After months of patient coaxing, incentivizing, and Olivia Rodrigo-ing, Thursday marked the start of a new phase in the federal COVID vaccination strategy called We Are No Longer Asking.
 

• President Biden will sign an executive order requiring all federal employees to get vaccinated—with no option to get tested regularly instead, in a shift from Biden’s earlier requirement. With limited exceptions for disabilities and religious beliefs, federal workers will have 75 days to get fully vaxxed or they’ll face disciplinary measures. “We would like to be a model to what we think other businesses and organizations should do around the country,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Thursday.
   
• In a White House address, Biden laid out the other pieces of a six-pronged plan to address the latest COVID surge, including inviting Ron DeSantis to a month-long CPAC conference on a remote mountaintop a new rule that businesses with more than 100 employees must mandate vaccines or weekly testing, which will affect over 80 million workers in the private sector. “We've been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us,” Biden said to vaccine-resistant Americans. The administration will also require staff at health-care facilities receiving Medicaid or Medicare funding to get vaccinated, increase rapid-test kit production, and call on schools to ramp up testing in an effort to keep them open safely. 
   
• While focused on the domestic response in Thursday’s speech, Biden is also expected to call for a global summit on vaccinations during the U.N. General Assembly later this month. The conference would focus on improving coordination among world leaders to address vaccine and oxygen shortages in the developing world. The vaccine-sharing program COVAX announced on Wednesday that it expected to have just 1.4 billion doses available by the end of 2021, down from its June projection of 1.9 billion doses this year.

The Biden administration’s tough new approach comes as the Delta variant and vaccine skepticism join forces to wreak havoc on back-to-school season.
 

• The U.S. is now seeing more than 150,000 new coronavirus cases per day, and more than 1,500 daily deaths. As feared, the children returning to in-person classes aren’t impervious. More than 250,000 kids tested positive last week alone, the biggest weekly figure for pediatric cases since the start of the pandemic, and kids now represent more than a quarter of weekly cases nationwide. Pediatric hospitalizations have also hit a record high, straining some hospitals in areas with low vaccination rates. 
   
• Astoundingly, the response to those numbers still depends on the political makeup of where you live. On one end of the spectrum, Los Angeles public schools—the second-largest school district in the country—have approved a vaccine requirement for students ages 12 and older. On the other, much shittier end, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has filed an emergency appeal to enforce his ban on school mask mandate while the case winds through the courts. 

After the GOP put untold lives at risk by hastening to politicize vaccines the moment Biden took office, turning to vaccine mandates to mitigate the damage was the only rational response. Now it’s time for Democrats to call out the Republican sabotage that made these measures necessary in the first place.

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The Justice Department has sued Texas over its near-total abortion ban, in the Biden administration’s first major step to fight the new law. “It is settled constitutional law that ‘a state may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability,’” the lawsuit says. “But Texas has done just that.” Texas Republicans designed the law to be tricky to challenge in court by deputizing private citizens in need of hobbies to enforce it, rather than government officials, but the federal government has “the authority and the responsibility to ensure that no state can deprive individuals of their constitutional rights through a legislative scheme specifically designed to prevent the vindication of those rights,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Thursday. The Justice Department is seeking an immediate injunction to prohibit enforcement of the law.

• An estimated 200 westerners, including Americans, were able to leave Afghanistan on a commercial flight out of Kabul on Thursday, in the first large-scale evacuation since the U.S. military completed its withdrawal at the end of August.
   
• President Biden has withdrawn his nomination of David Chipman to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives amid pushback from Republicans and a handful of moderate Democrats.
   
• Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) revealed that she was successfully treated for early-stage breast cancer earlier this year, and called attention to the danger of delaying routine examinations because of the pandemic. 
   
• Biden will campaign for Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) in Long Beach on Monday, the eve of the recall election. (Here’s your daily reminder to help GOTV.)
   
• Disgraced former president Donald Trump has endorsed Harriet Hageman in the Wyoming GOP primary against Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY).
   
• Several Trump appointees, including Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer, threw a fit after Biden called on them to resign from their military academy board positions by Wednesday evening or be fired.
   
• The Los Angeles Police Department has asked officers to collect social media information as part of its interview process for civilians, regardless of whether the interviewee was implicated in a crime. 
   
• Facebook has partnered with Ray-Ban to make the privacy-obliterating camera sunglasses we’ve all been clamoring for, and as a very special hell-world bonus, Facebook’s thinking about building in facial recognition.
   
• Speaking of Bad Things That An Astonishing Number Of People Decided Were Good Things, it gives us no pleasure to introduce the activism reality show.

The dark-money group No Labels put out a push poll to boost Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) proposal for a “strategic pause” on Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, and the good folks at Axios went ahead and published it at face value. The poll from No Labels (a group that Manchin formerly co-chaired, incidentally) found that 60 percent of respondents preferred to wait on the bill, in contrast to a recent Washington Post poll that found broad support for the package. That’s a function of the wording: Instead of asking about the reconciliation bill in neutral terms, No Labels framed it as a “$3.5 trillion in social welfare spending,” and asked people to weigh in on Manchin’s pause suggestion specifically—something that most people, who don’t read daily political newsletters, have not heard of. Nevertheless, Axios gave the poll a write-up, vaulting Manchin’s proposal into the day’s discourse and helping No Labels present a political position as an objective measurement of public opinion.

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The EPA has taken the first steps towards protecting Alaska’s Bristol Bay from potential mining.

The Biden administration has officially backed a set of proposals to lower prescription drug prices. 

AOC has helped raise over $250,000 for Texas pro-choice organizers and health-care providers.

Run For Something saw a 100 percent spike in people interested in running for office in the days after the Texas abortion ban went into effect.