“We’ve seen this dynamic over and over again where Democrats are effectively negotiating with themselves, watering down their own package, not in exchange for votes but in exchange for the hope of keeping the negotiations going,” said Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of the liberal organization Indivisible. “And the inevitable result is that what passes is weaker and less popular than what would have passed if they had gotten bigger and bolder to begin with.”

“Every day that passes where we’re still sort of hopelessly pursuing a mirage of bipartisanship is a day that we’re not moving on to the priorities that Democrats were actually elected to do,” Greenberg added, pointing to voting rights, equal pay and nondiscrimination laws.

The rising anger over infrastructure talks is feeding calls in the progressive political ecosystem to ramp up the pressure on Biden to put an end to the negotiations and move ahead with efforts to pass a spending bill through a process known as budget reconciliation, which requires just 50 votes in the Senate. Up to this point, liberal organizations have largely given the president space to negotiate and have praised not just the scope of his proposals — especially on Covid relief — but his willingness to move quickly.

The White House had to earn that trust. According to more than a dozen activists and movement leaders interviewed for this piece, the White House has taken the task of progressive outreach incredibly seriously. A host of close Biden aides are routinely in touch with top officials on a range of policy fronts. There are regular meetings and informal chats, during which frank discussions are encouraged.

“They have a whole engagement team and there are so many different calls,” said one top official at a leading environmental group. “They do a pretty incredible job with outreach. I think the reason why there is not more progressive frustration is that they do feel heard.”

Over the past few weeks, sources at these meetings say, White House representatives have been repeatedly pressed on infrastructure talks, including fears that if a deal is reached, it could sap momentum for a follow-up bill that includes the rest of Biden’s jobs and family plans, like child care, community college and parental leave. In a recent meeting the administration was asked why they blew through the president’s initial Memorial Day deadline for talks to end. The response has been essentially what the administration says publicly: Biden believes that a big bipartisan bill is important, but he won’t let the pursuit of it override the need to get something done.

Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said the president is engaged in good faith talks with both parties in Congress and “has been emphatic that inaction is not an option, that progress needs to be made in the short term, and that he is open to other conversations about infrastructure.” He pointed to a June 9 House markup as a key date. “Equity is at the heart of his agenda,” Bates added.

But progressives are done waiting. Drawn out negotiations, they say, could hurt the prospects of passing other liberal priorities — not only those included in Biden’s jobs and family plans, but campaign promises like voting rights legislation and police reform.

“There’s no deal to be had here,” said Brian Fallon, an Obama alum and executive director of the advocacy group Demand Justice, which supports liberal judicial nominees. “To the extent that it’s a political imperative for the White House to want to look like they tried to get a bipartisan deal, they’ve achieved that. So what’s clouding their judgment this time?”

Some leaders on the left pointed to the recent GOP votes blocking a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection as an inflection point. For progressives, the vote further cemented that the White House, for all its wishful thinking, isn’t dealing with good-faith negotiators. Others noted the fact that Republicans in 2017 had no problem pushing through their tax cut by a partisan vote and are now trying to rule the bill off limits during bipartisan negotiations.

And some activists say the administration’s dedication to striking a deal with Republicans to create traditional infrastructure jobs creates the impression that they are prioritizing white blue collar workers over women of color working in elder and child care, which the president has, for now, put off for a second, subsequent bill.

Maurice Mitchell, a leader with the Movement for Black Lives coalition, said he saw a “lack of coherence” in Biden stressing the need for urgent action to close the racial wealth gap in a speech in Tulsa, Okla., but a day later engaging in further negotiations with Republicans. The GOP’s push to pass a narrow bill focused on physical infrastructure like roads and bridges prioritizes “traditional white, male laborers” said Mitchell, risking the elements of Biden’s plan to boost working conditions for elder care jobs held primarily by women of color and immigrants.

“The way that people talk about what does infrastructure mean and the difference between physical infrastructure or a broader definition of infrastructure and the care economy — folks are not understanding the race and gender implications of these questions,” said Mitchell, executive director of the Working Families Party. “They drive at the heart of who is being prioritized in these policy conversations on the Hill, which people are being prioritized.”

Out of fear about the direction that talks are heading, some groups are planning more direct action. The liberal advocacy group MoveOn is set to mobilize its members and target lawmakers attempting to water down Biden’s proposal. Sunrise Movement, a progressive climate change group, wants Biden to meet with them rather than Republicans. In an internal strategy memo circulated by Sunrise this week, leaders called for “short, intense” bursts of pressure on the White House and Democrats to “stiffen their spines in negotiations with moderate Republican and Democratic senators.”

“If we learned anything from this year alone, the GOP is not the party that I think Biden idealizes,” said Ellen Scales, a spokesperson for the group. “Voters in 2022 and 2024, young people, are not going to ask whether or not Joe Biden was kind to Shelley Moore Capito — they don’t even know who that is. They’re going to see whether or not he dealt with the climate crisis and created millions of good jobs.”

The White House says it’s not going to negotiate much longer and maintain that the president wants to move quickly. An administration official said they still needed to play ball to the extent that it helps firm up the support of moderate Senate Democrats, who will be needed if Biden falls back on using reconciliation to push a bill with only Democrat votes. And White House advisers like Steve Ricchetti have told Democrats that a concerted bipartisan attempt would benefit Democrats politically.

“The tail is wagging the dog here and the strategy is being driven by congressional Democrats that are high on their own supply in terms of enjoying the constant running back and forth of offers with Republicans,” said Fallon. “Voices like Ricchetti,” Fallon assumed, are “arguing internally” to give moderate congressional Democrats “more space” to bring along Republicans.

The White House and Republicans remain at odds over how to pay for the package, the size of it, and what actually defines infrastructure. Though Biden revised his proposed tax hikes, and Republicans are entertaining increasing their current $250 billion offer, few on the Hill or in the White House expect negotiations to ultimately succeed.

Meanwhile, progressives are fearful that Republicans may actually take the deal that Biden has offered and fracture the Democratic party in the process.

“We are rooting for them to be dumb,” said one top consultant who advises several progressive groups. “If they were smart they would take it. They’d box Biden in on it. And, not just that, he would legitimately be fine with it. And the left would be livid.”

But those 25 million doses represent just a fraction of the global demand for Covid-19 vaccines in low- and middle-income countries that have struggled to source shots on their own. Despite the United States’ growing vaccine surplus, officials at the White House, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development spent months mired in intense debate about whether to send doses to the rest of the world and how to determine which countries needed them most, seven senior U.S. officials told POLITICO.

“We had an obligation to try and move as quickly as possible to get [the doses] over there,” one senior health official said. “We’ve got plenty of doses. Now we’re finally moving. But we didn’t need to take this long to do it.”

Biden said in late April that the U.S. would send 60 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine abroad by July 4, a commitment made amid growing global concern about sharp spikes in Covid-19 cases and deaths in India. On May 17, Biden said the U.S. would donate an additional 20 million doses — a mix of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson’s shots — by the end of June.

But the world waited for months for a hint of which countries would share in the United States’ vaccine bounty. In recent weeks the virus has overwhelmed countries across South Asia and South and Central America, leaving them unable to treat their citizens let alone vaccinate them.

Early in the Biden administration, White House, national security and health officials agreed that their goal was for the U.S. to become the world leader in vaccine donations, multiple senior administration officials told POLITICO. But they disagreed on when to start shipping out doses, how many to send, and whether to even call them donations.

Officials also split on how the U.S. should decide where to send the vaccine. Dozens of countries across the world were at risk for uncontrollable virus surges. The U.S. government wanted to ensure that the doses it did ship would be distributed equitably and help the maximum number of people possible.

The administration did not begin working on a framework for donations until Gayle Smith, the coordinator of the global COVID response and health security at State, stepped into office in April.

It took until last week for the White House to finalize its plan for the initial donation of 25 million doses after coming under increasing pressure from world leaders and members of Congress. In particular, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar pressed State and National Security officials about the hold up in vaccine shipments, two senior officials with knowledge of those conversations said. Biden had said in April that he intended to send Covid-19 vaccines to India; since then, millions of Indians have contracted Covid-19 and tens of thousands of people have died, but the U.S. has not shipped the country any shots.

The first wave of donations announced Thursday includes 19 million doses that will be distributed through COVAX. Six million of those will go to countries in South and Central America, including Brazil, Paraguay and El Salvador; seven million doses will be sent to Asian countries, including India, Nepal, Pakistan and the Philippines. Another 5 million doses will go through COVAX to African countries that will be selected in coordination with the African Union. The U.S. will also send a total of 6 million doses directly to allies and “regional priorities,” including Mexico, Canada, West Bank and Gaza, Ukraine, Egypt and Iraq, the White House said.

The donation will come from the U.S. stockpile of Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. But that was not the original plan. The administration originally planned to start donations by drawing on 60 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine manufactured at a Baltimore plant — but those shots have been tied up in a lengthy Food and Drug Administration safety review.

In March, the Baltimore facility run by contract manufacturer Emergent BioSolutions accidentally contaminated 15 million Johnson & Johnson doses with the active ingredient of AstraZeneca’s vaccine. Production at the plant stopped in April and the FDA began investigating the matter. Since then, the agency has been trying to determine whether any of the other millions of doses of the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines made by Emergent were contaminated. While available testing methods can identify major contamination problems, they are not always capable of tracing small amounts of contamination.

Officials had said they needed the FDA to sign off on those doses as safe before the administration could announce which countries would receive vaccine donations.

For weeks this spring, administration officials told POLITICO they expected the FDA investigation to come to a conclusion soon — enabling the White House to begin shipping shots abroad. But as the days passed by, it became clearer to the Biden team that the FDA investigation needed more time, three officials working on the federal government’s Covid-19 global response said.

The doses were tested for contamination, but the agency worried that low levels of contamination could escape detection. The FDA ultimately asked AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson to run risk assessments of the potential effects of any trace contamination in the Emergent doses — contamination that would not necessarily impact the overall safety of the vaccine. The agency took extra care with its review in part because the administration planned to ship many of the doses abroad.

That caution has frustrated not only foreign leaders and members of Congress, but also personnel at other U.S. agencies. American diplomats overseas have pushed the State Department to send vaccine abroad as a way to counter Russia and China, which are using their homegrown shots to win political concessions from recipients. And senior health officials have told the White House that the U.S. has more than enough vaccine in its stockpile for America’s needs.

“We will work as expeditiously as possible,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Thursday. “This is certainly a complex operational challenge but one that we will take on. Our goal is in service of ending the pandemic globally. We want to save lives and thwart variants that place all of us at risk. Most important, this is just the right thing to do.”

Disagreement among top officials at State, the National Security Council and the White House over the donations began in early April, officials said. The White House was wary of shipping vaccine abroad when U.S. demand for the shots was falling, making it unclear how many doses would be needed at home over the next six months. Other senior health and national security officials pushed back, saying internal vaccine projections showed the U.S. could spare millions of doses from its stockpile to lower and middle income countries.

“It’s been a … well, let’s just say it hasn’t been an easy few weeks,” said one of the seven senior administration officials working on vaccine-donation effort. “The fact is we couldn’t get these doses overseas quick enough. We needed to send them sooner. But we couldn’t.”

Two national security officials familiar with deliberations on vaccine requests told POLITICO the administration was originally concerned about the situation in South Asia, including Nepal and the Philippines, but that the focus has shifted in recent days to South America and other countries in the Northern Hemisphere.

Beyond the national security and health implications of sending vaccines to the rest of the world, senior administration officials in the White House also discussed in several high level meetings with the NSC and State Department about the optics of sending doses to the world when the U.S. was far from reaching herd immunity through vaccination.

“I think there was a real sense that we might not be able to get where we want to go with the vaccine in this country,” one senior administration official with knowledge of the White House conversations said. “And we wanted to approach this with an America first attitude. Let’s get our own people taken care of first before we move to help others.”

But continuing to wait became untenable.

“A major tension within the administration and certainly outside the administration has been how much of the focus of the White House should be on U.S. response versus doing more globally,” said Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health. “It’s been very clear which side has been winning that debate.”

The vaccine donations supplement a broader effort in the Biden administration to provide Covid-19 humanitarian assistance to the rest of the world. USAID is leading the effort in trying to identify life saving supplies such as masks, gloves and oxygen components in the supply chain, buy the products and find ways to ship them to countries across the world.

That effort has slowed in recent weeks, even after the administration said it would provide supplies to India, two officials with knowledge of the matter said. Prices for personal protective equipment are rising again and oxygen components are increasingly difficult to come by. Officials said there is an added hurdle of finding enough cargo space to ship the materials overseas.