White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that President Biden won’t wear a mask when he visits the Capitol for the State of the Union speech — just hours after the White House dropped its rules requiring face coverings to guard against COVID-19.
“The president’s not going to wear a mask tonight. But it’s different depending on the part of the country,” Psaki said during a Fox News interview.
Just in time for Biden’s first State of the Union, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention radically changed its guidance Friday for when indoor mask orders are needed — placing Washington, DC, into the least-restrictive category.
The White House stuck to its internal mask mandate two days longer than Congress, as the House of Representatives’ attending physician decreed Sunday that masks were optional — though many Capitol staffers kept wearing them anyway.
Ahead of Biden’s speech, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chairwoman of the left-wing Congressional Progressive Caucus, told The Post, “the CDC has spoken and I think we gotta listen to the science — so, you know, I think a lot of people won’t be wearing masks tonight.”
Indeed, Democratic lawmakers who routinely chastised their Republican peers for flouting mask rules overwhelmingly arrived bare-faced to Biden’s speech.
Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Nydia Velazquez (D-NY), Jim Clyburn (D-SC), Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) were among the prominent Democratic attendees without a mask.
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), who has suffered health problems, was one of the few who still wore a mask.
Psaki brushed off a question about the mask move from Fox News host Bill Hemmer, who asked her: “What changed in the science yesterday, Monday, as opposed to a week ago Monday?”
“It wasn’t actually yesterday, Bill,” she answered. “What the CDC did is they put out guidance last Friday that identified recommendations depending on what the hospitalization rates are in your part of the country.
“We’re currently in a part of the country — in Washington, DC — where it’s very low, the rates. So … the recommendation is not to wear masks, so we’re not wearing masks at the White House.”
The capital’s COVID-19 cases remained low throughout February after a spike in January due to the Omicron variant. On Feb. 14, long before the CDC pivot, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser announced that the city’s indoor mask mandate would end March 1, presenting potentially awkward optics for Biden’s speech.
Masks have been a political flashpoint for months across the country, most notably in school districts. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has docked the pay of legislators who don’t wear a face covering on the House floor.
In a reflection of how swiftly health guidance changed, the State of the Union will still feature noticeable social distancing. The House chamber will be roughly one-third full, guests are not allowed, and some members of Congress will be relegated to the public viewing gallery. Everyone in the room must have a negative PCR test result in hand and press access to the House chamber is being dramatically curtailed.
Psaki declared that Biden would go maskless after she said Monday — while hosting a press briefing with compulsory masking — that Biden “will certainly not be wearing a mask when he’s speaking,” but that she was unsure if he would wear one at other times.
The president often wears a mask in public, including while crossing the White House lawn with no one nearby.
Last year, Biden took heat for wearing a mask even after health officials said it was no longer necessary due to plunging new infection rates following a mass vaccination drive. When the more contagious Delta and Omicron variants spread, mask mandates returned.
The State of the Union is occurring much later than usual due to the Omicron wave that caused record-high US coronavirus infections in January. But a reduction in cases has done little to lift the dour national mood and Biden’s poor approval ratings due to inflation hitting a 40-year high, with consumer costs up 7.5 percent in January from one year earlier.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last week is also expected to be a major topic in the speech, with Psaki telling Fox that the president “has been looking at what steps we can take to maximize the impact on [Russian] President [Vladimir] Putin — on the cronies and the oligarchs who have been benefiting from so much corruption in Russia for decades.”
The press secretary also pushed back on host Dana Perino’s question about whether Biden will push to expand US energy production, including by reversing his decision to ax the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
“This Keystone pipeline, it would take years for that to have an impact on prices,” Psaki scoffed.
Psaki also stopped short of declaring that Putin was guilty of war crimes in Ukraine amid reports of bombing of residential areas as Ukrainian authorities distribute automatic weapons to civilians to fight Russian troops.
“There’s no question … that we’re seeing barbaric tactics starting to be used,” she said. “That is horrifying. That is troubling, and we will certainly be looking closely at it.”
