Joe Biden will address the Economic Club of Washington DC today, one day after the US Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the first time in four years, marking a significant turning point for the economy.

While the president is expected to hail a “new milestone” in America’s post-pandemic economic recovery, his top officials said he would acknowledge there remains more work to do.

“This is not meant to be a declaration of victory,” Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, told reporters. “This is meant to be a declaration of progress.”

Biden “knows this is no time for a victory lap”, according to Zients, and will use his speech to “lay out how we build on the progress we have made”.

Lael Brainard, the president’s top economic adviser, pointed to housing, healthcare and childcare as examples of areas where his administration wanted to improve affordability.

Here’s more on the Fed’s decision yesterday to drop interest rates by half a percentage point, and signal more cuts will follow in the months to come:

The New York Times also released polling data this morning, which contained some better news for Kamala Harris’s standing in the vital swing state of Pennsylvania: she leads Donald Trump, with 50% support to his 46%.

But nationally, the two candidates are in a dead heat, polling at 47% each. The Washington Post poll released earlier today did not include nationwide perceptions of the candidates.

Much like the Post’s, the Times poll, conducted with Siena College and the Philadelphia Inquirer, finds voters believe Harris was the winner of last week’s presidential debate, with 67% saying she did “well”, compared to 40% who said the same for Trump.

A Washington Post poll published this morning shows that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are essentially tied in Pennsylvania, the swing state viewed as perhaps the most likely to determine the outcome of the presidential election.

The survey conducted after last week’s presidential debate found that 48% of likely and registered voters support Harris, and 47% back Trump, with the rest planning to vote for third-party candidates. Excluding other candidates, Harris and Trump are tied at 48% support among likely voters, while among registered voters, Harris has a slight advantage at 48% support to Trump’s 47%.

However, the vice-president did impress debate watchers in the state: 54% of those surveyed said she won last week’s face-off, with only 27% saying the same about Trump.

US House fails to pass federal funding bill as shutdown deadline nears

Joan E Greve

A government funding package championed by Republican House speaker Mike Johnson failed to pass on Wednesday, with less than two weeks left to prevent a shutdown starting 1 October.

The final vote was 202 to 220, with 14 House Republicans and all but three House Democrats opposing the bill. Two Republican members voted “present”.

The bill was not expected to pass, as a number of House Republicans had voiced criticism of the proposal before the vote. Given Republicans’ narrow House majority and Democrats’ widespread opposition to the bill, Johnson could only afford a handful of defections within his conference. Johnson delayed a vote on the funding package last week in the hopes of consolidating Republicans’ support, but those efforts could not get the bill across the finish line.

Johnson’s proposed bill combined a six-month stopgap funding measure, known as a continuing resolution, with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, a controversial proposal that would require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

Donald Trump, who has championed baseless claims of widespread non-citizen voting, has pressured Johnson to reject any funding measure unless it includes “election security” provisions, a stance that the former president doubled down on hours before the vote.

Read the full story.

US health system ranks last compared with peer nations, report finds

Jessica Glenza

The United States health system ranked dead last in an international comparison of 10 peer nations, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund.

In spite of Americans paying nearly double that of other countries, the system performed poorly on health equity, access to care and outcomes.

“I see the human toll of these shortcomings on a daily basis,” said Dr Joseph Betancourt, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation with a focus on healthcare research and policy.

“I see patients who cannot afford their medications … I see older patients arrive sicker than they should because they spent the majority of their lives uninsured,” said Betancourt. “It’s time we finally build a health system that delivers quality affordable healthcare for all Americans.”

Read the full story here.

Iranian hackers sought to interest President Joe Biden’s campaign in information stolen from rival Donald Trump’s campaign, sending unsolicited emails to people associated with the then-Democratic candidate in an effort to interfere in the 2024 election, the FBI and other US agencies have said.

The FBI confirmed on 12 August that it was investigating a complaint from Trump’s presidential campaign that Iran had hacked and distributed a trove of sensitive campaign documents. On 19 August intelligence officials confirmed that Iran was behind the hack.

There’s no indication that any of the recipients in Biden’s campaign team responded, officials said on Wednesday, and several media organisations approached over the summer with leaked stolen information have also said they did not respond.

Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign called the emails from Iran “unwelcome and unacceptable malicious activity” that were received by only a few people who regarded them as spam or phishing attempts.

Read more here.

Associated Press

Trump stages first rally since apparent assassination attempt

Ed Pilkington

Donald Trump on Wednesday night staged his first rally since he became the target of a second attempted assassination in as many months, telling his supporters in a sports venue outside New York City that what he called “these encounters with death” had only hardened him.

“God has now spared my life. It must have been God, not once, but twice,” Trump said to loud cheers from the ecstatic crowd.

The former president took his usual ragbag of lies, hyperbole, and dark and racist invective to the Nassau Coliseum in the suburbs of Long Island, just seven miles from the borders of New York City. It was an audacious choice of location, given that there are just 48 days til the election and New York is on neither main party’s list of priorities.

The state is reliably Democratic, having last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1984 with Ronald Reagan’s re-election. Even Nassau county, where the arena is situated, voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by 54% to Trump’s 45%, while the latest New York state polls show Kamala Harris comfortably ahead of him by double digits.

Yet Trump clearly saw method in his madness. Long Island, the leafy suburbs that stretch east from the city, has shifted towards the right in recent years, becoming something of an incubator for the Make America Great Again (Maga) upheaval.

Read the full story here.