Republicans and Democrats on the congressional committee planning next month's inauguration squabbled Tuesday morning over the election results, with Republicans voting against a measure from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer acknowledging Biden's victory.

"I made a motion that the committee notify the American people that it is preparing for the inauguration of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris, and in consultation with them and health experts are doing so to protect the health of our people," Hoyer told reporters after the meeting. "That motion was defeated three to three."

All three Republicans on the panel -- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Rules Committee Chairman Roy Blunt and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy -- voted against the measure, while Democrats on the panel -- Hoyer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. -- voted in favor.

Even as they refuse to acknowledge Biden's victory, Republicans called Hoyer's move a stunt that has no bearing on planning the inauguration: They are already working with Biden's inaugural committee, and the measure wasn't relevant to the day's meeting.

“It is not the job of the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies to get ahead of the electoral process and decide who we are inaugurating. The JCCIC is facing the challenge of planning safe Inaugural Ceremonies during a global pandemic," Blunt said in a statement. "I would hope that, going forward, the members of the JCCIC would adhere to the committee’s long-standing tradition of bipartisan cooperation and focus on the task at hand.”

-ABC News' Benjamin Siegel

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, chief on infectious diseases as Massachusetts General who was tapped as Biden's pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said her work on the HIV/AIDS pandemic brought her to this moment and said she is “honored” to serve an administration that will let science lead.

"I've dedicated my career ever since to researching and treating infectious diseases, and to ending the HIV/AIDS crisis for good. Now a new virus is ravaging us. It's striking hardest once again at the most vulnerable: the marginalized, the underserved," she said. "The pain is accelerating. Our defenses have worn down. We are losing life and hope at an alarming rate."

Walensky said she never anticipated taking on the role in government but compared the nation to a dying patient, said it's her calling as a doctor to respond.

"Every doctor knows that when a patient is coding, your plans don't matter. You answer the code. And when the nation is coding, if you are called to serve, serve. You run to take care of people, to stop the bleeding, to stabilize, to give them hope and a fighting chance to come back stronger," she said.

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci, who will stay on Biden's COVID-19 equity task force and take on the elevated role of chief medical adviser, appeared virtually at Biden's rollout and expressed support for Biden's initiatives around masks and vaccinations in his first 100 days in office.

"I believe, as you do, that in the fight against this pandemic, we must lead with science and that a key piece of our ongoing work is communicating consistently with the American people," Fauci began.

"Whether it's maintaining social distancing and not congregating indoors, or the 100-day challenge you described on masking or to get as many people vaccinated as possible, these actions are bold, but they are doable and essential to help the public avoid unnecessary risks, to help us save lives, reopen schools and businesses and to eventually beat the pandemic," he continued.

Acknowledging he's dealt with many public health crises in his career, Fauci said the COVID-19 pandemic is "the toughest one we have ever faced as a nation," and repeated Biden's warnings that a dark winter is ahead.

"The road ahead will not be easy. We have got a lot of hard and demanding work to do in the next year, but as we have done during previous crises, I also know we can get through this pandemic together as a nation," Fauci added, thanking Biden for the opportunity to serve in this capacity.

Fauci explained he wasn't able to attend the event in-person because his colleague at the NIAID is receiving the Nobel Prize in medicine Tuesday.

Biden's nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, who served in the same role in Obama administration, reminded in his remarks that COVID-19 is not the only health crisis devastating families and shortening life spans in America while warning that even with the best policies, the nation must overcome the fear and distrust that many are feeling amid the pandemic.

"In my new expanded role, I will work to bring a health focus to our policies across government so that our schools, our workplaces and our communities can be forces for strengthening our health and wellbeing, but the truth is that the very best policies, and even the best vaccines and treatments, will not heal our nation unless we also overcome the fear, anxiety, anger and distrust that so many Americans are feeling right now," Murthy said.

"So more than anything, I will come to this role as a doctor, one who learned the most important lessons about medicine not in medical school, but from the clinic that my parents opened when they first came to America as immigrants decades ago," he added.

Drawing from personal experience, Murthy went on to say he is "endlessly grateful to serve one of the few countries in the world where the grandson of a poor farmer in India could be asked by the president-elect to look out for the health of an entire nation."

While the U.S. Supreme Court has twice refused to hear pro-Trump challenges to the 2020 elections, a federal judge in Wisconsin on Saturday joined the chorus of rulings against Trump in his effort to use the courts to invalidate Biden’s victory.

“This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Brett H. Ludwig, a Trump appointee. Ludwig noted that the president had asked “that the Rule of Law be followed,” and he declared in response: “It has been.”

The ruling comes just one day after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider an election challenge brought by the Texas attorney general contesting the way elections were run in four states, including Wisconsin. Trump had called that case “the big one,” because he thought it held the best hopes for him of re-litigating the 2020 contest in court.

This latest ruling marks nearly 50 losses for the president  in cases brought by him and his supporters since election day. In Wisconsin, where Biden won by more than 20,000 votes, Trump asked for 221,000 absentee and mail-in ballots to be excluded on the grounds they were collected in ways not laid out by the state legislature. And the president argued that the legislature should be afforded the chance to select an alternate slate of electors.

Ludwig’s 23-page opinion gave wide latitude to Trump -- finding that the president had standing to file his election challenge and was not too late to raise his concerns about the way the election was conducted. But the outcome of the case was the same as rulings in other battleground states -- that Biden’s victory was attained legally and should not be thrown to a legislature to upend.

The president, Ludwig wrote, “has not proved” that state election officials violated his rights. “To the contrary, the record shows Wisconsin’s Presidential Electors are being determined in the very manner directed by the Legislature, as required by Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.”

Ludwig further noted that if he followed the demands set out in Trump’s lawsuit, “any disappointed loser in a Presidential election, able to hire a team of clever lawyers, could flag claimed deviations from the election rules and cast doubt on the election results. This would risk turning every Presidential election into a federal court lawsuit over the Electors Clause.”

The Trump campaign has not yet responded to requests for comment.

At the moment the federal ruling was handed down, the Wisconsin Supreme Court was hearing arguments on a separate challenge to a recount of votes in the state, which had failed in a lower court.

-ABC News' Matthew Mosk and Alex Hosenball