congratulations to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs on their 38-35 victory over the Philadelphia Eagles last night.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The U.S. military shot down three airborne objects over the weekend, one Friday evening off the Alaskan coast, the second Saturday in Canadian airspace, and a third Sunday afternoon in Michigan over Lake Huron. The Pentagon has yet to announce whether the objects were surveillance balloons like the Chinese one shot down off the coast of South Carolina last week; all three were reportedly smaller than the Chinese device. Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder said Friday the object shot down over Alaska was flying at an altitude that made it a risk to civilian aircraft, and it is being recovered by U.S. officials after reportedly breaking apart when it hit ocean ice. On Saturday, American jets shot down an object—described by the Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand as “cylindrical”—in concert with the Canadians as part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and the Canadian military is collecting the debris from the object in the Yukon Territory. Airspace was closed over Montana Saturday afternoon after NORAD spotted an object on radar. While jets scrambled to confirm its presence originally found nothing, the object reappeared Sunday over Michigan’s Lake Huron and an F-16 shot it down with the same Sidewinder air-to-air missiles that downed the previous three objects (including the Chinese balloon). Like the object over Alaska, this object was flying at altitudes that threatened civilian aircraft. The objects’ origins—and whether they carried any surveillance equipment—have yet to be determined. The rash of unidentified flying objects could be due to increased sensitivity in military radar after the Chinese balloon’s incursion. Meanwhile, the U.S. Commerce Department added six Chinese companies linked to the balloon’s production to its “entity list,” preventing American firms from selling them parts and technology without special approval.  
• The death toll from last week’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria has reportedly surpassed 33,000 people as the window for search-and-rescue operations—hampered by security concerns—draws to a close. Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, meanwhile, announced the government is investigating nearly 150 people involved in the construction of buildings unable to withstand the quakes. Three people have reportedly been arrested, seven detained, and seven more barred from leaving Turkey.  
• Russia launched a mass air attack on Friday targeting Ukrainian electricity infrastructure, with one missile reportedly flying over Moldova and coming within 25 miles of the border with Romania, a NATO member. The commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, said the Ukrainian military shot down 61 of the 71 cruise missiles and five of the seven drones the Russians deployed. 
• The FBI found one additional document with classified markings in its search of former Vice President Mike Pence’s Indiana home on Friday, an adviser to Pence announced. The search was coordinated by Pence’s legal team and the Justice Department after advisers to the former vice president turned over several classified documents found in Pence’s home last month. Meanwhile, ABC News reported Friday former President Donald Trump’s legal team had discovered a folder and a document with classified markings at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in recent months and turned them over to the Justice Department in December and January. A laptop allegedly belonging to a current aide of the former president—which reportedly had scans of those documents—was also turned over to federal authorities.
• U.S. Africa Command announced Sunday that—at the request of the Somalian government—U.S. forces conducted a “self-defense” airstrike near the coastal Somali city of Hobyo, killing approximately 12 members of the al-Shabaab terrorist group. U.S. officials believe no civilians were injured or killed in the strike due to the “remote location of the operation.”
• Three people in East Jerusalem—including a pair of brothers, ages 6 and 8—were killed Friday in what authorities described as a “ramming terror attack” when a Palestinian man—who was shot dead by an off-duty detective at the scene—drove his car into a bus stop. The attacker’s family said the man was unwell and had been released from a psychiatric ward hours earlier; Israeli security officials have reportedly come to a similar conclusion.
• The Somerset County (New Jersey) Prosecutor’s Office announced last week a Republican local council member had been fatally shot, days after a GOP city councilwoman in a different county was killed—though authorities don’t currently believe the deaths are connected. Russell Heller, a councilman from Milford, was shot in his car outside the office building where he worked. The shooter, who worked at Heller’s company, was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Sayreville councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour died from multiple gunshot wounds inflicted near her home last Wednesday. Authorities have not identified any suspects in Dwumfour’s murder, but believe the crime may be related to the church she attended.
• Toronto Mayor John Tory resigned Friday after revealing a romantic relationship with a staff member that began during the pandemic and ended earlier this year. Having just been elected in October to his third term as mayor, Tory said he was stepping down to begin “rebuilding the trust” of his family. A special election to replace Tory will be held in the coming months.

911, What’s Your National Emergency?

We don’t want to scare you, but the United States isn’t just facing a national emergency—it’s facing dozens of them and has been for decades. Iranian oil? Somalian pirates? The Japanese mafia, Colombian drugs, Belarusian election fraud? There’s an emergency for that, a declaration giving the president extra powers to tackle the problem. No wonder everyone’s so on edge all the time.

But as of May 11, we’ll all be able to breathe just a little easier. That’s when President Joe Biden says he’ll allow the COVID-19 national emergency—and accompanying public health emergency—to expire. The step is part recognition of a new phase of the pandemic, and part a response to pressure from congressional Republicans. It’ll affect health and immigration policy, and it could help put a permanent kibosh on Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

Ending the national emergency doesn’t mean COVID-19 has disappeared, of course. Globally, low vaccination rates and limited health care still put many people at risk, as reflected in the World Health Organization’s decision to keep its “public health emergency of international concern” declaration active for the virus. Nor is the United States fully out of the woods—more than 3,600 people are being admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 every day, and about 3,200 are dying every week. Yet with 70 percent of the population having received at least two doses of the vaccine and states no longer scrambling for equipment and treatments to handle surging case counts, it’s easy to see why administration officials feel comfortable relinquishing the flexibility the emergency declarations afforded to cut red tape.

Still, the decision to end the emergency was more recognition of political reality than desired policy change. Republicans had been agitating for the administration to drop the declaration for months, and the House had scheduled a vote on a bill that would force its end—the Pandemic is Over Act—and Democrats in the House were reportedly worried about the optics of voting against the legislation. Seeing the proverbial writing on the wall, the Biden administration nevertheless didn’t want the emergency to end without at least 60 days of warning. “An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system—for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the White House said in a statement. The May 11 expiration was an attempt to provide that warning.

This isn’t quite early enough for many Republicans. “Rather than waiting until May 11, the Biden administration should join us now in immediately ending this declaration,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a statement. “The days of the Biden administration being able to hide behind Covid to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on their unrelated, radical agenda are over.”

But barring more congressional wrangling—or an unexpected COVID-19 surge that changes the landscape—May 11 is go time.

The emergency declaration’s end will tweak a whole host of health care policies, but whether you notice depends heavily on your insurance situation. Medicare will still cover COVID-19 lab tests—though labs will no longer be required to report those results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—but seniors will start paying for over-the-counter tests. The federal government will keep handing out vaccines and treatments like Paxlovid at no charge, but the Biden administration has said it’s out of money to buy more, so the guarantee of getting that stuff for free will become a “while supplies last” situation. Meanwhile, private insurers will have more freedom to decide how to cover vaccines and tests.

Congress has adjusted some other previously emergency-authorized policies. Medicare recipients will keep their expanded access to telehealth through 2024, for example, but December’s omnibus spending bill made clear states can start kicking people from Medicaid as early as April, ending the pandemic freeze on disenrollments.

The effects of ending the emergency will also extend well beyond health care. As we’ve noted before, Title 42—which allows border officials to quickly expel migrants seeking asylum—relies on pandemic-related powers. The CDC declared the policy unnecessary in April 2022, but challenges by GOP-led states have kept it winding through the legal system all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Biden administration is still using the policy at the southern border. The White House has waffled a bit on what the end of the pandemic emergency means for Title 42, but Justice Department lawyers wrote a brief to the Supreme Court arguing that when the emergency expires, the case and Title 42 should go with it. “The anticipated end of the public health emergency on May 11, and the resulting expiration of the operative Title 42 order, would render this case moot,” DOJ lawyers wrote. “Because the Title 42 order would have ‘expired by its own terms,’ this suit seeking only prospective relief would ‘no longer present a ‘live case or controversy.’” Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, is leading the states’ challenge to keep the policy in place and begs to differ, arguing Title 42 will very much remain a live question as its end may contribute to a surge in border crossings.

The White House is hoping the emergency’s end won’t hurt the prospects of its already-frozen student debt cancellation plan, but it definitely won’t help. To be clear, Biden’s bid to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt for qualified borrowers doesn’t rely on the emergency declaration for its legal justification, but rather on the HEROES Act. Passed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the law gives the Education Department freedom to “waive or modify” student loan programs “in connection with” a “national emergency.” Just because the emergency is officially over, the Biden administration argues, doesn’t mean the financial distress it caused has passed. Still, a challenge to the policy by GOP-led states has already argued the plan “rests on a tenuous and pretextual connection to a national emergency.” With the emergency on its way out, it’s not hard to see the argument shifting from “tenuous” to “nonexistent.” Plus, the authors of the 20-year-old legislation—former Reps. John Boehner, Howard McKeon, and John Kline—filed an amicus brief earlier this month arguing the Biden administration had stretched the HEROES Act well beyond its limits. 

We’ll see what the Supreme Court says about how much the emergency declaration’s expiration matters, but there’s already evidence some justices will welcome its end. Late last year, Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented from the court’s decision to hear the Title 42 challenge on grounds that the emergency declaration it was based on should’ve been long gone. “The current border crisis is not a COVID crisis,” Gorsuch wrote at the time. “And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency.”

Worth Your Time

• Even before UFOs were a subject we were talking about with some level of seriousness, Matt Labash was yearning for boring times. “I miss what it feels like to not be overstimulated or provoked or moved to outrage, which we are constantly prompted to be,” he writes in his newsletter, Slack Tide. “There is not much our society won’t ingest these days. We like at least two of everything, and supersized. But one thing we seem to have no appetite for is being bored even for a second. Letting our minds sit still, instead of wandering around in our pathology-driven media hellscape. Being overstimulated, mind you, is something many consider a gift of the modern era. As the old Chinese curse has it, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Well, we do. But the times might have become too interesting for our own good.”
• In his new Substack, After Babel, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt runs through the data to explain why he believes the teen mental illness epidemic we’re living through today began around 2012. “This time really is different,” he writes, responding to those who dismiss the trend pieces as overhyped. “Given the long history of tech panics, you should come to this question and this blog with skepticism. Your default assumption should be the null hypothesis so often asserted by my critics: this is just one more unjustified freakout by older people about ‘kids these days.’ But as I have shown in this post, the evidence that this time is different is very strong. In 2010 there was little sign of any problem, in any of the long-running nationally representative datasets (with the possible exception of suicide for young teen boys). By 2015—when Greg Lukianoff and I wrote our essay The Coddling of the American Mind—teen mental health was a 5 alarm fire, according to all the datasets that Jean Twenge and I can find. The kids are not alright.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• Haley had a blast answering all your questions in February’s Monthly Mailbag (🔒). From predictions for the new House Select Committee on China to her favorite science fiction short stories to her theory on Lazarus being the Beloved Disciple in John’s Gospel, this might just be the most wide-ranging piece of content we’ve ever published.
• Good news: The Dispatch Book Club (🔒) is back and it has a new theme. Starting this month, Dispatch members who are so inclined can begin reading and discussing three books about the 1920s. The first podcast will be released on February 25, so, as Sarah would say, “Let’s dive right in!”
• Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration, joined Declan on the latest episode of the Dispatch Podcast for a conversation about the state of the economic union. The unemployment rate is near record lows and inflation is finally starting to come down, but we’re not out of the woods yet. Listen in—or watch the discussion on YouTube—to see why Furman believes the odds of a so-called “soft landing” are still only at about 20 percent.
• In Friday’s Stirewaltisms (🔒), Chris explains why he hates the State of the Union so much. “A televised pseudo-event in which the chief executive comes to Congress to instruct its members in how to conduct their business is so bad for small-r republicanism that it’s no surprise that the current form owes so much of its structure to noted stinkers” Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson, he writes.
• Audrey and Harvest join Haley for the latest Uphill (🔒) for a look at how balloon-gate is landing in Congress, a potential violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, and the kickoff of House Republicans’ Hunter Biden hearings and Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. According to Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the subcommittee will hear from experts, government officials, members of the media, FBI whistleblowers, and “Americans who’ve been targeted by their government.”
• With Kari Lake being named a CPAC headliner, Nick devotes Friday’s Boiling Frogs (🔒) to the question of why populists are “so drawn to defiant losers.” In part, he posits, it’s because “when you purport to represent The People against a sinister elite, it’s unthinkable that the actual people would go to the polls and choose those elites over you.”
• Friday’s G-File wades into Joe Rogan’s latest comments about, erm, the Joooooz. “I don’t think Rogan is an antisemite, and I don’t think he should be canceled,” Jonah writes. “I do think he’s often proudly ignorant and something of a hypocrite. After all, a guy who makes tens of millions of dollars a year for talking into a microphone about things he doesn’t understand probably shouldn’t be denigrating a class of people as abnormally obsessed with money.”
• On the site over the weekend, Reuel Marc Gerecht broke down the Biden administration’s calculations on Iran’s nuclear potential, Ethan McGuire defended Adam Sandler, Alec reviewed Gerard Butler’s new action thriller, and David M. Drucker reported on Ron DeSantis’ appeals to education activists group Moms for Liberty, “which advocates for parental rights and opposes liberal social policies in public schools.”
• On the site today, Chris writes on how love can be both virtuous and destructive—particularly in our politics—and Richard Goldberg examines how the Biden administration is working to keep the 2015 Iran nuclear deal alive.

Let Us Know

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