President Biden’s re-election campaign raised $71 million available by the end of February, more than double the $33.5 million in former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign account, as Democrats continued to expand their fundraising advantage over Republicans in the presidential race.

The cash difference was detailed in filings with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday, as campaigns and some presidential committees faced a deadline to file fundraising and spending reports for February.

Mr. Trump replenished his campaign account in February, adding more than $3 million in cash since January, when he ended the month with about $30 million on hand. But Biden’s campaign, which ended January with $56 million, added $15 million in February.

While Mr. Trump leads Mr. Biden in most national polls, Mr. Biden and the Democratic Party have a growing cash advantage — a gap that has become one of the most pressing issues facing Mr. Trump, who has been busy some of the Republican Party’s biggest backers during private dinners at Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Palm Beach, Florida.

Still, the financial picture remains incomplete: Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are raising money through joint fundraising committees, which won’t file reports until mid-April. These commissions transfer money to the campaigns, which are better able to pay salaries and buy advertising time at the lower rates guaranteed to the candidates.

Over the weekend, Mr. Biden’s team reported raising a total of $53 million in February, all committees supported his re-election bid, with a total of $155 million, up from $130 million at the end of January. The April reports will provide more details on how this money was raised and from whom.

As sitting chairman, Mr. Biden has spent months raising money with the Democratic National Committee — a massive operation that is building out the fieldwork needed for the general election.

Mr. Biden will also be supported by more than $1 billion that outside groups have pledged to support his bid — money separate from the party bills introduced on Wednesday.

Trump’s campaign told Fox News on Wednesday that it had raised a total of $20.3 million through a joint fundraising committee, with $42 million available between the two groups.

Part of Mr. Biden’s advantages are those of a traditional incumbent. Mr. Trump only became the presumptive Republican nominee in February and immediately moved to empty the Republican National Committee and fill it with loyalists. The committee itself reported raising $10.7 million in February and ended the month with $11.3 million.

Mr. Trump’s legal battle has also put a drain on his overall election funds. He faces four criminal charges and civil suits, which are proving costly. Last year, committees supporting him spent at least $50 million on legal fees, records show, and those costs are likely to balloon as he prepares for possible lawsuits this year.

A super PAC supporting Trump, Make America Great Again Inc., reported raising $12.8 million in February, with $25.5 million on hand, up from $19.7 million at the end of January.

The report filed Wednesday for one of Trump’s committees — a leading PAC called Save America, which he has used to pay his legal bills — reported $4 million at the end of February, up from more than $6 million in January.

That change appears to be attributable to an increase in Mr. Trump’s legal costs. The group spent nearly $5.6 million in February on bills for the legal teams that defended him.

Richard Truly, a naval aviator and astronaut who flew aboard two early Space Shuttle missions and, as NASA administrator, led the agency’s return to space after the Challenger disaster, died Feb. 27 at his home in Genesee, Colorado . He was 86 years old. .

The cause was atypical Parkinson’s disease, according to his wife Colleen (Hanner) Truly.

Mr. Truly joined NASA in 1969, but didn’t venture into space for 12 years. when he was the pilot of the shuttle program’s second orbital flight. The success of that flight proved that NASA could safely relaunch the Columbia shuttle and return it safely to Earth seven months after its maiden flight.

But the mission, which was supposed to last five days, was cut to two days after one of the Columbia’s fuel cells failed. (That mission was separate from the 2003 Columbia disaster, long after Mr. Truly left NASA, which killed a crew of seven.)

In 1983, Mr. Truly, who was a captain at the time, commanded Challenger on its third flight, eighth overall in the shuttle program. It took off at night and landed in the dark – a first for the program. The flight also marked a personal distinction: Captain Truly was the first American grandfather in space.

Shortly thereafter, he retired from NASA to become the first commander of the Naval Space Command, which consolidated the Navy’s operations in space communications, navigation and surveillance.

But he returned to NASA in 1986 as associate administrator in charge of the shuttle program, less than a month after the Challenger disintegrated in 73 seconds during its flight, partly due to the launch at too low temperatures, killing the seven-man crew was killed. including a teacher, Christa McAuliffe.

A month into his new job, Captain Truly said that the next shuttle would launch only in daylight and warm weather (the Challenger launched at 36 degrees Fahrenheit), and that it would land in California instead of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“I don’t want you to think that this conservative approach, this safe approach, which I think is the right thing to do, is going to be a namby-pamby shuttle program,” he said. “Flying in space is a daring undertaking.”

He added: “We can’t print enough money to make it completely risk-free. But we’re certainly going to correct any mistakes we’ve made in the past, and we’re going to get it going again as quickly as possible under these guidelines.”

Captain Truly was also the chairman of the internal NASA task force that provided support to the presidential commission investigating the Challenger disaster. But his main task was to get the shuttle program flying again.

“He was widely recognized as having done an excellent job in that responsibility,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said in an email.

The job took 32 months: Discovery’s launch on a four-day mission in late September 1988 ended a long period of gloom and self-doubt for the agency.

“The nation,” said Mr. Truly, who was then a vice admiral, “will have the shuttle as the backbone of its space program well into the next century.”

Richard Harrison Truly was born on November 12, 1937 in Fayette, Miss. His father, James, was an attorney for the Federal Trade Commission. His mother, Jessie Smith (Sheehan) Truly, was a teacher. They divorced when Richard was young.

Mr. Truly didn’t grow up wanting to be an aviator; he remembered dreaming of driving a fire truck. “I never really intended to be a pilot,” he said in a NASA oral history in 2003. “It just never occurred to me that that would be a possibility.”

He studied engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology on a Navy ROTC scholarship and became intrigued by aviation during two summers of Navy and Marine Corps indoctrination. After graduating in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering, he trained as a naval aviator and was assigned to a fighter squadron.

Between 1960 and 1963 he made more than 300 landings, many at night, on the aircraft carriers Intrepid and Enterprise, after which he became a flight instructor.

In 1965, he was assigned to the Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory, a Cold War surveillance program that planned to send astronauts into orbit in a modified Gemini capsule connected to a cylindrical, 50-foot-long laboratory . But the program was canceled in June 1969, and two months later Mr. Truly was one of seven astronauts from that program to join NASA.

He worked in capsule communications for the crewed Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions in the 1970s, then became a shuttle test pilot and backup pilot for the first shuttle mission in 1981.

He left NASA shortly after his second shuttle mission when John F. Lehman Jr., the Secretary of the Navy, asked him to take over the newly formed Naval Space Command in Dahlgren, Virginia. While there, he was promoted to vice admiral.

But after the Challenger tragedy, Mr. Lehman and the White House persuaded him to return to NASA. He recalled walking into his office on his first day as deputy administrator and finding people crying in the hallway “because of the media bashing they were getting,” he said in a 2012 interview. interview with the Colorado School of Mineswhere he was curator at the time.

“By then,” he added, “instead of a plane crash, it was portrayed as if NASA had killed its crew. It was the beginning of the most tumultuous technical, political, cultural and social undertaking I have ever been involved in.”

After three years as deputy administrator, Admiral Truly was appointed administrator by President George HW Bush, the space agency’s top position.

“This is the first time in its impressive history that NASA will be led by a hero of its own making, an astronaut who has been to space,” President Bush said at a news conference.

But Admiral Truly’s three years at the top of NASA were difficult ones. The agency had problems with launch delays, shuttles leaking fuel and the discovery of a defective mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope.

He was eventually forced to resign after clashing over NASA’s leadership with Vice President Dan Quayle and his staff at the National Space Council, of which Mr. Quayle was chairman.

Mr. Logsdon said that senior NASA employees, aerospace contractors and Congressional regulators had given positive assessments of Admiral Truly’s performance, but that his tenure was viewed negatively by “those reformers who believed that NASA needed fundamental change and concluded that Truly was not the person to lead that change.”

After leaving NASA in February 1992, Admiral Truly served as vice president and director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute, a nonprofit organization of Georgia Tech, and subsequently as director of the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He retired in 2005.

His awards included the Navy Distinguished Flying Cross, the Presidential Citizens Medal and two NASA Distinguished Service Medals.

In addition to his wife, Admiral Truly is survived by his daughter Lee Rumbles; his sons, Mike and Dan; five grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Admiral Truly admitted that he was sometimes afraid when he encountered danger and technical failures as a Navy pilot and astronaut.

“Fear is a beautiful, healthy phenomenon,” he once said. “Any pilot who says he has never been afraid is lying.”

Frank Popoff, a CEO and chairman who tried to make Dow Chemical more conciliatory toward regulators and environmentalists in the late 1980s and 1990s and who urged the chemical industry to adopt safer practices, died Feb. 25 at his home in Midland. Michigan, where Dow is located. He was 88.

A company spokesperson said the cause was cancer.

When the Bulgarian-born Popoff was named president and CEO of Dow in 1987, the company tried to shed its image as a belligerent chemical giant that napalm and the defoliant Agent Orange for the US military during the Vietnam War; toxic waste was released, as well as dioxins, from the Midland plant into the Tittabawassee River; and fought the Environmental Protection Agency to prevent flyover inspections of its emissions.

An estimated $50 million advertising campaign, begun two years before Mr. Popoff reached the top, used the slogan “Dow lets you do great things.” It was intended to change public perception of Dow, promote its image as a kinder company, and highlight the charitable and humanitarian uses of its products.

“I think we still have a fair amount of work to do in terms of the way we are perceived,” Mr. Popoff told The New York Times in 1987, shortly before he succeeded. Paul F. Oreffice as general manager. “We know we will never change Ralph Nader’s mind. But Dow is at peace with itself and we want our people to feel good about the company too.”

The company was then best known for manufacturing chemicals, including chlorine, and for using chemicals in making plastics, pharmaceuticals, and supermarket items such as Saran Wrap, Fantastik cleaning fluid, and Ziploc bags.

Regulators and environmentalists at the time were heavily focused on chemicals. In 1991, Mr. Popoff and another Dow executive, David Buzzelli, established a panel of outside environmental policy advisers — including Lee Thomas, a former EPA administrator – who scrutinized Dow’s activities and was able to obtain confidential information. A current version of that panel remains in place at Dow.

Between 1988 and mid-1991, Dow reduced emissions of 121 harmful chemicals the EPA had been tracking by nearly a third, and was on track to its goal of cutting emissions in half.

“I’m in the chemical business,” Mr. Popoff told The Detroit Free Press in 1992. “That is synonymous with a lot of bad things. But I am for environmental responsibility.”

In a speech to the Economic Club of Detroit a year later, he elaborated on the need for Dow to be open to ideas from regulators and environmentalists. “There is no alternative to environmental reform in our industry,” he said, arguing that chemical companies must lead such efforts or be forced to deal with poorly designed regulations.

Carol Browner, the EPA administrator at the time, recalled in an email that Dow was “easier to work with” under Mr. Popoff. But when she suggested in 1994 that the agency wanted to “replace, reduce or ban” the widespread use of chlorine and chlorinated products within three years, Mr. Popoff sent a sharp letter to President Bill Clinton.

“It would be irresponsible to implement a policy that assumes all chlorine products are bad, without considering the scientific evidence on chlorine chemistry or the economic impact of a chlorine ban,” he wrote. He added: “The decision to tackle this very complicated issue in such a major way was taken without industry participation. The Dow Chemical Company is committed to constructive participation.”

Jack Doyle, who wrote “Trespass Against Us: Dow Chemical & The Toxic Century” (2004) for the Environmental Health Fund, an advocacy group, said chlorine was too important to Dow’s bottom line to give it up without a fight.

Dow’s commitment to the chlorine industry was “so dominant and so intertwined in the global economy,” he added, “that making real dramatic changes was out of the question.”

Frank Popoff, whose given name was Pencho, was born on October 27, 1935 in Sofia, Bulgaria. His father, Eftim, also known as Frank, owned a dry cleaning business with his mother, Stoyanka (Kossoroff) Popoff, who went by Stany.

He emigrated to the United States with his parents and sister in 1939 and they settled in Terre Haute, Ind.

Inspired by a high school teacher who was gassed while fighting in World War I, Mr. Popoff studied chemistry at Indiana University, where he earned both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in business administration in the same year, 1959.

However, he did not want to become a chemist.

“Maybe I missed the creativity and vision that successful chemists have,” he said an interview in 2012 with the Chemical Heritage Foundation (now the Science History Institute, in Philadelphia). “I was very interested in the commercialization and application of chemistry.”

He joined Dow in 1959 and remained with the company for 41 years. He worked in the urethane laboratory and in the early 1960s in technical services and chemical sales. Over the next quarter century, he held increasingly influential positions: president of Dow Europe in 1981, executive vice president of Dow Chemical in 1985, and president and CEO two years later. In 1992 he was appointed chairman.

Under Mr. Popoff, Dow Chemical expanded the company’s Asian operations and in 1989 bought a majority stake in drugmaker Marion Laboratories (it was renamed Marion Merrell Dow) before selling it six years later amid patent expirations and intense competition.

In the early 1990s, Dow Chemical became embroiled in controversy over the safety of silicone breast implants made by Dow Corning, its joint venture with Corning Inc.

“Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people are outraged by the implants,” Mr. Popoff told The Free Press in 1992, but he added: “Our liability is limited to that of a stockholder because that’s what we are. ”

However, in 1995, the company was found liable by a Nevada jury for more than $14 million in damages after a woman suffered health problems due to leaking implants. The following year, the New York State Appellate Division ruled that Dow Chemical was not liable in 1,400 lawsuits over the implants.

Mr. Popoff resigned as CEO in 1995 and as chairman in 2000. He later taught for a time at Indiana University and served on boards of directors.

He is survived by his wife, Jean (Urse) Popoff, whom he met in college and married in 1958; three sons, John, Thomas and Steven; and four grandchildren.

Jim Fitterling, Dow’s current chairman and CEO, said Mr. Popoff’s key achievements revolved around making safety a critical goal – “not that it wasn’t important, but he made it a priority” – and the fact that he was an early proponent of sustainability. That included generating less waste, using fewer resources and better ensuring worker safety. He helped promote a voluntary industry-wide code of conduct that formalized these principles, called Responsible Care.

But Mr Popoff said it wasn’t always easy to get other companies to comply with the rules. There was opposition early on.

“Some things had more impact on big companies than on small companies,” he told the Science History Institute. “Then the hard work started, making sure everyone followed the rules. And what can you do? You can use every pulpit you have to assure other people that this is not only in their best interest, but that it is also mandatory for the industry to survive without undermining the hostility and ill will of society, which the chemical industry is sometimes capable of. Of doing.”