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President Barack Obama will lay out a strategy for getting around a divided Congress and boosting middle-class prosperity on Tuesday in a State of the Union speech that reflects scaled-back legislative ambitions after a difficult year.
Obama will make clear in his 9 p.m. EST address that he is willing to bypass U.S. lawmakers, and go it alone in some areas by announcing a series of executive actions that do not require congressional approval.
The White House said Obama would announce he is issuing an executive order to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour for federal contract workers with new contracts.
In his address, Obama will also call on Congress to pass a bill to increase the federal minimum wage for all workers to $10.10 an hour from $7.25, and index that to inflation.
The executive order raising the level for federal workers, which applies to new contracts or existing contracts in which terms are being changed,
