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    Treasury Shifts Cash Among States as Pandemic Housing Aid Dries Up

    The Biden administration pulled back the aid from states and counties with unspent funds and diverted it to four states pressing for more: California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has clawed back $377 million in federal emergency housing aid from states and counties, most of them controlled by Republicans, and redirected the cash to states that have been clamoring for more help, including New York, California and New Jersey.The $46 billion Emergency Rental Assistance Program, first enacted by Congress in 2020, succeeded in preventing a wave of evictions stemming from the downturn caused by the pandemic. But Treasury Department officials, increasingly concerned that evictions might rise after the program winds down, have tried to ensure that none of the remaining funding goes unspent while pushing states to find other funding sources to assist poor tenants.In recent months, White House officials have pressured governors in states with unspent funds to turn over the money to local governments within their states. Now they are going one step further, pulling back cash from states with relatively few tenants — like Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming — or localities that failed to efficiently distribute the aid, including Alabama, Arkansas and several counties in Texas.The money, in turn, is being diverted to four states that burned through their allotted amounts — with $136 million in additional aid headed to California, $119 million to New York, $47 million to New Jersey and $15 million to Illinois, according to a spreadsheet provided by a senior administration official. North Carolina, Washington and other localities will be receiving smaller amounts.New York officials were happy with their windfall but said it fell far short of the $1.6 billion in additional aid requested by the state.“This is better,” said Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat whose district includes the South Bronx, which has some of the highest eviction and poverty rates in the country. “But it’s a pitiful drop in the bucket compared to what we need.”The four states, home to roughly a third of the nation’s low-income renters, have already spent billions in emergency aid paying back rent for tenants at risk of eviction, and they have requested more funding, citing affordable housing shortages and rising rents. In January, their governors — Gavin Newsom of California, Kathy Hochul of New York, Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, all Democrats — called on Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen to shift cash from low-spending states into their accounts, saying that tenants were “facing an immediate need now.”Treasury officials responded with the reallocation — but made it clear the well was running dry, and states would soon have to make hard choices by using their own revenues, or other federal pandemic relief funding, to bankroll anti-eviction initiatives that might have been buoyed by President Biden’s stalled social spending bill.“The emergency rental program has helped keep millions of families in their homes, reducing the economic costs of the pandemic, and built a nationwide system for eviction prevention that didn’t exist before,” the deputy Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, who has overseen the implementation of the program, said in an interview.“As these funds run out, Treasury is encouraging state and local governments to invest in long-term strategies to prevent evictions and build affordable housing, using other resources,” he added.The program, initiated under the Trump administration and ramped up by Mr. Biden’s team, got off to a sluggish start, as state governments struggled to create new systems to process applications, determine eligibility and distribute the cash.But by late 2021, most local systems were up and running, thanks in part to White House guidelines relaxing verification requirements.The enormous infusion of cash, coupled with federal and local eviction bans, helped prevent or delay about 1.35 million evictions in 2021, according to an analysis published last week by Princeton’s Eviction Lab. Evictions have risen in recent months in some cities but remain below the levels predicted when the pandemic first struck.Most of the aid that the Treasury Department is clawing back comes from states in the West, Midwest and New England with relatively high per capita incomes and low percentages of renters per capita. But part of the money is being pulled out of some of the country’s poorest states, where local officials were unable, for various political and logistical reasons, to disburse the funds.Alabama, for instance, is losing $42 million from a total allocation of about $263 million. A spokesman for the state’s housing agency provided a memo from state housing officials claiming that the Treasury Department “did not consider that Alabama has a lower proportion of renters to homeowners” in making its aid decisions, and that an overall lack of need put “downward pressure” on applications.But applicants and housing groups have complained that the state has made accessing the money difficult, and that a company hired to run the program rejected a large percentage of low-income tenants.West Virginia, which has been slow to distribute a range of federal food, housing and anti-poverty aid during the pandemic, was forced to return $39 million despite recent efforts by state officials to encourage more renters to apply. A spokesman for Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, a Republican, said the state was “simply not a renter state,” adding that the program “was clearly designed with Manhattan in mind — not rural America.”And Arkansas, which took months to organize its effort, is giving back $9 million, according to the tally provided by the senior administration official.The Biden administration had hoped to avoid shifting funding across state lines, opting instead to negotiate with governors to send unspent aid to counties and cities in their own states. Late last year, the White House persuaded Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Wisconsin and other states to voluntarily shift about $875 million to the cities and counties in their states that needed the money most.Yet administration officials are less concerned about offending state officials that have lost funding than tamping down the expectations of Democratic governors who want them to claw back even more.Gene Sperling, who oversees the Biden administration’s pandemic relief programs, said that the program was on track to help around five million renters, and that the largest complaint now was that “the funds are moving out so swiftly that there is very little left to be reallocated.” More

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    Exports to Russia Blocked by U.S. and Its Allies

    To try to halt the war in Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies have imposed the most sweeping export controls seen in decades on Russia. Now they have to enforce them.WASHINGTON — The United States, in partnership with its allies, has hit Russia with some of the most sweeping export restrictions ever imposed, barring companies across the world from sending advanced technology in order to penalize President Vladimir V. Putin for his invasion of Ukraine.The restrictions are aimed at cutting off the flow of semiconductors, aircraft components and other technologies that are crucial to Russia’s defense, maritime and aerospace industries, in a bid to cripple Mr. Putin’s ability to wage war. But the extent to which the measures hinder Russia’s abilities will depend on whether companies around the globe follow the rules.Enforcing the new restrictions poses a significant challenge as governments try to police thousands of companies. But the task could be made easier because the United States is acting in concert with so many other countries.The European Union, Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and South Korea have joined the United States in imposing their own restrictions. And governments including Singapore and Taiwan, a major global producer of semiconductors, have indicated they will support the rules.“Because we have the full cooperation and alignment with so many countries, it makes enforcement a lot easier,” Gina Raimondo, the U.S. secretary of commerce, said in an interview. “Every country is going to be doing enforcement.”“That’s part of the power, if you will, of having so much collaboration,” she added.Officials from the Commerce Department, which is in charge of enforcing the U.S. rules, have already begun digging through shipping containers and detaining electronics, aircraft parts and other goods that are destined for Russia. On March 2, federal agents detained two speedboats at the Port of Charleston valued at $150,000 that were being exported to Russia, according to senior U.S. officials.To look for any potential violators, federal agents will be combing through tips from industry sources and working with Customs and Border Protection to find anomalies in export data that might point to shipments to Russia. They are also reaching out to known exporters to Russia to get them on board with the new restrictions, speaking to about 20 or 30 companies a day, U.S. officials said.Their efforts extend beyond U.S. borders. On March 3, Commerce Department officials spoke to a gathering of 300 businesspeople in Beijing about how to comply with the new restrictions. U.S. officials have also been coordinating with other governments to ensure that they are taking a tough stance on enforcement, senior U.S. officials said.Emily Kilcrease, director of the Energy, Economics and Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said that the level of allied cooperation in forging the export controls was “completely unprecedented,” and that international coordination would have an important upside.“The allied countries will be active partners in enforcement efforts, rather than the United States attempting to enforce its own unilateral rules extraterritorially,” she said.It remains to be seen how effective the rules are in degrading Russia’s military capability or dissuading its aggression against Ukraine. But in their initial form, the broad scope of the measures looks like a victory for the multilateralism that President Biden promised to restore.Mr. Biden entered office pledging to mend ties with Europe and other allies that had been alienated by former President Donald J. Trump’s “America first” approach. A key part of the argument was that the United States could exert more pressure on countries like China when it was not acting alone.That approach has been particularly important for export controls, which experts argue can do more harm than good when imposed by only one country — a criticism that was sometimes leveled at the export controls the Trump administration issued on China.“Because we have the full cooperation and alignment with so many countries, it makes enforcement a lot easier,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Russian invasion of Ukraine has unified Western governments like few issues before. But even with countries eager to penalize Russia, coordinating restrictions on a vast array of complex technologies among more than 30 governments was not simple. The Commerce Department held more than 50 discussions with officials from other countries between the end of January and Feb. 24, when the controls were announced, as they hashed out the details, senior U.S. officials said.Much of that effort fell to Matthew S. Borman, a three-decade employee of the Commerce Department, who in late January began near-daily conversations with the European Commission and other countries.In mid-February, Mr. Borman and a senior aerospace engineer flew to Brussels for meetings with Peter Sandler, the European director general of trade, and other staff. As a “freedom convoy” protesting coronavirus restrictions attempted to roll into Brussels, they worked from early in the morning until late in the night amid reams of paper and spreadsheets of complex technological descriptions.Each country had its own byzantine regulations, and its own interests, to consider. The European Commission had to consult the European Union’s 27 member countries, especially tech powers like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Finland, on which products could be cut off. Officials debated whether to crack down on the Russian oil industry, at a time of soaring gas prices and inflation.As Russia’s neighbors, the Europeans wanted to ensure that Russia still had access to certain goods for public safety, like nuclear reactor components to avoid a Chernobyl-style meltdown. At least one country insisted that auto exports to Russia should continue, a senior administration official said.The breakthrough came when American officials offered a compromise. The Biden administration planned to issue a rule that would bar companies anywhere around the world from exporting certain products to Russia if they were made using American technology. But those measures would not apply in countries that joined the United States and Europe in issuing their own technological restrictions on Russia.In an interview, Mr. Borman said that American allies had historically been concerned with the extraterritorial reach of U.S. export controls, and that the exclusions for countries that imposed their own rules “was really the key piece.”The Russia-Ukraine War and the Global EconomyCard 1 of 6Rising concerns. More

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    Warehouses Transform N.Y.C. Neighborhoods as E-Commerce Booms

    The region is home to the largest concentration of online shoppers in the country. The facilities, key to delivering packages on time, are reshaping neighborhoods.An e-commerce boom turbocharged by the pandemic is turning the New York City region into a national warehouse capital.In just two years, Amazon has acquired more than 50 warehouses across the city and its surrounding suburbs. UPS is building a logistics facility larger than Madison Square Garden on the New Jersey waterfront near Lower Manhattan.In Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, 14 huge warehouses to help facilitate e-commerce operations are rising, including multistory centers previously found only in Asia.Fueled by the soaring growth of e-commerce while so many Americans have been working from home, online retailers, manufacturers and delivery companies are racing to secure warehouses in the country’s most competitive real estate market for them.Every day, more than 2.4 million packages are delivered just in New York City, an online-buying mecca in a region of 20.1 million people.The feverish activity has already transformed the landscape of city neighborhoods and rural towns, transforming Red Hook in Brooklyn into a bustling logistics hub and replacing farmland in southern New Jersey with sprawling warehouses where packages are sorted, packed and delivered, often within hours of being ordered.An Amazon grocery hub in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which has emerged as a nexus of e-commerce warehouses in New York because it offers relatively easy access to Lower Manhattan, Queens and the rest of Brooklyn.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesJust 1.6 percent of all warehouses in New York City and only 1.3 percent in New Jersey are available for lease, according to the real estate firm JLL; only the Los Angeles area has fewer warehouse vacancies in the United States. Some companies are converting buildings never intended to be warehouses. Amazon turned a shuttered supermarket in Queens into a makeshift package hub.The soaring demand for warehouses, once the ugly duckling of the real estate industry, underscores their pivotal role in a complex global supply chain. Nationwide, developers are pouring billions of dollars into the construction of new facilities, helping lift the commercial real estate sector, which has been battered by the emptying of offices during the pandemic.But the rise of warehouses has also sparked significant opposition. While they provide jobs and can lower residential property taxes by contributing to the local tax base, people across the region say the large hubs will lead to constant flows of semi-trucks and delivery vans that will worsen pollution and traffic congestion.Understand the Supply Chain CrisisThe Origins of the Crisis: The pandemic created worldwide economic turmoil. We broke down how it happened.Explaining the Shortages: Why is this happening? When will it end? Here are some answers to your questions.A New Normal?: The chaos at ports, warehouses and retailers will probably persist through 2022, and perhaps even longer.A Key Factor in Inflation: In the U.S., inflation is hitting its highest level in decades. Supply chain issues play a big role.They have also bemoaned the loss of open land to mega facilities. In recent months, residents in the southern New Jersey township of Pilesgrove, just across the Delaware River from Wilmington, Del., protested plans for a 1.6 million square-foot warehouse — larger than Ellis Island — on former farmland.While Amazon, major retailers and logistics operators such as UPS, FedEx and DHL dominated the initial wave of warehouse deals at the start of the pandemic, interest is now coming from smaller businesses seeking greater control of their supply chain amid a global bottleneck in the movement of goods.“I’ve been doing this for 30-some-odd years, and I’ve never seen it like this,” said Rob Kossar, a vice chairman at JLL who oversees the company’s industrial division in the Northeast. “In order for tenants to secure space, they are having to negotiate leases with multiple landlords on spaces that aren’t even available. It’s insane what they are having to do.”The rising cost to lease facilities has frustrated some small business owners who cannot compete with retail and logistics giants, as well as newcomers like Tesla and Rivian, which have opened showrooms and service centers for their electric vehicles in Brooklyn warehouses. Leasing prices for warehouses in the Bronx, for instance, have jumped 22 percent since the pandemic started.Warehouse jobs are still just a fraction of New York City’s labor force, but companies are on a hiring spree. Since 2019, the number of warehouse jobs doubled to 16,500 positions in late 2021. New hires at Amazon make around $18 an hour and get starting bonuses up to $3,000. But the company has also been fighting workers at some of its warehouses, including on Staten Island, who are trying to unionize to improve working conditions.Prose employs about 150 employees at its facility in Brooklyn from where it ships products across the United States and to Canada.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesToday, nearly everything — from cars to electronics and groceries to prescription drugs — can be ordered online and arrive in as little as a few hours. In New York City, new companies are offering 15-minute grocery delivery.And though most retail sales nationwide still happen at brick-and-mortar stores, online sales are increasing at breakneck speed, growing by 50 percent over the last five years to reach 13 percent of all retail purchases, according to the census.That surge is pummeling many retailers, especially smaller businesses, that have also had to weather the loss of customers during the pandemic.At the onset of the pandemic shoppers switched to online buying at a rate that had been expected to take a decade to reach, according to analysts.Some large retailers, such as Target and Best Buy, that have a handful of warehouses in the region lean on their stores to fulfill online orders. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, does not have a store in New York City so it uses a warehouse in Lehigh Valley, Pa., just over the border from New Jersey, and stores in surrounding suburbs to serve city residents.Amazon is taking a different approach. Across New Jersey to the northern New York City suburbs to Long Island, Amazon is cobbling together a sprawling network of fulfillment centers, package-sorting facilities and last-mile hubs. In the city it has set up a handful of facilities in the Red Hook and Sunset Park neighborhoods of Brooklyn.Amazon’s rapid expansion is not unique to the New York area. Last September alone, Amazon said in a recent earnings call, it added another 100 facilities to its delivery network in the United States.Red Hook, a neighborhood of just under a square mile bounded by water on three sides, has become a center for warehouses in the city because it is near major roadways into population centers in other parts of Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan and Queens.The owner of Prose decided to keep all his manufacturing under one roof before the supply chain problems emerged. “It has been a great decision,” he said.Clark Hodgin for The New York TimesAt least three new warehouses have opened in the neighborhood and more could be on the horizon. UPS paid $300 million for a 12-acre property, and two developers of logistics centers spent $123 million in December to buy several industrial sites there.How the Supply Chain Crisis UnfoldedCard 1 of 9The pandemic sparked the problem. More

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    Why Is the Fed Raising Interest Rates?

    Prices for groceries, couches and rent are all climbing rapidly, and Federal Reserve officials have been warily eyeing that trend. On Wednesday, they are expected to take their biggest step yet toward counteracting it.Central bank officials — who have been signaling for months that they are preparing to pull back economic support — are expected to raise their policy interest rate by a quarter percentage point. That small change will carry with it a major signal. Policymakers are telling markets and the public that they have fully pivoted to inflation-fighting mode and will do what is necessary to make sure price gains do not remain hot for months and years to come.The Fed will release its decision at 2 p.m., and Jerome H. Powell, the central bank’s chair, will hold a news conference at 2:30 p.m.The Fed is acting at a tense moment for many consumers, when people are worrying about rising day-to-day expenses and trying to think through what higher interest rates could mean for their finances. Here’s a rundown of what is happening, why it is happening and what it is likely to mean for markets and the economy.The Fed is taking its foot off the accelerator. More

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    Refugee Crisis Will Test a European Economy Under Pressure

    Nearly everyone who crossed the Danube on the open-air ferry from Ukraine and landed in the frostbitten Romanian port city of Isaccea on a recent morning had a roller bag and a stopgap plan. One woman planned to join her husband in Istanbul. Another was headed to Munich, where her company has its headquarters. Others were meeting brothers, cousins, in-laws and friends in Paris or Sofia, Madrid or Amsterdam.And then, they hoped to go back to Ukraine.“I need to return,” said Lisa Slavachevskaya, who traveled with her 10-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter from Odessa. “My husband, my mother and my grandmother are there.” She said she planned to go home in a month.Whether such quick turnabouts are possible is one of the many uncertainties hanging over Europe’s fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II. No matter how the catastrophe in Ukraine ends, the costs of helping the millions of Ukrainians fleeing Russian bombs will be staggering. Some early estimates put the bill for housing, transporting, feeding and processing the flood of humanity at $30 billion in the first year alone.“This is a humanitarian and medical emergency in the next weeks,” said Giovanni Peri, director of the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis.Tania Uzunova with her three children on a ferry headed to Isaccea in Romania.What happens over the next few months will determine if Europe will face the additional costs of a massive resettlement that has the potential to reshape the economic landscape.European economies are still recovering from the pandemic and coping with stubborn supply chain shortages and high inflation. As costly as it will be to provide short-term relief to families temporarily displaced by the war, over the long term the expense of integrating millions of people would be much greater and put immense strain on housing, education and health care systems. While a giant influx of workers, particularly skilled ones, is likely to increase a nation’s output over time, it could intensify competition in the job market. Roughly 13 million people were unemployed in the European Union in January.“It is uncertainty that now dominates the economic calculation,” Mr. Peri said.More than three million refugees fled Ukraine in less than three weeks, according to the U.N. International Organization for Migration, and millions more are likely to follow as the war rages on.Officials, migration experts and economists say it is too early to say whether most displaced Ukrainians will end up staying.That is a stark contrast to 2015, when 1.3 million migrants from the Middle East and North Africa escaped to Europe after years of war and terror, seeking asylum because they feared persecution. Return was not an option.So far, officials say, relatively few have asked for such protection. Of the 431,000 Ukrainians who have crossed into Romania, for example, only 3,800 have asked for asylum. Indeed, many winced at the “refugee” label.Of the 431,000 Ukrainians who have crossed into Romania, only 3,800 have asked for asylum, according to a government spokesman.“I don’t consider myself a refugee,” Evgeniy Serheev, a lawyer, said through a translator as he waited to cross into the northeastern Romanian town of Siret. But with his wife, three children and their bags crammed into one of hundreds of cars inching toward the border, he acknowledged that he looked the part.The urgent humanitarian and moral case is compelling on its face; the economic argument can be harder to make. Most research, though, over the long term shows that working refugees can help economies grow, expanding a nation’s productive capacity, paying taxes and generating more business for grocery stores, hair salons, and clothing and electronics stores. That was what happened in Germany after 2015 when it took in more than a million refugees, most of them from Syria.“Economically speaking it was a net positive,” said Ángel Talavera, head of European economics at Oxford Economics.But countries face significant initial costs.The European Union last week pledged 500 million euros, or $550 million, in humanitarian support, but it will have to put up more. “European governments are going to blow the budget,” said Claus Vistesen, chief eurozone economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics. This latest drain comes on top of an extraordinary amount of public spending over the last two years to battle the coronavirus pandemic.The sudden need for more housing, fuel, food, health care services and more is going to further exacerbate supply shortages. “Inflation is going to go up, up, up,” Mr. Vistesen said.Igor Korolev with his family and their cat, Murka, inside a makeshift shelter in the ballroom of a hotel in Romania.The Ukranians were welcomed by Romania with food and shelter.Cristian Movila for The New York TimesMost Ukrainians have been met with care packages and offers of free shelter in Romania.In the eurozone, inflation is running at 5.8 percent, and Mr. Vistesen said he expected it to rise to 7 percent this year given soaring energy prices. Those are up by nearly a third since last year. For the European Central Bank, he added, it will make the delicate task of balancing the risk of inflation with the risk of recession all the more difficult.For those living and working in Europe, it will mean less spending power in the short run. If wages don’t rise, they will be poorer.For now, Ukrainians, with strong kinship, cultural and religious ties in other European countries, have mostly been met with care packages and offers of free shelter, transportation and food.At the border in Siret, volunteers rushed up to Ukrainian families trudging up the road with offers of cups of hot tea and €5 cellphone SIM cards. Organizations, businesses and individuals jockeyed for a spot closest to the checkpoint to be the first to give chicken soup, kebabs, blankets, toothbrushes, stuffed animals and hats.The government in Bucharest has so far allocated $49 million to cover the costs. The prime minister, Nicolae Ciuca, said he expected the European Union to reimburse a big chunk of that.The E.U. has granted Ukrainians immediate permission to stay for up to three years, get a job and go to school — access that migrants from other parts of the globe could only dream of. And some countries, including Romania and Poland, have agreed to allow refugees to receive the same social and health services available to their own citizens.The Russia-Ukraine War and the Global EconomyCard 1 of 6Rising concerns. More

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    NLRB Issues a Complaint Against Starbucks

    The National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint against Starbucks on Tuesday over accusations that it retaliated against two employees seeking to unionize their store in Phoenix.The workers are part of a campaign that has created unions at six stores in the Buffalo area and Arizona since December, out of roughly 9,000 company-owned stores nationwide. Overall, workers at more than 100 Starbucks locations have filed for union elections during that time.The formal complaint — something a regional office of the labor board issues after investigating and finding merit in accusations against employers or unions — is the first of the current Starbucks campaign. It contends that Starbucks issued a written warning to one employee and suspended her, and rejected the scheduling preferences of a second employee, leading to her termination, because the employees supported the union.In addition, the complaint states that the first employee, Laila Dalton, was suspended and disciplined for raising concerns about wages, hours and insufficient staffing on behalf of co-workers, and that the retaliation was intended to discourage other employees from raising similar concerns, even though it is their legal right to do so.If the regional office is successful in prosecuting the case through an administrative law judge, Starbucks will have to advise employees of their rights to engage in protected activities like complaining about wages and staffing. The company would also have to make the second employee, Alyssa Sanchez, whole for the losses she suffered as a result of her effective termination. The agency could seek other remedies as well. The company could appeal the decision to the full N.L.R.B. in Washington.“Today is the first step in holding Starbucks accountable for its unacceptable behavior during the unionizing efforts in our store and stores around the country,” Bill Whitmire, a barista at the store who is involved in the union campaign, said in a statement. “Laila and Alyssa were traumatized, and their hope is that no other partner EVER has to go through what they have gone through.”Reggie Borges, a company spokesman, reiterated previous denials of accusations of anti-union activity.The union representing Starbucks employees, Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, has brought similar charges on behalf of other workers around the country, including roughly 20 two weeks ago. More

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    Biden Withdraws Sarah Bloom Raskin as Nominee for Fed’s Top Bank Cop

    President Biden will withdraw his nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to serve as the Federal Reserve’s top bank regulator on Tuesday, after a Democratic senator said he would join Republicans in voting against her, most likely dooming her chances of confirmation.Ms. Raskin earlier on Tuesday sent a letter to the White House asking to withdraw her name from consideration to be the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, according to two people familiar with the decision. The New Yorker earlier reported the existence of the letter.“Sarah was subject to baseless attacks from industry and conservative interest groups,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released on Tuesday afternoon.While the end of Ms. Raskin’s candidacy will leave the Biden administration without the regulatory voice it was hoping for at the Fed Board, which oversees the nation’s largest banks, it could pave the way toward confirmation for the White House’s other Fed picks. Republicans had been stonewalling Ms. Raskin’s nomination, and in the process they were holding up the White House’s four other Fed nominees, including Jerome H. Powell, who is seeking confirmation to a second term as Fed chair.Besides Mr. Powell, Mr. Biden has nominated Lael Brainard to be the Fed’s vice chair and two academic economists — Philip N. Jefferson and Lisa D. Cook — to serve as governors.“I urge the Senate Banking Committee to move swiftly to confirm the four eminently qualified nominees for the Board of Governors,” Mr. Biden wrote in his statement.Ms. Raskin almost certainly lacked sufficient support to pass the Senate. Republicans opposed her nomination to be vice chair for bank supervision and Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, said on Monday that he would not vote to confirm her.In deciding to withhold support for Ms. Raskin, Mr. Manchin essentially doomed her chances in an evenly divided Senate. Democrats most likely needed all 50 lawmakers who caucus with their party to vote for Ms. Raskin, with Vice President Kamala Harris able to break ties.Republicans had shown little appetite for placing a supporter of tougher bank regulation into a powerful regulatory role at the Fed and had also boycotted her nomination over her work in the private sector. Lawmakers refused to show up to a key committee vote to advance her nomination to the full Senate.They had also seized on Ms. Raskin’s writings, saying her statements showed that she would be too aggressive in policing climate risks within the financial system and would overstep the unelected central bank’s boundaries.“President Biden was literally asking for senators to support a central banker who wanted to usurp the Senate’s policymaking power for herself,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said on Tuesday. He added: “It is past time the White House admit their mistake and send us someone suitable.”Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, cited Ms. Raskin’s past comments on the role that financial regulation should play in fighting climate change for his opposition.Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Manchin, who represents a coal state and has close ties to the fossil fuel industry, cited Ms. Raskin’s climate comments in explaining his opposition.Ms. Raskin had written an opinion piece in September 2021 arguing that “U.S. regulators can — and should — be looking at their existing powers and considering how they might be brought to bear on efforts to mitigate climate risk.”She did not argue that the Fed push beyond its legal boundaries, and the fierce backlash underlined that the issue of climate-related regulation is politically fraught territory in the United States.The White House “may want to take some time, lick their wounds, and make sure they carefully think about who to nominate next,” said Ian Katz, a managing director at Capital Alpha Partners. He noted that he would expect the White House to name a new nominee before the midterm elections in November. “They’re not having success with candidates who do not sit well with moderate Democrats.”Saule Omarova, a Cornell Law School professor whom critics painted as a communist after Mr. Biden picked her to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, withdrew her candidacy late last year.Opponents to Ms. Raskin’s confirmation targeted more than just her climate views. They also took issue with work she did in the private sector — and the way she answered questions about that work.Republicans had specifically cited concerns about Ms. Raskin’s time on the board of directors of a financial technology firm. The company, Reserve Trust, secured a coveted account with the Fed — giving it access to services that it now prominently advertises — after Ms. Raskin reportedly called a central bank official to intervene on its behalf.It is unclear how much Ms. Raskin’s involvement actually helped. But the episode raised questions because she previously worked at the Fed and because she made about $1.5 million from the stock she earned for her Reserve Trust work. Democrats regularly denounce the revolving door between regulators and financial firms.Republicans had demanded that Ms. Raskin provide more details about what happened while she was on the company’s board, but she had largely said she could not remember. Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the committee, led his colleagues in refusing to show up to vote on Ms. Raskin and the other Fed nominees until she provided more answers.Mr. Toomey signaled on Monday that he would favor allowing the other Fed nominees to proceed.Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio and the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday that he would hold a markup for the other nominees, and later told reporters that he might move them as soon as this week.“Sadly, the American people will be denied a thoughtful, experienced public servant who was ready to fight inflation, stand up to Wall Street and corporate special interests, and protect our economy from foreign cyberattacks and climate change,” Mr. Brown said in his statement.Several more progressive Democrats expressed disappointment that Ms. Raskin would not be confirmed.“The lobbyists have power on Capitol Hill, and when they see their power threatened, they fight back hard — Sarah Bloom Raskin is just the latest casualty,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in response to the news.Michael D. Shear More