The New York Times reports:

More than 36 million Americans are suddenly unemployed. Congress has allocated $2.2 trillion in aid, with more likely to be on the way as a fight looms over government debt. Millions more people are losing their health insurance and struggling to take care of their children and aging relatives. And nearly 90,000 are dead in a continuing public health catastrophe.

This was not the scenario Joseph R. Biden Jr. anticipated confronting when he competed for the Democratic nomination on a conventional left-of-center platform. Now, with Mr. Biden leading President Trump in the polls, the former vice president and other Democratic leaders are racing to assemble a new governing agenda that meets the extraordinary times — and they agree it must be far bolder than anything the party establishment has embraced before.

So far, neither Mr. Biden nor Mr. Trump has defined in itemized terms what an agenda for the first 100 days of a new presidency in the coronavirus era might look like. But on the Democratic side, far more than within the Republican Party, there is an increasingly clear sense of the nature and scale of the goals a new administration would pursue.

Mr. Biden’s campaign has been rapidly expanding its policy-drafting apparatus, with the former vice president promising on Monday to detail plans for “the right kind of economic recovery” within weeks. He has already effectively shed his primary-season theme of restoring political normalcy to the country, replacing it with promises of sweeping economic change.

On Wednesday, Mr. Biden signaled anew that he was willing to reopen his policy platform, announcing six policy task forces — covering issues including health care, climate and immigration, as well as the economy — that combine his core supporters with left-wing allies of Senator Bernie Sanders, his vanquished primary opponent.

The formation of those committees was aimed in part at easing divisions between Democrats that are already flaring on subjects like the size of a potential infrastructure bill and the intractable issue of health care. Despite having dashed Mr. Sanders’s populist insurgency in the primary, Mr. Biden is still facing loud calls from his party’s activist wing to adopt ideas he has firmly resisted, like single-payer health care.

But in several areas there are already strong signs of consensus within Mr. Biden’s party, as once-cautious electoral and legislative tacticians shed their opposition to huge price tags and disruptive change amid a crisis that has melted traditional obstacles to government action.

Democratic leaders say that if they hold power next January, they must be prepared to move to pump trillions more into the economy; enact infrastructure and climate legislation far larger than they previously envisioned; pass a raft of aggressive worker-protection laws; expand government-backed health insurance and create enormous new investments in public-health jobs, health care facilities and child care programs.

Discussions are also underway, some of them involving Republicans, about policies that would ban stock buybacks and compel big corporations to share more of their profits with workers.

And there is more to come: Interviews with more than a dozen influential lawmakers, union leaders, think tank experts and advisers to Mr. Biden and other senior Democrats revealed an intensifying set of deliberations in the Zoom meetings of Mr. Biden’s campaign, the skeletally staffed offices of Capitol Hill, and a web of conference calls and email chains initiated by powerful Democratic interest groups. Across all of them, there is a sense that Democrats must use the next six months — with an unpredictable campaign still in progress — to prepare to act swiftly in case they get the chance.

“There is a recognition that this event is more transformative than 2008, more transformative than 9/11, more transformative than the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a centrist Democrat. [Continue reading…]