Fact-checking the CBS News vice presidential debate between Vance and Walz

CNN

By CNN Staff, CNN

(CNN) — Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Republican Sen. JD Vance of Ohio are facing off Tuesday night in New York City for their first – and only – vice presidential debate.

CNN’s team is fact-checking the candidates, and this story will be updated throughout the evening.

Vance mischaracterizes Harris’ role on border policy

Sen. JD Vance claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris was appointed the “border czar” during the Biden administration. “The only thing that she did when she became the vice president, when she became the appointed border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border,” Vance said.

Facts First: Vance’s claim about Harris’ border role is false. Harris was never made Biden’s “border czar,” a label the White House has always emphasized is inaccurate. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is the official in charge of border security. In reality, Biden gave Harris a more limited immigration-related assignment in 2021, asking her to lead diplomacy with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in an attempt to address the conditions that prompted their citizens to try to migrate to the United States.

Some Republicans have scoffed at assertions that Harris was never the “border czar,” noting on social media that news articles sometimes described Harris as such. But those articles were wrong. Various news outlets, including CNN, reported as early as the first half of 2021 that the White House emphasized that Harris had not been put in charge of border security as a whole, as “border czar” strongly suggests, and had instead been handed a diplomatic task related to Central American countries.

A White House “fact sheet” in July 2021 said: “On February 2, 2021, President Biden signed an Executive Order that called for the development of a Root Causes Strategy. Since March, Vice President Kamala Harris has been leading the Administration’s diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”

Biden’s own comments at a March 2021 event announcing the assignment were slightly more muddled, but he said he had asked Harris to lead “our diplomatic effort” to address factors causing migration in the three “Northern Triangle” countries. (Biden also mentioned Mexico that day.) Biden listed factors in these countries he thought had led to migration and said that “if you deal with the problems in-country, it benefits everyone.” And Harris’ comments that day were focused squarely on “root causes.”

Republicans can fairly say that even “root causes” work is a border-related task. But calling her “border czar” goes too far.

From CNN’s Daniel Dale

Walz on jobs from Biden’s climate law

Touting the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, a major climate law for which Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, her running mate, Tim Walz, spoke of how the law created “200,000 jobs in the country,” including building electric vehicles and solar panels.

Facts First: This claim needs context. While it’s clear that a significant number of new clean energy jobs were created as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the “200,000” figure includes jobs that companies have promised to create but aren’t finalized. And other counts of new clean energy jobs have come up with smaller figures. 

There are several data sets that track climate law investments, all of which differ slightly. Walz’s number of jobs created by President Joe Biden’s climate law is slightly smaller than a June tally by communications group Climate Power that found a total of 312,900 jobs publicly announced by companies following the IRA passage through May 2024.

E2, another clean energy group that tracks Inflation Reduction Act-related investments and jobs, has counted over 109,000 new clean energy jobs created or announced from August 2022 to May 2024 – significantly lower than the Climate Power number. A recent report from the US Department of Energy found 142,000 new clean energy jobs were created in 2023.

Not all of these jobs have already been created. Climate Power’s topline number also didn’t distinguish between construction jobs building new factories and the long-term jobs at those factories – jobs building batteries, solar panels and electric vehicles, among other things.

Different entities use different methodologies when analyzing data, so it is difficult to determine an exact figure. Regardless, there’s no question there’s a huge amount of clean energy investment, and a significant number of new jobs building EVs and renewables like wind and solar are being created by the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. The 2024 Energy Department report showed clean energy jobs made up more than half of the total for new energy sector jobs and grew at a rate twice as large as the overall US economy.

The report also acknowledged how the sudden growth in the clean energy sector from the Inflation Reduction Act has made it difficult to track all the jobs that are being created.

From CNN’s Ella Nilsen 

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