Economists in the Biden administration are calling for more aggressive federal action to reduce costs for homebuyers and renters, targeting one of the biggest economic challenges facing President Biden as he runs for re-election.

The policy proposals in a White House report released Thursday include what could be an aggressive federal intervention in local politics, often dictating where homes are built and who can occupy them. The administration is backing a plan to pressure cities and other places to relax zoning restrictions, which in many cases are hampering affordable housing development.

The recommendation is part of a deep dive by the new administration into a housing crisis that has been brewing for decades and is hampering the president’s chances for a second term. The proposals, included in the president’s annual Economic Report, could serve as a blueprint for a major boost to the housing market if Mr. Biden wins a second term.

The report includes a series of measures intended to reduce the cost of renting or purchasing a home, while encouraging local governments to change zoning laws to allow for the development of more affordable housing.

“It’s really hard to make a difference in this space, in this affordable housing development, without addressing land use regulations,” Jared Bernstein, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview.

Mr. Bernstein added that government officials believed many local leaders were encouraging a greater federal role in zoning reform — which could help override objections from local groups opposed to development. “I feel like we’re kicking ass more now than ever before,” he said.

The report is packed with statistics that illustrate why housing has become an acute source of stress for American families and an electoral burden for Mr. Biden.

The government has recognized that it has limited power over local zoning rules, which tend to dictate the design and density of housing in certain neighborhoods. Most of the president’s recommendations to expand supply involve using the federal budget as a carrot to encourage local governments to allow more construction — including adding low-income housing and smaller starter homes.

Such policies are unlikely to become law this year, with elections looming and Republicans in control of the House of Representatives.

But the focus on housing and the adoption of a comprehensive set of policies to increase supply and affordability could serve as a blueprint for a potentially bipartisan effort in this area if Mr. Biden is re-elected. It could also boost a housing reform movement that is well underway in state legislatures across the country.

The report documents how home prices have significantly exceeded wage growth for American households over the past decade. That has put ownership out of reach for middle-income homebuyers and pushed lower-income renters to the brink of poverty.

A quarter of tenants – around twelve million households – now spend more than half of their income on rent. Prices are so high that if a minimum wage worker worked 45 hours a week for a month, an average rent would eat up every dollar he or she earned.

According to the report, behind all this lies a long-term housing shortage. The lack of housing has become a rare point of agreement between Democratic and Republican lawmakers.

The shortage is the result of decades of inability to build enough homes, a trend that worsened after the 2008 financial crisis. The situation has been exacerbated by rising construction costs and many local zoning and land use regulations, which make building housing more difficult and expensive. These rules also limit which types of units can go where, for example making apartments in single-family neighborhoods illegal.

The lack of affordable housing mainly affects lower-income families and first-time couples. Millions of cheaper apartments have all but disappeared over the past decade, either due to rising rents or falling into disrepair. At the same time, smaller and cheaper ‘starter homes’ form an increasingly smaller share of the market.

In recent years, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in both red and blue states have passed dozens of state bills to limit cities’ control over development. The report applauded them and noted the government’s efforts to encourage such reforms Housing supply action planwhich was released two years ago.

Mr. Biden has focused heavily on housing in recent weeks, in part to show voters he is fighting to reduce one of their biggest monthly costs. Privately, his aides have expressed hope that interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve this year will push down mortgage rates and possibly home prices, if a new supply of homes comes onto the market in response.

Publicly, Mr. Biden has taken the initiative, calling on lawmakers to pass major federal investments in housing supply and tax breaks for people who buy homes.

“If inflation continues to fall – and that is expected to happen – mortgage rates will also fall, but I am not going to wait,” Biden said in Las Vegas on Tuesday. “I’m not going to wait.”

Senator Bernie Sanders this week legislation unveiled to reduce the standard work week in the United States from 40 to 32 hours, without a pay cut, saying Americans are working longer for less pay despite advances in technology and productivity.

If passed, the law will shorten the workweek over four years, lowering the threshold at which workers qualify for overtime pay. The 40-hour work week has since become the standard in the United States codified into federal law in 1940.

At a hearing Thursday before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on the proposed law, Mr. Sanders, an independent of Vermont, said the profits from productivity increases in recent decades had been reaped only by business leaders and not shared. with workers.

“The sad reality is that Americans now work more hours than residents of any other wealthy country,” he said, citing statistics showing that U.S. workers work on average hundreds of hours longer per week than their counterparts in Japan, Great Britain Britain and Germany. .

Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, said at the hearing that such a cut would hurt employers, shift jobs overseas and cause dramatic spikes in consumer prices.

“It would threaten millions of small businesses that operate on razor-thin margins because they can’t find enough workers,” Mr. Cassidy said.

Mr. Sanders is far from the first to propose the idea. The idea was suggested by Richard Nixon, pitched by autoworkers and experimented by companies ranging from Shake Shack to Kickstarter and Unilever’s New Zealand unit.

But the concept has gained momentum in recent years as the Covid-19 pandemic has caused fundamental shifts in work culture and revised expectations about employment. Rep. Mark Takano, Democrat of California, introduced the 32-hour workweek bill in the House of Representatives in 2021 and reintroduced it to complement the bill sponsored by Mr. Sanders in the Senate.

In proposing the legislation, Mr Sanders cited a trial carried out by 61 companies in Britain in 2022, where most companies that switched to a four-day working week saw revenues and productivity remain stable, while staff turnover fell significantly. The research was conducted by a non-profit organization, 4 Day Week Global, with researchers from Cambridge University, Boston College and a think tank, Autonomy.

Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College and lead researcher on the study, testified at Thursday’s hearing that 91 percent of companies that switched to a four-day work week had stuck with the new arrangement a year later.

“Participants tell us the new schedule is life-changing,” Ms. Schor told senators.

Critics, including some who testified at this week’s hearing, say many of the pilot programs target only the kinds of companies that can afford the flexibility in work schedules, and ignore many companies where employees work hands-on.

“There is no statistical evidence to justify a national mandate of a 32-hour work week,” said Liberty Vittert, a professor of statistics at Washington University in St. Louis. “If it works for some companies in some sectors, that’s great, but it can’t be applied to all sectors.”

The Biden administration announced Thursday that it is proposing new rules for how airlines must treat passengers in wheelchairs, an effort aimed at improving air travel for people with disabilities.

Under the proposed rule, damaging or delaying the return of a wheelchair would be an automatic violation of an existing federal law that prohibits airlines from discriminating against people with disabilities. The Transportation Department said the change would make it easier for the agency to penalize airlines for mishandling wheelchairs.

The proposed regulations would also require more robust training for employees who physically assist disabled passengers or handle their wheelchairs.

“There are millions of Americans with disabilities who avoid air travel due to inadequate aviation practices and inadequate government regulation, but now we want to change that,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “This new rule would change the way airlines operate and ensure that travelers who use wheelchairs can travel safely and with dignity.”

For people in wheelchairs, flying can be difficult and uncomfortable, and airline mistakes can make for an even more painful experience. According to the Transportation Department, more than 11,000 wheelchairs and scooters were mishandled by airlines last year.

The proposed regulations complement previous steps by the Biden administration intended to improve the flying experience for disabled travelers. In 2022, the Department of Transportation published a Bill of Rights for Airline Passengers with Disabilities. Last year, the agency finalized new regulations to require more commercial aircraft to have accessible bathrooms.

Gov. Kathy Hochul will propose an appropriation Tuesday that would provide one of the largest amounts ever invested by a state in research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neurodegenerative disease known as ALS.

The appropriation, part of Ms. Hochul’s overall budget proposal, would direct $25 million to ALS research, creating a program that would support several efforts, including drug development. The governor said she hoped the program could also serve as a foundation for tackling other rare diseases.

Ms. Hochul’s mother, Patricia Courtney, died in 2014 from ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. She never saw her daughter become a lieutenant governor or governor. But last week, as Ms. Hochul stood in the State Assembly and laid out her goals for the coming year in her State of the State address, she had her mother in mind when she announced her commitment to fund research into “rare diseases like ALS, who rob millions, like my own mother, of their vitality.”

In an interview, Ms. Hochul said that “it was obviously a very personal moment for me,” adding that she was usually reluctant to talk about her family. “By talking about it at that location, people can understand that we are working on this in a way that we hope will produce a different outcome for them,” she said.

The governor said health care was one of her top priorities when she first took office and that people with rare diseases had remained at the forefront of her thoughts. So when Ms. Hochul was at an event and encountered Dan Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor of New York City who has been living with ALS as of 2021, she immediately invited him to work with her. Mr. Doctoroff’s nonprofit organization, Target ALS, is committed to raising money for ALS research.

“Being in the ALS community, you feel like you’re brothers and sisters just by having experienced it,” said Mr. Doctoroff, whose father, uncle and college roommate died of the disease. “We feel connected to each other in a way that is deeply emotional.”

He said the intent of Ms. Hochul’s program would be to provide care and early diagnosis to all ALS patients, whose data could then be used to support research efforts across the state. The money will also be used to provide pharmaceutical companies with incentives to invest in the development of drugs to treat ALS and to fund regional centers outside the New York City metro area to provide better care to patients outside urban locations.

Misdiagnoses and late ALS diagnoses are major problems, stealing time from people with a disease that typically becomes fatal within two to five years. According to the Target ALS websiteEarly symptoms include twitching or cramping in the arms, legs, shoulders, or tongue, weakness, slurred speech, and difficulty chewing.

Ms Hochul’s mother was misdiagnosed, delaying treatment and leaving the family in limbo. She died not long after her ALS diagnosis.

“I’m not saying it would have changed the outcome, but it certainly would have given us some knowledge about what she was actually going through,” Ms Hochul said.

Dr. Neil A. Shneider, the director of the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig ALS Center at Columbia University, said New York was well positioned to advance ALS research because of the number of specialized centers in the state, such as his own and the New York City. York Genome Center, as well as nonprofits such as Target ALS.

“These kinds of efforts, I think, can only be supported with public money,” he said. “I think this money will be a real impetus for progress and change.”

Dr. Shneider added that ALS research has historically been underfunded, something Ms. Hochul also acknowledged. She called her proposal “trying to make up for lost time.” ALS research has made significant progress over the past five years, Mr. Doctoroff said, with an increase in academic studies, nonprofit involvement and federal government investment. In December 2021, President Biden signed the ALS Act, which invests $100 million annually for five years to provide research grants and accelerate the development of therapies. The missing piece in New York’s fight against ALS was state support.

“We are making progress in every respect,” Mr. Doctoroff said. “I think the field believes this is a treatable disease, that we can solve it. But it won’t happen overnight.”

As Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken returned to the Middle East on Friday in an effort to defuse escalating tensions, Israel’s Defense Minister presented a post-war plan for the Gaza Strip that exposed divisions in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wartime government.

The proposal from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a moderate member of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, was widely seen as a trial balloon, but it showed the pressure Israel faced as Washington and others pushed for a shift to politics. a less intense phase of the war.

Further complicating diplomatic efforts in the region, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the powerful armed group Hezbollah, which has clashed with Israeli forces along the Israel-Lebanon border, on Friday ruled out any negotiations to stop the fighting until the war in Gaza is over. .

Mr Gallant’s proposal, shared at a stormy meeting of Israel’s security cabinet on Thursday, is based on the army’s defeat of Hamas in Gaza. It calls on Israel to maintain military control of Gaza’s borders while a “multinational task force” oversees reconstruction and economic development in the territory, which has been devastated by nearly three months of brutal Israeli airstrikes.

Under the plan, Gaza residents with no ties to Hamas, which controls Gaza and has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, would handle civil affairs in the enclave, according to details of the cabinet meeting reported to the United States has been leaked. Israeli news media. But there would be no role for the Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and no resettlement of Israelis in Gaza – an idea that far-right Israelis support.

The proposal appeared to be an attempt to find a middle ground between the post-war plans of the United States and members of Israel’s far right. The Biden administration has called for a “renewed and revitalized” Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza after the war, seeing this as a path to a two-state solution that would create a Palestinian state consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, a proposal that many Israelis on the right are against it.

In a Facebook post, a far-right Israeli leader, Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, criticized Mr. Gallant’s plan and suggested it risked a repeat of the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7. He reiterated his call for the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinian citizens from Gaza, where most of the 2.2 million residents have been driven from their homes. Many are hungry, sick and living in dilapidated tents.

In recent days, Mr. Smotrich and another far-right Israeli leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, have suggested that Palestinians should leave Gaza and that Israelis should resettle the enclave as part of a long-term solution to the war. .

France, Germany and the United States denounced the comments, which the Foreign Ministry called “inflammatory and irresponsible.”

Israeli news media described the Israeli security cabinet meeting as turbulent, saying it had ended in an outburst after several ministers attacked army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi for forming a committee to investigate military failures that led to the attack. The October 7 attacks killed about 1,200 people and abducted 240 others to Gaza, according to Israeli authorities. The ministers criticized the composition of the committee and questioned whether the investigation should be conducted while Israel was at war.

Netanyahu’s governing coalition has a fragile majority, with 64 seats in the 120-seat parliament. Days after the October 7 attack, some of Netanyahu’s centrist rivals joined him to form an emergency government and strengthen his small war cabinet. But they have not signed any coalition agreement, and they have said they will leave the government when they see fit.

With his popularity at a new low, largely due to the October 7 security scare, Netanyahu is reluctant to see elections anytime soon and needs to keep his governing coalition together to stay in office.

In a speech on Friday, Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, addressed Israelis directly, telling them: “You must demand your government to stop the offensive.”

“There will be no dialogue unless the aggression in Gaza stops,” he added, warning: “You will be the first to pay the price.”

The statement came as Mr Blinken embarked on a tour of the Middle East aimed at preventing a wider regional war following Tuesday’s killing of a senior Hamas official in a suburb of the Lebanese capital Beirut.

Israel has not publicly accepted or denied responsibility for the killing, but two senior Lebanese security officials, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss an active investigation, said Israel carried out the attack using six missiles , two of which failed to explode.

The caretaker government of Lebanon said Friday that it had filed a complaint with the UN Security Council over the strike, calling it the “most dangerous phase” yet of the conflict and a violation of its territorial sovereignty.

Mr. Nasrallah reiterated a message he delivered in a speech on Wednesday in which he vowed that Hezbollah would avenge the killing of Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri, whom he described as a “dear friend.”

“This will not go unpunished,” Mr Nasrallah said on Friday. “We cannot remain silent. ”

But he did not say how or when Hezbollah would respond. And while clashes have intensified along the Israel-Lebanon border, none have yet signaled a clear escalation.

Michael Levenson contributed reporting from New York.