WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will use his second State of the Union address on Tuesday to remind Americans of how their lives have been improved over his first two years in office, as he tries to confront pessimism in the country and navigate the tricky politics of a newly divided Washington.

Rather than laying out major new policy proposals, Biden was expected to devote much of his speech to highlighting his efforts over the past two years to create jobs, fight inflation and improve the nation’s infrastructure. The speech comes as Biden is honing his pitch to voters ahead of his expected announcement in the next few months that he will seek another term in office despite voter frustrations about the direction of the nation.

“Next week, I’ll be reporting on the state of the Union,” Biden said Friday after a stronger-than-expected jobs report that saw the unemployment rate drop to the lowest level in more than 53 years. “But today, I’m happy to report that the state of the Union and the state of our economy is strong.”

Biden’s remarks from the House rostrum will take place in a sharply different context from a year ago. Republicans now control the chamber, rendering it unlikely that any significant legislation reaches Biden’s desk. The newly empowered GOP is itching to undo many of Biden’s achievements and raising the specter of persistent investigations — including into the recent discoveries of classified documents from his time as vice president at his home and former office.

“Jobs are up, wages are up, inflation is down, and COVID no longer controls our lives,” Biden told the Democratic National Committee on Friday. “But now, the extreme MAGA Republicans in the House of Representatives have made it clear they intend to put it all at risk. They intend to destroy it.”

The president, meanwhile, is shifting his focus from legislating to implementing the massive infrastructure and climate bills passed in the last Congress — and to trying to make sure Americans credit him for the improvements.

“These things don’t sell themselves,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Sunday on NBC. “And it’s one of the reasons I’m really looking forward to that State of the Union address. I will say that there have been so many accomplishments under this administration. It can be difficult to list them in a distilled way.”

While large-scale bipartisanship remains unlikely, Biden was set to reissue his 2022 appeal for Congress to get behind his “unity agenda” of actions to address the opioid epidemic, mental health, veterans’ health and cancer.

Biden will also call on lawmakers to responsibly raise the debt limit and keep the government funded. The president has remained opposed to negotiating to avoid default, while Republicans are pushing for unspecified deep spending cuts to reduce the deficit.

Biden, according to two administration officials who requested anonymity to preview the speech, was also expected to discuss his decision to shoot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon Saturday, as part of a broader section on countering China’s more assertive economic and military actions around the world.

His address last year came just days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine and many in the West doubted Kyiv’s ability to avoid a swift routing. Now the war is on the cusp of entering its second year, and under Biden the U.S. and allies have sent tens of billions of dollars in military and economic assistance to bolster Ukraine’s defenses. Now the president must make the case — both at home and abroad — for sustaining that coalition as the war drags on.

Meanwhile, inflation, which rose precipitously last year in part because of soaring energy prices from the war, has begun to ease.

Still, only a quarter of U.S. adults say things in the country are headed in the right direction, according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research; about three-quarters say things are on the wrong track.

Similarly, views of the national economy remain deeply negative, with 24% calling the national economy good and 76% calling it poor. Forty-one percent of Democrats and 8% of Republicans call the economy good. The figures are similar to when Biden delivered his State of the Union address last year, but an adjustment from Biden’s first year in office when Americans were more optimistic; about half said they thought the country was headed in the right direction when the president took office.

At the same time, 57% say their personal financial situation is good. That’s unchanged since December but has eroded slightly since earlier last year. No less than 62% of Americans had called their personal financial situation good in AP-NORC polls conducted from late 2019 through spring of 2022.

Two years after Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters, a protective fence was reinstalled Sunday around the Capitol ahead of Biden’s address.

After the speech, Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and his Cabinet plan to hold over 30 events in two days to drive the message home to the American people in their communities. Biden will visit Wisconsin to discuss job creation on Wednesday and on Thursday will be in Tampa, Florida to talk about his efforts to lower prescription drug costs and protect Social Security and Medicare.

“During the State of the Union, President Biden will outline how the past two years has seen historic job growth, falling inflation, higher wages, and record investments coming back to America,” the White House said. “The economic travel blitz showcases how the president’s vision is creating jobs, rebuilding our infrastructure, lowering costs for families, tackling climate change, investing in our future and delivering for families too often left behind.”

The travel follows Biden’s stops last week in Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia focused on rail and water infrastructure projects funded by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.

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Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani, Emily Swanson and Hannah Fingerhut contributed to this report.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea has scheduled a major political conference to discuss the “urgent task” of improving its agricultural sector, a possible sign of worsening food insecurity as the country’s economic isolation deepens amid a defiant nuclear weapons push.

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said Monday that members of the ruling Workers’ Party’s Politburo met on Saturday and agreed to hold a larger plenary meeting of the party’s Central Committee in late February to review strategies on agriculture and set new goals. It said the Politburo members acknowledged a “a turning point is needed to dynamically promote the radical change in agricultural development.”

“It is a very important and urgent task to establish the correct strategy for the development of agriculture and take relevant measures for the immediate farming … to promote the overall development of socialist construction,” the KCNA said.

The Politburo meeting came amid indications that the country was preparing to stage a massive military parade in Pyongyang, possibly this week, to glorify the rule of leader Kim Jong Un and his growing collection of nuclear-capable weapons, which he has aggressively pushed to expand despite limited resources and economic decay.

Although not unprecedented, it’s uncommon for North Korea to hold two different party plenaries in a span of two months. It’s also rare for North Korea to call a plenary meeting over a single agenda, this time agriculture, South Korean Unification Ministry spokesperson Koo Byoungsam said in a briefing.

“The government will closely watch North Korea’s food situation and internal trends,” said Koo. He said South Korea estimates that North Korean food production fell by about 4% in 2022 to 4.5 million tons.

Following the collapse of nuclear negotiations with the United States in 2019, Kim declared to strengthen his nuclear weapons and missile program against “gangster-like” U.S. sanctions and pressure and urged his nation to stay resilient in the struggle for economic self-reliance.

But the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed further shock on North Korea’s already broken economy, by forcing the nation to shield its poor healthcare system with strict border controls that choked off trade with China, its main ally and economic lifeline. The country was also hit with devastating typhoons and floods in 2020 that decimated crops.

In a study published on the North Korea-focused 38 North website last month, analyst Lucas Rengifo-Keller said food insecurity in North Korea is likely at its worst since the country’s 1990s famine that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

It’s difficult to establish an accurate assessment of North Korea’s humanitarian needs considering the closed nature of its regime and the poor quality of the limited statistics it discloses. But North Korea’s grain balance estimates issued by U.N. agencies and outside governments as well as possibly sharp increases in rice and corn prices observed by NGOs and media indicate that “country’s food supply has probably failed to satisfy minimum human needs,” Rengifo-Keller wrote.

Russia’s war on Ukraine likely worsened the situation by driving up global prices of food, energy and fertilizer, on which North Korea’s agricultural production is heavily dependent.

“Put simply, North Korea teeters on the brink of famine,” Rengifo-Keller said.

The Workers’ Party’s Central Committee also held a plenary meeting in December, when Kim doubled down on his nuclear ambitions by calling an “exponential increase” of nuclear warheads, mass production of battlefield tactical nukes targeting rival South Korea and the development of more powerful long-range missiles designed to reach the U.S. mainland. Party members also during the meeting identified key economic projects for 2023, highlighted by agricultural and construction activities.