Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Wednesday, February 3rd. I'm Erica Pandy filling

in for Naila Boudou. Here's what we're watching today. What's next for Alexi Navalny? Plus,

the residents of Marvin Gaye's what's going on 50 years later. First though, Biden's

barriers to reopening schools is today's one big thing.

Before he took office, President Joe Biden said a goal to reopen schools by the end of his

first 100 days. But now the clock is ticking and the challenges around safely reopening schools

keep piling up. Axios' White House reporter, Elena Trin, has been talking to people on Biden's

team about these obstacles. So, Elena Biden made this promise in December. What challenges

is he facing now? There's a lot of challenges, Erica. And what the administration is saying,

and we're also hearing from doctors like Anthony Fauci and others, they're starting to say there's

mitigating factors or other things that might be getting in the way. And then they're also arguing

that because there's different strains of viruses that are popping up, the vaccine distribution and

rollout has been a bit more shaky than they had hoped. Those are also things that are getting in

the way of them feeling comfortable to have this nationwide mandate to reopen. So with everything

you're saying, are we seeing any signs that the 100-day timeline is getting longer?

President Biden is saying that he's still committed to this date, even though others on his team

are starting to try to set expectations for others. And the big thing that we're also seeing

happen now is Republicans are really ramping up pressure to force the Biden administration

to open up sooner, saying that the money issue in particular is one that shouldn't be argued,

given that so much money had been allocated already in previous pandemic relief packages.

There's a lot of confusion about how to tackle this and the parties are definitely in many ways

on different sides of the aisle on whether it's safer people to begin returning on a much broader

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