Good morning, I'm Allison Michaels from The Washington Post, and this is the Daily

202 for Friday, February 19th.

In today's news, the White House announces $4 billion in funding for COVAX, the global

vaccine effort that Trump spurned, and a NASA rover called Perseverance landed on Mars

in a mission to search for past life.

First, the big idea.

Texas has long been devoted to its singular power grid.

The state has rejected federal electricity regulation and the kinds of shared high voltage

connections with neighboring states.

Those can be found across most of the country.

The Post's Will England, Steve Muffson and Dino Grandoni report that

top officials ignored warnings over decades that confidence in the grid was misplaced.

Largely, as a result, Texas is entering now its fifth day with widespread power failures

after a severe cold snap and snow storm.

In 1989, punishing cold weather that caused power failures across the state led to a federal

study that spelled out how to avoid such disaster in the future.

The report laid out how to winterize equipment the way more northern power companies do.

In 2011, after Arctic weather caused a series of rolling blackouts,

the Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission or FERC produced another report that warned Texas

power companies and regulators again that they had to winterize their equipment.

That report, like the earlier one, was largely ignored.

The regulatory recommendations are coming after cold and snow that blew in over last weekend and

...