Washington: US President-elect Joe Biden is poised to unleash a series of executive actions on his first day in the Oval Office, prompting what is likely to be a years-long effort to unwind President Donald Trump's domestic agenda and immediately signal a wholesale shift in the United States' place in the world.
In the first hours after he takes the oath of office on the West Front of the Capitol at noon on Jan. 20, Biden has said, he will send a letter to the United Nations indicating that the country will rejoin the global effort to combat climate change, reversing Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord with more than 174 countries.
Biden's afternoon will be a busy one.
He has vowed that on Day 1 he will move rapidly to confront the coronavirus pandemic by appointing a "national supply chain commander" and establishing a "pandemic testing board," similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt's wartime production panel. He has said he will restore the rights of government workers to unionise. He has promised to order a new fight against homelessness and resettle more refugees fleeing war. He has pledged to abandon Trump's travel ban on mostly Muslim countries and to begin calling foreign leaders in an attempt to restore trust among the United States' closest allies.
"Every president wants to come out of the gate strong and start fulfilling campaign promises before lunch on the first day," said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama and helped choreograph Obama's first days in the White House. "Executive orders are the best way to do that."
For Biden, who won the election in a deeply divided nation, the early signals he sends as the country's new leader will be critical. On the trail, he repeatedly said he was campaigning as a Democrat but would govern "as an American." Following through on that promise will require him to demonstrate some respect for parts of the Trump agenda that were fiercely supported by the more than 70 million people who did not cast ballots for him.
How far?
"How far is he going to go?" Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, asked on CNN on Saturday, hours after Biden had been declared the victor. "If you want to show that you want to work on a bipartisan basis, then you don't go out right away and sign all the executive orders on immigration and bypass the Congress."
But there is no question that Biden and members of his party are eager to systematically erase what they view as destructive policies that the president pursued on the environment, immigration, health care, gay rights, trade, tax cuts, civil rights, abortion, race relations, military spending and more.
Some of that will require cooperation with Congress, which may remain divided next year. If Republicans maintain control of the Senate, Biden's pledges to roll back some of Trump's tax cuts are almost certain to run headfirst into fierce opposition from that chamber. Efforts to advance a more liberal agenda on civil rights and race relations - centrepieces of Biden's stump speech during his campaign - may falter. And his efforts to shape the new government with appointments could be constrained by the need to win approval in a Republican Senate.
But Biden may be able to achieve some of his goals with nothing more than the stroke of a pen. Trump largely failed to successfully negotiate with House Democrats during his four years in office, leaving him no choice but to use executive actions to advance his agenda. Biden can use the same tools to reverse them.
Gag rule
Some executive orders have become almost automatic at the start of a new administration. Biden is almost certain to move immediately to revoke the so-called global gag rule, which prohibits federal government funding for foreign organizations that provide or even talk about abortion. The rule, also known as the Mexico City policy, has been a political Ping-Pong ball since Ronald Reagan was president and is typically in place only under Republican administrations. Trump reinstated it on his first business day in office.
But Biden has signaled that his top priority will be demonstrating a much more muscular federal approach to the pandemic than Trump's leave-it-to-the states strategy.
Aides said he would use the power of his office to invoke the Defence Production Act - the Korean War-era law that allows the president to order businesses to manufacture products necessary for national defence - to build up supplies more aggressively than Trump has.
While Biden would like to see a national mask mandate, his advisers have concluded that he does not have the legal authority to impose one. So he will try to increase mask wearing in other ways. He has already said that, as president, he would require masks on all federal property, an executive order that could have wide reach and is likely to come in the first hours or days of his presidency.
Order on masks
In addition to mandating masks in federal buildings, Biden has said he would require them on "all interstate transportation."
The president-elect has also repeatedly derided Trump's lack of ethical standards, accusing him of waging an extensive assault on Washington's norms and traditions. Biden's response to that will probably take the form of an ethics pledge to impose tough new requirements on the people who serve in his government.
"The Trump administration has shredded those standards," Biden's campaign wrote on his website. "On Day 1, Biden will issue an ethics pledge, building and improving on the Obama-Biden administration's pledge, to ensure that every member of his administration focuses day in and day out on the best outcomes for the American people, and nothing else."
