President Joe Biden selected Jerome Powell for a second four-year term as Federal Reserve chair while elevating Governor Lael Brainard to vice chair, keeping consistency at the U.S. central bank as the nation grapples with the fastest inflation in decades and the lingering effects of Covid-19.

The move, announced by the White House on Monday, rewards Powell for helping rescue the U.S. economy from the pandemic and tasks him with protecting that recovery from a surge in consumer prices. A Republican, Powell faces what will likely be a smooth confirmation in the Senate, where he was backed for his first term as chair in an 84-13 vote and whose members he subsequently worked hard to woo.
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Brainard would replace Richard Clarida in the vice chair slot and may face opposition from Senate Republicans for her confirmation. She was interviewed by Biden for the chair position and was seen as a strong contender for the separate job of vice chair for supervision, which remains vacant.

Biden plans to announce that nomination along with additional picks for open seats on the Board of Governors beginning in early December, the White House said.

Read More: How Lael Brainard Compares to Jerome Powell for Fed Chair

Powell, 68, has enjoyed bipartisan support, including from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other Democrats, although progressive Democrats such as Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren lobbied Biden to choose someone more aligned with them on overseeing banks and battling climate change. Powell also had to answer for an ethics scandal after trading revelations by some senior Fed officials.

Biden’s choice of Powell will also likely win approval from investors by ensuring continuity at the central bank as it begins withdrawing ultra-easy monetary policy amid the challenges of persistent inflation.

Biden, in a written statement, called the economic recovery so far a “testament to the economic agenda I’ve pursued and to the decisive action that the Federal Reserve has taken under Chair Powell and Dr. Brainard to help steer us through the worst downturn in modern American history and put us on the path to recovery.”

Biden added, “I’m confident that Chair Powell and Dr. Brainard’s focus on keeping inflation low, prices stable, and delivering full employment will make our economy stronger than ever before.”

He also singled out what he called their “deep belief that urgent action is needed to address the economic risks posed by climate change, and stay ahead of emerging risks in our financial system.”

Brainard and Powell have similar views on monetary policy, but differ over bank regulation with Brainard opposing at nearly every step Powell’s modest rollbacks of some of the tough curbs imposed on banks after the financial crisis.

Brainard, 59, was appointed a Fed governor in 2014 by President Barack Obama. In 2020, Biden considered picking her as Treasury Secretary, before he picked Janet Yellen.

A graduate of Harvard University, Brainard served in Bill Clinton’s White House as deputy national economic adviser. In 2009, under Obama, she joined the Treasury and became undersecretary for international affairs in 2010.

Powell’s second term is going to be very different from his first. While the economy is rebounding, inflation is running at a three-decade high, Covid-19 cases remain elevated and strained supply chains present big uncertainties.

Some officials are already suggesting the Fed may need to pull back its massive asset-purchase program faster than now planned and Powell will also be presiding over a committee with a number of members who likely want to raise interest rates sooner than he does.

Powell said this month he won’t consider hiking rates until the labor market shows greater signs of healing.

On Nov. 9, Cuban journalist Elaine Diaz was trying to send out a newsletter to the subscribers of Periodismo de Barrio, her watchdog news site covering human rights issues on the island, when she got an error message on her screen.

The U.S.-based service she had been using, MailChimp, had suddenly and unexpectedly eliminated her account. “They did it without prior warning, for being based in Cuba,” she wrote on Twitter. “It’s not the first Cuban outlet to go through this experience. Shameful.”

As Internet access has exploded on the island, an increasing number of Cuban journalists, activists, dissidents and artists find themselves locked out of the online platforms and services used by the rest of the world—not by their communist government, but due to restrictions imposed on American companies by the broad, 60-year-old U.S. embargo. In recent years, they have been abruptly blocked from cloud services, file transfer sites, social media managers, editing software, development apps, video calling, free education platforms and NFT marketplaces. It not only shuts them out of the global digital economy, several young Cubans tell TIME, it also makes it harder to create content and reach a wider audience.
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The restrictions come on top of the Cuban government’s own tight grip on Internet access for its citizens through the state-owned telecommunications monopoly, ETECSA, which blocks news websites deemed critical of the regime. The agency also restricted access to social media platforms in the wake of historic protests over food and medicine shortages in July, with some calling on President Miguel Diaz-Canel to step down.

The two factors have combined to hit the heart of Cuba’s protest movement. The summer protests, as well as the San Isidro demonstrations that preceded it last year, were spearheaded by young artists who rely on digital platforms to disseminate information and express and organize themselves online. As a result, the blunt instrument of the decades-old embargo is inadvertently stifling the very freedom of expression and robust civil society that the U.S. government seeks to support in Cuba, experts say, as U.S. companies try to avoid running afoul of the law.

“It’s a classic case of our own sanctions boomeranging and biting us in the ass,” says Ted Henken, a professor of Latin American studies at Baruch College who has written a book on Cuba’s digital revolution. “The embargo is so ill-targeted and its enforcers know little about the island’s emergent digital civil society.”

Although Mailchimp ultimately reinstated Diaz’ account after she went public, that was a rare exception, according to Cuban artists and activists who spoke to TIME. (A Mailchimp spokesman told TIME the service “operates in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations” but did not clarify how Diaz’ circumstances changed.) There are at least 107 popular tech sites, software and web services restricted from being used in Cuba, according to a compilation by Cuban programmers on Github, a site for sharing code. These services list restrictions on users in Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Syria on their websites, citing U.S. law.

“As time goes by, more and more websites and services are being blocked for Cubans,” says Gabriel Guerra Bianchi, a Havana photographer and artist. Like many Cuban artists and activists who had started to build a community around digital art, he was frustrated when OpenSea, a popular website for selling digital items, blocked Cuban users in May citing the embargo, locking them out of one of the largest marketplaces for non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

“Sometimes one doesn’t even know where these [blocks] are coming from—whether from here or from there,” Bianchi said. He says he doesn’t blame services like OpenSea, which he said expressed regret to their community of Cuban users. “It’s not out of bad faith from these companies, but rather it seems to be part of their security protocols to avoid future problems with the U.S. State Department.”

Cubans have lived with the impact of the U.S. embargo for generations. President John F. Kennedy imposed a near-total trade embargo on the country in 1962 after Washington’s failed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, citing “the subversive offensive of Sino-Soviet Communism” the regime was aligned with. As a result, Cuba, which depended heavily on trade with the U.S., became reliant on the Soviet Union, and later Venezuela, for economic and military aid.

But the embargo’s restrictions on U.S.-based services have gained new urgency as web access has expanded to more Cubans. Internet usage in Cuba grew dramatically in the wake of the historic détente in 2014, when President Barack Obama and Raul Castro agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations, leading to the easing of many restrictions on business with and travel to Cuba, as well as an influx of U.S. dollars. Although Cuba only allowed full Internet access on mobile phones in 2018, more than four million citizens on the island—over a third of the population—now access the web on their smartphones.

The relationship between the two countries deteriorated again under Trump, who promised to reverse Obama’s measures and toughened the embargo by imposing over 240 sanctions during his four years in office. President Joe Biden, despite vowing during his presidential campaign that he would restore Obama-era policies of engaging with the Cuban regime, so far has not moved to ease the restrictions.

The complicated web of regulations, trade restrictions and sanctions that comprise the embargo forbid U.S. companies from providing any type of service to Cuba. While there are exceptions for some telecommunications services that expand actual Internet access on the island and “directly benefit the Cuban people,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), this does not include most web services, which would only be able to provide services to Cuba under a special license. Confusion over how to interpret these regulations has led many U.S. platforms and companies to abruptly pull their services in recent years, rather than risk violating the embargo.

Read more: Food Shortages, COVID-19, and Instagram: The Driving Forces Behind the Cuba Protests

Access has been tightening for years. In 2014, Coursera, a California-based online education platform that offers free classes, suddenly blocked users from Cuba as well as other sanctioned countries from logging into their accounts. The company said in a statement at the time that while export control regulations for educational services had “been unclear,” they had received information from the State Department and OFAC that allowing users in these countries to access their services was in violation of U.S. law. Similarly, link-shortening website Bitly suddenly stopped working for Cuban users in 2016, leading to a wave of broken links across Cuban websites.

In 2017, Cuban human rights activist Rosa María Payá saw an error message for her website “Cuba Decide,” an initiative calling for a national plebiscite on free elections. She found that the site had been blocked not by the communist government but because it was using Google’s Project Shield, a DDoS protection service that works with journalists, human rights organizations and elections monitoring sites. In a tweet, Payá called it “the error with which Google joins censorship in Cuba.” Google said at the time the site was being blocked due to compliance with the U.S. embargo. “I would like to know what provision of the embargo forces Google to block an initiative to promote freedom of expression?” Payá asked the Miami Herald.

Four years later, the list of web services used to create and disseminate content and organize online communities has only grown—and with it, the sudden errors that Cuban users encounter. Google blocks access in Cuba to a variety of services that might run afoul of the embargo, such as Google Cloud, Google Developers, Google One and Google Play, according to the list compiled by Cuban programmers. Some of the other apps that are blocked are Adobe, Android Developers, Gitlab, IBM software, Intel, Java, Oracle, Zoom, and a host of payment apps that are necessary to participate in much of the digital world.

PayPal, for instance, which will allow transactions that mention the words “bomb” or “cocaine,” will block any transaction with the word ‘Cuba’ in it. (When a TIME reporter tried to send another user in the U.S. $1 with the note “Cuba Libre” on Nov. 17, PayPal immediately restricted their account and put the transaction under review.) Paypal’s terms of service note that its services may not be used by residents or nationals of “any country subject to United States embargo or UN Sanctions.”

One day last June, Claudio Pelaez Sordo, a Cuban photo and video-journalist who works for independent news outlets, woke up to find himself no longer able to access WeTransfer, a file transfer service that had become indispensable among many Cuban artists and content creators. Unlike Google Drive, it didn’t require users to register for an account, and allowed them to send files up to 2 GB.

“The U.S. government prohibits the provision of certain products and services to specific countries. What this means is that regrettably we are unable to provide our services to you,” the error message read. Although headquartered in Amsterdam has offices in New York and Los Angeles. WeTransfer did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.

“This adds itself to the long list of sites and platforms that [we] can’t access as part of the economic blockade against Cuba,” Pelaez Sordo posted on Facebook on June 10. But “if there’s something the Cuban government has taught us, it’s how to always find a way around it,” he wrote, adding the hashtag #righttolivewithoutblockade.

Read more: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, one of the leaders within Cuba’s San Isidro movement

Young Cubans have increasingly relied on VPNs to work around these restrictions, in order to access everything from news websites blocked by the Cuban government to online services and apps blocked by U.S. sanctions. But low-cost VPNs tend to work slowly, according to people who spoke to TIME, forcing Cubans to spend their money on expensive ones if they want to access or use services that are free to access in the rest of the world.

This has especially frustrated some young artists as Havana has become an unlikely hotspot for crypto art in recent months. Cuban artists have launched several art collections through NFTs, which not only open up new sources of income in their devastated economy but serve as outlets of protest and expression.

“Oh come on!!!! Really!??” tweeted Bianchi, the Havana photographer and artist, when OpenSea blocked him in May. “Cuban artists can’t have access. We are creators! Give us a break!” (An OpenSea spokesman acknowledged to TIME the service had been blocked for Cuban users due to the U.S. sanctions). When sympathetic followers from around the world suggested VPNs to bypass the block, Bianchi explained the reality: even many slow, cheap ones are out of reach for many Cubans.

“This $10 dollars a month is a 10-day salary in Cuba,” he replied on Twitter. “Not only that, we don’t have credit cards in Cuba to pay, or bank accounts.”

The complicated web of U.S. trade restrictions under the embargo, as well as the whiplash of the recent opening and closing of U.S.-Cuba relations during the Obama and Trump administrations, has deterred American companies and platforms from trying to find a way to operate in Cuba, experts say.

“I’ve worked with a lot of clients over the years who take a very conservative approach and decide they don’t want to run that risk,” says Doreen Edelman, a partner at Lowenstein Sandler who chairs their global trade and policy practice, adding that this is especially true for the start-ups who run many of these services. “They’re not going to want to pay for legal fees for stuff like this, so they’ll just follow the embargo and be done with it.”

But while the blanket Cuba embargo dates back 60 years, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has recently been “much more surgical” in its approach to sanctions, says Laura Fraedrich, senior counsel at Lowenstein Sandler’s global trade and policy team. She points to sanctions against certain people and specific activities in countries like Russia and Venezuela. “It’s targeted at people who are in or have been in the government, and you really wonder why we couldn’t go to something like that for Cuba to mitigate some of these secondary and tertiary effects.”

Unsurprisingly, the Cuban government has used the blocking of these services as part of their broader criticism of the U.S. embargo. In a report to the U.N. Secretary-General last year, it outlined how the embargo’s impact on online communications had resulted in Cuban representatives having trouble accessing or participating in virtual U.N. meetings related to the COVID-19 pandemic, since digital platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams are restricted in Cuba. (The State Department referred questions to OFAC, which did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.)

It’s a rare point of agreement between the communist regime and some young Cubans. “Solidarity or just appearances?” Rubén Martínez Rojas, who lives in Havana, wrote in a Facebook post in August. “It would be interesting to know how it is possible that the U.S. is so interested in a free access internet for Cubans but prevents us from accessing digital platforms such as WeTransfer, OpenSea, Adobe and dozens of others that are accessed by the rest of the world, adding obstacles to our human development.”

Though a group of Republican politicians, including Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio, have been clamoring for the Biden Administration to do more to facilitate Internet access in Cuba to promote democratic values on the island, Rojas pointed out that goal is at direct odds with the impact of the embargo.

The U.S. restrictions are preventing Cubans from creating iCloud accounts or installing applications from the App Store, necessary for anyone wanting to use an iPhone, forcing them to pay for expensive workarounds, he wrote. “No U.S. senator is worried about resolving these issues caused by this decades-long blockade which affect every inhabitant of Cuba.”

Lawmakers who have called for expanded Internet access for Cuba placed the blame squarely on the Cuban government. “The U.S. sanctions specifically do not apply to telecommunication,” a Rubio spokesperson told TIME. “It is the regime that is blocking access to it and reporting otherwise is to parrot their propaganda.” His office did not respond to the fact that many of the services in question cite the embargo as the reason for their restricting service to Cuba.

Both U.S. technology policy towards Cuba and the general policy under the embargo are beset by the same internal contradictions, says Henken, the professor at Baruch College. While their aim is to isolate or target the Cuban government, they often impact the people they are designed to support and empower, working against U.S. interests in the country, he says. “The irony is that the same U.S. politicos that support granting free and uncensored access to the internet for the Cuban people also support an embargo which puts those connections in legal and financial jeopardy,” he says.

He cites the example of Cuban opposition group Archipelago, which was behind an attempted Nov. 15 protest and relies on online activists. The November demonstrations were largely suppressed by the government, but could have easily been affected by the U.S. embargo, he says.

“Just imagine if a group like Archipelago would have had one of its essential social media accounts canceled right during the planned protest, due not to the Cuban regime’s internal blockade on the free flow of information but due to the ham-handed and woefully imprecise U.S. embargo.”

—With reporting by Abby Vesoulis

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy rose at 8:38 p.m. Thursday, ostensibly to speak in opposition to Democrats’ social-spending and climate bill. But it quickly became apparent that he was auditioning for the job of Speaker of the House.

And by the time he wrapped at 5:10 a.m.—eight hours and 32 minutes later—it was clear that he had an audience of one: ex-President Donald Trump, a figure who is still widely seen as the true commander of the Republican Party and still a critic of McCarthy for not doing more to keep Trump in the White House after his electoral loss.
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So McCarthy, who has said he had to keep Trump close to keep him from engaging in even more extreme shenanigans, rose in an act of contrition to the 45th President. He criticized the Nobel Peace Prize committee for denying Trump the recognition and blasted Democrats for two impeachments: “​​It was all lies.” He took a personal dig at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for taking three trips to Europe in the last three months on what he mused might be her “farewell tour” and offered without evidence that she might leave office before this term ends. He mocked her fancy refrigerator and ice cream, and at one point before 2 a.m. slid into a mock female voice to mimic her comments. And McCarthy repeatedly claimed China unleashed COVID-19 on the world—despite new doubts about the virus’ origin raised just hours earlier in a widely respected journal.

McCarthy is an ambitious pol, albeit not one who necessarily focuses on details. He’s had his eye on the Speakership since he served as the recruitment chairman for House Republicans and helped to usher in the Tea Party wave of 2010. He is the only one of the three self-proclaimed “Young Guns” to lead a new generation of Republicans to still remain in elected office, the other two dispatched by what would now be called Trumpist politics. McCarthy’s not a shoe-in for the Speakership if Republicans win in 2022, though. He sought the gig once before, back in 2015. He dropped that at the last minute as it seemed like a defeat was imminent.

Now, he’s again within reach of the job. But to get it, he will need Trump’s blessing. One bad word from Trump can sink McCarthy’s ability to win the majority of the 435 voting members of the House. It’s why McCarthy reversed course Thursday and said he would not just restore censured Rep. Paul Gosar’s committee assignments but also those of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, two polarizing figures to say the least. And at a news conference before he started his gabfest, McCarthy disclosed that Trump had phoned him just that morning from a golf course.

Then there’s the not-so-quiet rumor rumbling through conservative circles that Trump himself may prefer the role of House Speaker, one fueled by comments made by Trump’s last chief of staff, himself a former House member. The literal passing of the gavel between Pelosi and her successor could be an incredibly spiteful moment if that heir is Trump. A perch at the Capitol would be useful for his 2024 campaign. Plus, the perks of the Speakership are pretty great, including the use of a government plane and a role as third-in-line for the presidency. There is no requirement, though, that the Speaker be an elected member of the House. Congress has never had a non-member serve as Speaker, but America also never had a President like Trump, either.

But, McCarthy is instead posturing for himself to be part of the hand-off. “I want her to hand that gavel to me. I want her to be here,” McCarthy said, again repeating the unfounded rumor that Pelosi’s resignation was imminent.

At another point, he was explicit—even if that candor was unintentional. “Where’d the Speaker go? Did you fall?” he asked. “Can I be Speaker?” he inquired at the five-hour mark as the Democrats took turns presiding over the House.

Democrats, who around midnight decided to delay the vote to Friday morning and left the chamber, were clearly frustrated. “Kevin McCarthy has now shown more anger about making child care affordable than he has about the insurrection on January 6th,” tweeted Rep. Mondaire Jones of New York. Others shouted at McCarthy at other points and jeered him for making messy what should have been a major win for Biden and his Democrats.

But, in perhaps a strategic error, McCarthy’s delay now puts the vote at the start of the day and denied the bill the epithet of being “passed in the middle of the night.”

McCarthy also repeated all of the GOP’s greatest hits, alleging Democrats want to “Defund the Police” and are soft on China for its role in COVID-19 pandemic, seek to take away private property and embrace a socialist posture. He plucked the strings of the culture wars. “I don’t think the Taliban cared about the pronouns in the military,” he sneered. He recounted the story of allegations of the sexual assault of a female student by a gender-fluid student at a suburban D.C. school. Fears of unsafe neighborhoods for kids, unrelenting immigrants crossing the Southern border illegally and wanton joblessness lurk behind every corner in McCarthy’s telling.

“Every American city is set to become a border city and a sanctuary city,” McCarthy said as the clock ticked past 2 a.m. It was fear-mongering 101, and it is shaping up to be a roadmap for the GOP heading into the midterm elections. It worked in Virginia two weeks ago as Republicans defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the race for governor. As McCarthy was just under the six-hour mark, he invoked those results, noting two Democratic incumbents hail from Virginia districts that voted for Republican Glenn Youngkin by margins of 8 and 11 points.

But back here in Washington, McCarthy was working at proving himself fit for the top job, even if his facts were at times badly inaccurate. He inflated the total cost of the bill to $5 trillion, even as the scorekeepers at the Congressional Budget Office pegged it at $1.68 trillion over a decade. He treated Biden’s Justice Department as out-of-control spies on parents, the IRS as a force to knock on every American’s door and Biden’s one-party control of Washington as a threat to U.S. democracy.

“We will not allow America to fall further behind as the Biden Administration has,” McCarthy promised if Republicans retake the majority next year. “I think you’re fighting to make this a socialist country,” McCarthy told the Democrats.

Because of his privilege as the Republican Leader, he is one of three House lawmakers who can speak without a check on his time. It’s the House version of the Senate filibuster, although deployed far less frequently and unlike its Senate sibling, can’t be shut down by anyone. The stunt is unlikely to derail Biden’s Build Back Better Act, although that fact didn’t stop him from taking advantage of every opportunity afforded him in what is known on the Hill as a Magic Minute. That, in turn, allowed him to deliver an occasionally meandering critique of the spending bill with a history of Reconstruction, the Cold War and Reaganism. He gave a mini-history of Washington Crossing the Delaware, the portrait of America’s first President that hangs (as a reproduction) in McCarthy’s conference room. And he seemed to delight in angering Democrats who occasionally heckled him before finally realizing McCarthy was settling in for a long delay tactic.

“I’m just getting geared up,” he said at 11:35 p.m., three hours into the show.

An hour later, he noted that most Democrats had gone home. “I don’t know if they think they left, I would stop,” McCarthy said. “I’m not talking to them. I’m talking to the American people.”

Finally, McCarthy wrapped up just after 5 a.m. In a factoid that only Congress nerds will appreciate, McCarthy surpassed Pelosi’s legendary Magic Minute, which went eight hours in 2018, until this morning widely considered a record for a House speech.

It’s impossible to have a speech of this length and expect it all to make sense. And McCarthy has never been known as a skilled orator; his success has been in fundraising and managing friendships. So McCarthy can be excused for some of the words making less than perfect sense. Even the most generous listeners would have trouble tracing his desire to have been in Tiananmen Square during the violent 1989 crackdown on protests and in Germany for the fall of the Berlin Wall. Add to that McCarthy’s disclosure that he might have a little headache during his overnight talk-a-thon from his third COVID-19 booster shot.

But he also gave his critics plenty of fodder. For instance, he said he got his first vaccination on Jan. 6, the day Trump riled up a crowd on the National Mall to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential race. McCarthy, who supported Trump’s efforts to undermine the results, said he had had a bad reaction to the jab. “I got the chills. I got the shakes—for a lot of reasons,” McCarthy said in a very tone-deaf recollection on a day that saw a violent mob storm the Capitol.

But ultimately, the evening and into the morning was about proving McCarthy is up to the top job in the House should the Republicans prevail in 11 months. He noted that in his time in the majority, the GOP never lost a procedural motion—an insider boast as an organizer. And he was already announcing prospective rules changes. “No more proxy voting. You’re going to have to show up to vote,” he said. He announced he would scrap the metal detectors outside the House chamber, a second layer of security put in place after Jan. 6. He also hinted that he would strip several Democrats from all committees. “Don’t worry, there will be many more (without committee assignments) next time,” McCarthy said.

If that doesn’t sound Trumpian to you, you’ve not been paying attention to Trump’s capacity for retribution. But McCarthy would also do well to remember this Trump trait: his loyalty is, at best, wobbly. McCarthy spent four years in the service of Trump but could still find his quest for the House gavel unsuccessful if the former President wakes up one day with another idea.

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