MARYLAND HEIGHTS, Mo. — By lunchtime, the representatives from the recruiting agency Express Employment Professionals decided to pack up and leave the job fair in the St. Louis suburb of Maryland Heights. Hardly anyone had shown up.

“We were hoping we would see prepandemic levels,” said Courtney Boyle, general manager of Express. After all, Missouri had just cut off federal unemployment benefits.

Business owners had complained that the assistance, as Gov. Mike Parson put it, “incentivized people to stay out of the work force.” He made Missouri one of the first four states to halt the federal aid; a total of 26 have said they will do so by next month. But in the St. Louis metropolitan area, where the jobless rate was 4.2 percent in May, those who expected the June 12 termination would unleash a flood of job seekers were disappointed.

Work-force development officials said they had seen virtually no uptick in applicants since the governor’s announcement, which...

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Senate Democrats are considering a sweeping roughly $6 trillion reconciliation package that could advance key elements of President Biden’s infrastructure plan along with additional reforms targeting climate change and health care, aiming to sidestep likely Republican opposition on Capitol Hill.

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A new Hutchins Center survey of Federal Reserve watchers in academia and the private sector finds a substantial improvement in their grades of the Fed’s communication efforts compared to a similar survey conducted in 2016.

Of the 46 respondents, 25 (54 percent) gave Fed communications an overall grade of A or A-. In the 2016 survey, only 4 of 58 respondents gave comparable ratings. The median grade for 20 Fed watchers who participated in both surveys went from a B in 2016 to an A-/B+ in the 2020. Respondents from academic institutions and think tanks generally gave the Fed higher marks than did those who work on Wall Street or in other financial institutions.

“When I began covering the Fed for the Wall Street Journal in 1987, the Fed didn’t even announce when it decided to move interest rates,” said David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center. “Since then, the Fed has become increasingly transparent. While it can never satisfy those on Wall Street who want...

By August Benzow

As the country’s population growth fell to its lowest rate since the 1930s last year, a majority of counties lost residents according to the latest Census Bureau estimates. For the year ending July 1, 2020, Sunbelt metro areas, the Mountain West, and the Pacific Northwest enjoyed robust population growth. By contrast, the urban Midwest and Northeast added to their long population declines along with large parts of Appalachia and the rural South. Expensive coastal areas like the Bay Area and New York City also shed population, hit hard by domestic out migration and a dwindling pipeline of international migration. Exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, net international migration nationally sunk to its lowest number of the decade, falling to 477,000 from 719,900 in the year prior. At the same time, the U.S. birth rate fell to four percent, its lowest point ever.

Key takeaways from the Census estimates:

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You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

President Biden named Lina Khan, a prominent critic of Big Tech, as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, according to two people with knowledge of the decision, a move that signals that the agency is likely to crack down further on the industry’s giants.

A public announcement of the decision is expected Tuesday, one of the people said.

Earlier in the day, the Senate voted 69 to 28 to confirm Ms. Khan, 32, to a seat at the agency. The commission investigates antitrust violations, deceptive trade practices and data privacy lapses in Silicon Valley.

Ms. Khan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In her new role, Ms. Khan will help regulate the kind of behavior highlighted for years by critics of Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple. She told a Senate committee in April that she was worried about the way tech companies could use their power to dominate new markets. She first attracted notice as a critic of Amazon. The agency is...

A couple of months ago, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office announced that it had figured out a way to move more of President Joe Biden’s agenda around the 60-vote threshold needed to break a Senate filibuster.

Under the budget reconciliation process—which Democrats used to pass their $1.9 trillion COVID relief plan in January—budget-related legislation that meets certain conditions isn’t subject to a filibuster, and thus can pass with 50 votes. The first step of the process is to pass an annual budget resolution that includes reconciliation instructions. The conventional wisdom, then, held that senators were limited to one reconciliation bill per fiscal year.