Updated at 2:58 p.m. ET

The Senate confirmed Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo on Tuesday as the next secretary of the U.S. Commerce Department.

With a 84-15 confirmation vote that was delayed by a procedural move in February by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Raimondo is set to lead one of the federal government’s most eclectic departments, which includes the Census Bureau, close to two months after President Biden announced the Democratic governor’s nomination.

As secretary, Raimondo is set to take on a portfolio of agencies that also includes the Minority Business Development Agency, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Raimondo, the first woman to lead Rhode Island, is cutting short her second term as governor of the country’s smallest state to join the Biden administration.

During the confirmation process, Raimondo emphasized the need for the department to address how the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the economy and underscored structural inequities facing people of color and families with lower incomes.

“In this time of overlapping crises, the Commerce Department must be a partner to businesses and their workers to help them innovate and grow,” Raimondo said during the January confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee.

Among Raimondo’s most urgent agenda items in the coming weeks is overseeing the processing and release of the first results of the 2020 census, which are now more than two months overdue because of delays stemming from COVID-19 and last-minute schedule changes by the Trump administration.

On Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog agency, announced that the head count remains on its list of “high-risk” government projects because of the delays and uncertainty in the quality of the data in light of the disruptions.

Unlike the previous administration, Raimondo is expected to defer to the expertise of the Census Bureau. In January, bureau officials said they expect to finish running delayed quality checks on the new state population counts used to determine representation in Congress and the Electoral College by the end of April.

“I commit to taking the politics out of [the] census, relying on expertise and doing everything I can to rebuild people’s trust in the census,” Raimondo told lawmakers during the Senate hearing. “It needs to be accurate.”

Still, Raimondo is set to inherit ongoing court challenges against the Commerce Department and Census Bureau, including a lawsuit by the state of Ohio over the bureau’s decision to also push back the release of the redistricting data needed to redraw voting maps by about six months to allow for more quality checks.

Those redistricting data, which cannot be produced until after the bureau finishes processing the apportionment counts, are now expected by Sept. 30. But the office of Ohio State Attorney General Dave Yost is asking U.S. District Judge Thomas Rose to order the bureau to deliver the data to the states by March 31. That date is the current legal deadline that may be extended through legislation a bipartisan group of U.S. senators say they plan to introduce soon.

A court hearing for Ohio’s lawsuit is tentatively scheduled for March 19.

Updated at 1:15 p.m. ET

The Biden administration, signaling a tougher stance on Russia than under the Trump White House, announced Tuesday new sanctions targeting seven senior Kremlin officials in response to last year’s poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Senior administration officials, speaking to reporters on a conference call, said the sanctions also include export controls on 14 parties — nine Russian, three German and one Swiss, and three Russian government research institutes, most of which are believed to be involved in the production of chemical and biological agents.

Later, the Treasury Department released a list of the sanctioned individuals. They are: Aleksandr Bortinkov, director of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor to the KGB; Alexander Kalashnikov, director of the Russian Penitentiary Service, or FSIN; Sergey Kiriyenko, deputy chief of staff to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a former prime minister; Russia’s prosecutor-general, Igor Krasnov; deputy defense ministers Col. Gen. Aleksey Krivoruchko and Gen. of the Army Pavel Popov; and Andrei Yarin, director of Russia’s Presidential Domestic Policy Directorate.

The Treasury Department also announced sanctions on the FSB and GRU, the Russian military’s intelligence agency.

In a statement, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the actions were taken “to send a clear signal that Russia’s use of chemical weapons and abuse of human rights have severe consequences. Any use of chemical weapons is unacceptable and contravenes international norms.”

U.S. officials said the moves were being coordinated with the European Union, although human rights advocates have previously criticized the EU for failing to target the most important Russian officials allegedly involved. The EU announced new sanctions Tuesday targeting high-ranking Russian officials over the attack and prosecution of Navalny, Putin’s most high-profile political foe.

“We’re in many ways catching up to the EU and U.K.,” one of the U.S. officials said, noting that European officials announced some of their sanctions in October and are adding to those sanctions on Tuesday.

In Tuesday’s conference call, officials also announced that a U.S. intelligence assessment had concluded with “high confidence” that Russian intelligence officers “used a nerve agent known as Novichok to poison Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Aug. 20, 2020.”

Speaking at a news conference in Geneva on Monday, United Nations special rapporteurs Agnès Callamard and Irene Khan said they had reached the same conclusion that “Russia is responsible for the attempted arbitrary killing of Mr. Navalny.”

The Kremlin has denied any role in the attack against Navalny, but toxicology tests in Germany, where the opposition leader received treatment, identified the substance as the Soviet-era Novichok, which most experts agree could only be obtained through a state actor.

Administration officials also noted Russia’s use of Novichok in the 2018 attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer, carried out in the U.K.

On his return to Russia after treatment in Germany, Navalny, 44, was promptly arrested and later sentenced to two years in a penal colony. In recent weeks, thousands of protesters in Russia have been arrested after publicly voicing their support for Navalny.

In Tuesday’s briefing, Biden administration officials reiterated a call for Navalny’s release. Last month, the European Court of Human Rights made a similar plea, but was rebuffed by the Kremlin.

The latest White House sanctions are meant to signal a tougher line on Russia. The Trump administration declined to take action against Russia after the attack on Navalny, which the senior Biden administration officials described as an attempted assassination.

“The tone and subject of our conversation with Russia and our conversations about Russia will be very different than what you saw in the previous administration,” one official said.

The Biden administration planned further steps to respond to what officials called “a number of destabilizing actions,” by Russia.

Under the actions, property belonging to the sanctioned individuals can be seized by the U.S., and U.S. citizens are prohibited from doing business with them. The practical effects of the sanctions are limited: the seven Russian officials have few, if any, financial interests in the United States.

The Navalny poisoning is one of four areas of tension between the United States and Russia that the Biden administration has been reviewing since taking office in January. A response to the SolarWinds cyber hack, believed to be of Russian origin, is also under review, with an announcement expected within weeks, the officials said.

“The United States is neither seeking to reset our relations with Russia, nor are we seeking to escalate,” one of the officials told reporters, noting that the Biden administration is willing to work with Russia in areas that are mutually beneficial, such as the five-year extension of the New START nuclear weapons treaty announced in January after being suspended by the Trump administration.

“We expect this relationship to be a challenge and it’s one that we are prepared for,” the official said. “Given Russia’s conduct in recent months, there will no doubt be adversarial elements and we will not shy away from those.”

The Obama administration imposed sanctions on Moscow over its interference in the 2016 presidential elections by expelling dozens of Russian diplomats.

But former President Donald Trump generally took a softer approach to Russia. He repeatedly denied evidence from U.S. intelligence agencies who affirmed the Russian hacking in the election. Trump also downplayed the SolarWinds attack, despite his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, calling it “a very significant effort.”

Updated at 10:03 a.m. ET

FBI Director Christopher Wray is expected to face a grilling from lawmakers Tuesday about the bureau’s response to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the rising threat from white supremacists and other domestic violent extremists.

Wray is appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee for what will be his first public testimony before Congress since a pro-Trump mob ransacked the Capitol almost two months ago.

Watch the hearing live. Editor’s Note: Video shown during the hearing may contain graphic content.

The January assault left at least five people dead, caused millions of dollars in damage to the historic building and led to then-President Donald Trump’s second impeachment. Federal prosecutors have opened a massive nationwide investigation to find those who took part in the violence and hold them responsible.

So far, authorities have arrested some 280 people and charged more than 300 in connection with the attack.

On a parallel track, members of Congress are looking for answers about the security failures that allowed the Capitol to be breached by the mob. They also want to know what the FBI is doing to counter the danger posed by far-right violent extremists.

“I think domestic terrorism, religious and racial-based hate groups have become a major threat in America,” the committee’s Democratic chairman, Dick Durbin, told reporters Monday. “I want to know if our intelligence operations have taken this into consideration in establishing their priorities.”

Durbin and the panel’s other Democrats sent Wray a letter last week expressing concerns about the FBI’s approach to white supremacists and other homegrown far-right extremists.

“Unfortunately, the FBI appears to have taken steps in recent years that minimize the threat of white supremacist and far-right violence, a grave concern that some of us have raised with you on numerous occasions in recent years,” the letter says.

The Democrats say public reporting suggests the FBI, at the direction of Trump administration appointees, shifted resources from investigating right-wing extremists to instead focus on left-wing movements.

“These reports raise serious concerns about whether the FBI is allocating law enforcement and intelligence resources in a manner that reflects the scale of the threat posed by violent white supremacists, whom DHS has called ‘the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland,’ ” the lawmakers write.

Wray has spoken publicly only once since the riot. In those remarks, eight days after the attack, he said the FBI was aggressively tracking down suspects and monitoring potential threats.

In previous testimony, he has defended the FBI’s approach to domestic terrorism threats of all stripes and stressed that the bureau investigates violence, not ideology.

Speaking to reporters Monday, Durbin said he has questions for Wray about Jan. 6.

“What did he know? When did he know it? And who did he tell?” Durbin said. “Those are questions which have been raised in other hearings, but he is the man of the hour.”

Wray is testifying a week after three former top congressional security officials — the ex-sergeants at arms of the House and Senate plus the ex-U.S. Capitol Police chief — blamed what they called a lack of actionable intelligence for the security failure on Jan. 6.

They pointed the figure at intelligence despite the fact that the Capitol Police department had produced its own assessment on Jan. 3 that Congress would be a likely target for the crowd on Jan. 6. Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund testified last week, “None of the intelligence we received predicted what actually occurred.”

All three officials resigned after the Capitol attack.

NPR congressional reporter Claudia Grisales contributed to this report.