The House of Representatives will return Monday to a post-election session with a few major but controversial items to address, including leadership elections, how to deal with more coronavirus relief and a must-pass spending bill.

To help, they’ll have a new, widespread testing program to track the coronavirus among members, staffers and workers. The plan is a first for any chamber of Congress eight months into the pandemic, and it comes as cases are spiking across the country and in Washington, D.C.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says the focus during the lame duck session — a notoriously difficult time to pass legislation, between the elections and a new Congress — will be on a stalled wave of coronavirus relief and funding the government before it runs out of money next month.

“Again, our focus in the Congress now, in this lame duck, continues to be on COVID relief. This is a red alert,” Pelosi told reporters on Friday. “All hands on deck.”

But that’s not all: The House holds its leadership elections this week for the new Congress that will be seated in January. Democrats retained control of the chamber, albeit with a smaller majority facing a larger Republican minority.

Pelosi will seek the speaker’s gavel again and has no challenge, while Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., will look to retain his role. They’ll be among a host of members seeking other, lower down leadership posts, but both leadership teams are expected to look similar to the ones in place now.

Those elections, which are usually held in person, will look different this year. For example, Democrats will hold theirs remotely.

Meanwhile, the incoming class of newly elected members is undergoing orientation elsewhere on the Capitol complex.

Lame duck business

House Democrats are hoping to hit the ground running when they return, but they face plenty of obstacles.

While Pelosi says job one is addressing another wave of pandemic relief, both parties still remain far apart.

Democrats are still seeking a package in the $2 trillion range for more stimulus for businesses, individuals and state and local governments.

“We’re in that same place, even more so,” Pelosi told reporters last week.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has also signaled his position hasn’t changed either. Republicans have rebuked the Democrats proposal as too high.

“That’s not a place I think we’re willing to go,” McConnell told a Capitol Hill pool reporter. He has been pushing for a bill that costs roughly $500 billion.

Meanwhile, both parties will be working to head off a Dec. 11 deadline when the government runs out of money. Before this month’s elections, Congress approved a short-term funding measure, and now they’ll be looking to see if they can reach a deal that bundles together all of the annual spending bills.

“I’m optimistic that that will happen,” Pelosi said recently. McConnell has also said he hopes they can reach a broad spending deal.

Finally, members will be working to see if they can reach a final deal on an annual defense bill that typically gets overwhelming bipartisan support. This year, however, President Trump has expressed opposition to a provision in both the House and Senate versions of the National Defense Authorization Act to potentially remove Confederate names and symbols from military bases and other property.

Meanwhile, newly elected members will continue orientations that began last week. Rather than Democrats picking up five to 10 new seats as expected, Republicans are celebrating gains of a handful seats or more, as roughly a dozen races remain uncalled.

“It was an unbelievable night for Republicans in Congress,” McCarthy said recently.

By Friday, about 68 member-elects and candidates in uncalled races had attended the orientation, according to the office of Illinois Republican Rep. Rodney Davis, the ranking member of the House Administration Committee who narrowly won his own reelection race. Of those, 50 are Republicans and 18 are Democrats.

“Each of us has been given the opportunity by our constituents to step up and be those leaders for our districts and for the country,” Davis said in remarks before the new members on Friday. “And it starts right now.”

The new member sessions, which are being held at the Capitol complex, will continue until Thanksgiving, and then resume after the holidays until Dec. 5.

New COVID-19 testing

One key concern that has plagued Congress during the pandemic is the absence of a widespread testing plan to track the coronavirus illness. Testing was only offered in limited cases.

So far, Congress has seen at least 25 of its members test positive for the coronavirus illness, and more than 150 workers.

But after pressure from members and facing increasing caseloads across the country, a new testing regime is being implemented as members return after being away for the election. Pelosi, in conjunction with Dr. Brian Monahan, the Capitol attending physician, recently announced the addition of up to 2,000 weekly COVID-19 tests for current members and staff.

It’s similar to a program pitched by McCarthy and Davis, who has called for the screening plan for several months.

Republicans “gave a plan to open up the House safely, with testing, which the speaker denied us,” McCarthy told reporters last week of the struggle to devise a plan in recent months.

This new testing plan came ahead of announcement this month by Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser requiring testing for those who travel to the nation’s Capitol from most states. However, the new requirements don’t apply to essential workers, which members of Congress have argued applies in their case.

Pelosi shared the news with leaders of her caucus earlier this month, according to a senior Democratic aide. At Monahan’s recommendation, the House partnered up with the Air Force to provide the weekly 2,000 polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests for six weeks. And while the tests are a dramatic increase over previous testing levels, it still falls short of reaching the full Capitol community, which can total 20,000 workers.

Test results will be available within six to 12 hours, and those who test positive will receive additional screening to confirm the results, the aide said. A longer term plan to extend the testing beyond six weeks is also being considered.

Meanwhile, a House mask mandate instituted earlier this year remains in effect, the aide said.

This is as the House takes additional steps to ramp up options to allow full remote voting by members. Earlier this year, they approved a move to allow remote hearings and, under an emergency order extended through December, proxy voting.

It’s the subject of legal action by Republicans, who largely remain opposed to the plan and any expansion of it.

“We believe you just spent some millions of dollars saying you’ll be the voice for all of you in your district, you should show up and be that voice,” McCarthy told reporters recently.

NPR’s Susan Davis contributed to this report.

Former President Barack Obama delivered a stinging rebuke of President Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election, warning of the real-world harm that can stem from any delay in the peaceful transfer of power, but saying Trump will fail in “denying reality.”

In an interview with NPR that airs Monday, Obama provided some of his most wide-ranging remarks about the election since Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. Obama said that he took Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the election seriously and described the president’s unwillingness to cooperate with the transition as “yet one more example of how Donald Trump’s breach of basic democratic norms is hurting the American people.”

Obama’s remarks come as Trump continues to falsely maintain that he won the election and as he pursues a Hail Mary legal strategy to challenge the outcome based on unproven and baseless allegations of fraud. With near-universal consent from Republicans in Congress, the president has formed a united front that has blocked the incoming Biden administration from millions in federal dollars set aside to fund the transition, as well as access to information and agency officials across the government.

“I’m distressed that you haven’t seen more Republican leadership make this clear, because the amount of time that’s being lost in this transition process has real-world effects,” Obama told All Things Considered host Michel Martin. “Look, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. We’re in the middle of an economic crisis. We have serious national security issues.”

Obama said Trump’s behavior marks a total departure from how he and his staff were treated by the last Republican president to exit the White House, George W. Bush, following Obama’s victory in the 2008 election.

“For all the differences that I had with George W. Bush, he and his administration could not have been more gracious and effective in working with us to facilitate a smooth transition,” Obama said. He said his ability to get “immediately briefed” by top administration officials on everything from the financial crisis to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq “meant we hit the ground running and allowed us to be more effective in our responses.”

Republicans have defended the president’s rights to exercise all legal options, but within Democratic ranks, Trump’s refusal to concede has been roundly criticized as an attempt to cast a permanent cloud over Biden’s victory. Democrats have denounced it as a replay of Trump’s attempts to delegitimize Obama’s presidency by stoking the birther conspiracy movement. Many in the Democratic Party now say that by going along with the president, Republicans are signaling that Biden’s calls for bipartisan cooperation are already a lost cause.

Asked whether bipartisanship is a fool’s errand, Obama said that absent a supermajority in the Senate to break filibusters, “Joe Biden is going to have to work with some Republican colleagues.”

“There is a way to reach out and not be a sap,” he said. “There’s a way of consistently offering the possibility of cooperation but recognizing that if Mitch McConnell or others are refusing to cooperate, at some point you’ve got to take it to the court of public opinion.”

Obama said that what he failed to recognize, particularly at the start of his presidency, is that “an obstructionist strategy oftentimes is not punished by voters in the polls.” He said his advice, “not just for Democrats, but anybody who just wants to see a functioning, effective government, is you’re going to have to stay involved.”

Reflections on race

Obama spoke ahead of the Tuesday release of his new memoir, A Promised Land, which traces his ascent to the White House and concludes with the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011. A second volume covering the remaining years of his presidency is scheduled to follow.

Among the issues he writes about is his record on race. While Obama’s victory in 2008 was celebrated as a high point in America’s long and troubled history on race, the backlash to the first Black president in U.S. history has also been credited with helping to fuel the rise of Donald Trump.

“I think that what did happen during my presidency was, yes, a backlash among some people who felt that somehow I symbolized the possibility that they or their group were losing status — not because of anything I did but just by virtue of the fact that I didn’t look like all the other presidents previously,” Obama told NPR. At the same time, he said, “You had a whole generation of kids who grew up not thinking it was weird or exceptional that the person who occupied the highest office in the land was Black.”

That doesn’t mean there is not still progress to be made. Obama’s tenure in office was repeatedly beset by lingering tensions brought to the surface by the deaths of young Black males such as Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Michael Brown two years later in Ferguson, Mo.

Those tensions only intensified following the death of George Floyd this past May while in the custody of Minneapolis police. Obama said he understood people are discouraged by the pace of progress and admitted that he too feels frustration.

“There are times where I am sad, where I’m angry, where I’m hurting, where I feel obliged to buck up my wife or my daughters when we see not just the kinds of shocking injustices as we saw with George Floyd, but also when you see elected officials — people in positions of responsibility — not simply ignore or dismiss these things, but actually seem to suggest that it’s OK,” Obama said. “I think it is completely understandable to feel discouraged and hurt and upset.”

But he said the progress that has been made on race in just his lifetime is what keeps him from a “plunge into despair.”

Obama also said he draws inspiration from a younger generation that is more open when it comes to attitudes on not just race, but also gender and sexual orientation.

He said this is the generation he wrote the book for — to show that there are two competing visions for the world: one where “we are a collection of tribes and we are inevitably at war and it’s a zero-sum game” and another that says “for all our differences, there is a common humanity and it is possible for us in a multiracial, multiethnic, highly diverse country and world, it is possible for us to see each other, understand each other, respect each other and work together.”

The choice, he said, is up to them.

The Trump administration has not cooperated with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, and top Biden officials say the incoming president is limited in what he can do before his team takes the reins. Still, Biden’s coronavirus advisory board co-chair Vivek Murthy says they’re doing everything they can to ensure plans are ready to go on Inauguration Day — including stronger mask requirements.

Biden has already called for implementing mask mandates nationwide. Where mandates don’t exist, Biden will make direct pleas to governors and mayors to put them in place, Murthy said in an interview with NPR’s Weekend Edition.

“The worse this pandemic gets, there are more leaders, elected leaders, who are coming around to the fact that as unpalatable as these mandates might be, they are important and they actually work,” Murthy said.

Different parts of the country are dealing with the pandemic in their own ways, and that lack of uniformity in restrictions isn’t helpful, the former surgeon general said. For instance, “We don’t have a uniform national alert system that tells communities at what level to start implementing restrictions based on important indicators,” Murthy said.

What is clear, he said, is that strict lockdowns aren’t always necessary if people comply with less restrictive measures.

“I think the more important way for us to think about restrictions is not as a switch that we flip up and down, but more as a dial that we increase and decrease as the situation dictates.”

The severe lockdowns that much of the country faced in the spring were essentially a “blunt axe,” Murthy said. “We did that in part because we didn’t know a lot about the virus in the spring that we know now.”

Overly severe restrictions not only lead to weakened compliance, Murthy said, but also disrupt schooling, work and actually lead to “very little public health gain.”

Health experts say that once a vaccine becomes available, about three quarters of the population will have to take it to really protect the public — a goal that Murthy called “ambitious but achievable.”

“It’s not going to be easy. And it’s going to take not only an adequate supply of the vaccine, but it’s going to take perhaps one of the most important but challenging elements too, which is public trust.”

Americans have a complicated relationship with vaccines. The flu vaccine, for instance, is only taken by about half of Americans. But Murthy pointed to other vaccines that have better compliance — like the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine, which states require children to get before they can attend school.

Murthy said he did not anticipate having to make a COVID-19 vaccine a legal requirement, arguing such a mandate won’t be necessary once people recognize that the vaccine is “based on science and not politics.”

“What we’ve got to do is help people understand that the urgency they’re feeling in their lives as they look at these numbers go up, that that urgency can be addressed actually by a vaccine that we hope to have available in the next few months. But it’s going to be a Herculean effort.”

Meanwhile, the current president has taken a more hands-off role in dealing with the latest surge, even as case counts reach record highs. Trump hasn’t attended a coronavirus task force meeting in at least five months, task force member Adm. Brett Giroir confirmed to ABC’s This Week on Sunday.

“There’s not that much that Joe Biden can do right now to change things,” said President-elect Biden’s newly named chief of staff, Ron Klain, in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “All Americans, and our state and local governments, need to step up right now. If the president and the administration’s not going to lead, that’s where the leadership has to come from. That will change on January 20, but right now we have a crisis that’s getting worse.”

Klain noted that Biden’s advisors will have meetings this week with drug makers to discuss the progress of their vaccine efforts. But the mechanics of manufacture and distribution is even more important, Klain said. “That really lies with folks at the Health and Human Services Department,” he said. “We need to be talking to them as quickly as possible.”