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WASHINGTON – President-elect Joseph “Joe” Biden is about to unleash a series of executive orders on his first day in the Oval Office at the White House, leading to what will likely be a years-long effort to undo President Donald Trump’s agenda and internal signal. immediately a generalized change in the place of the United States in the world.
Biden has said that, in the first hours after the Capitol swearing in, at noon on January 20, he will send a letter to the United Nations stating that the country will rejoin the global effort to combat climate change, reversing the Trump decision. to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement signed by 174 countries.
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Biden’s afternoon, the same day, will be very busy. He promised to act swiftly to address the new coronavirus pandemic, appointing a “national supply chain commander” and establishing a “pandemic test board” similar to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s production panel during World War II. The Democrat also said he would restore the rights of government workers to unionize, order a new fight against homelessness and resettle more war refugees.
Another promise is to remove Trump’s ban on traveling to countries the current president considers hostile, most of them Muslim, and to start calling in foreign leaders in a bid to restore trust among America’s closest allies.
“Every president wants to get out the door hard and start delivering on campaign promises before lunch on the first day,” says Dan Pfeiffer, who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “Executive orders are the best way to do this.”
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For Biden, who won the election in a deeply divided nation, the first signals he sends as the country’s new leader will be critical. In the race, he repeated that he was campaigning as a Democrat, but would govern “as an American.” Following that promise will require you to show some respect for parts of Trump’s agenda that were strongly supported by more than 70 million people who voted for the Republican.
“How far does it go?” Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, questioned on CNN Saturday, hours after Biden was declared the winner. “If you want to show that you want to work on a bipartisan basis, don’t go immediately and sign all the executive orders on immigration and avoid Congress,” he warned.
But there is no doubt that Biden and members of his party are eager to systematically erase what they see as destructive policies that Trump has adopted on the environment, immigration, health, gay rights, trade, cuts. tax, civil rights, abortion and relationships. racial and military spending, among others.
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Part of this will require cooperation with Congress, which may remain divided in 2021. If Republicans retain control of the Senate, Biden’s promises to reverse Trump’s tax cuts are sure to face fierce opposition. Efforts for a more liberal agenda on civil rights and race relations, central points of campaign discourse, may fail. And the effort to shape the new government with nominations will be limited by the need to be approved in a Republican Senate.
Biden can accomplish some of his goals with just a pen. Trump largely failed to negotiate with House Democrats during his four years in office, leaving him with no option but executive orders to advance his agenda. Biden can use the same tools to reverse them. Other presidents tried to do this, not always successfully.
On his first day in the White House in 2009, Obama issued a presidential decree on presidential records and another on ethics that attempted to prohibit members of his administration from exerting pressure on the federal administration for two years after leaving office. Later, there were reports that some employees circumvented the restrictions.
The following day, Obama ordered the government to end the torture, responding to the clamor for the use of harsh interrogation measures in the administration of his predecessor, George W. Bush. He also ordered the closure of the terrorist detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But Congress continued to block the measure when Obama resigned eight years later.
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Trump also acted swiftly. In the first hours after he was sworn in as president of the United States, he issued an executive order that promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and instructed the government to “take all steps consistent with the law to minimize unjustified burdens. economic and regulatory laws ”
In the following week, Trump issued immigration decrees, calling for changes to asylum procedures at the border, increasing deportations of undocumented immigrants, and banning travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, an order that incited chaos at several airports, while border officials tried to understand who it applied to.
Biden will almost certainly act immediately to repeal the so-called global gag rule, which prohibits federal government funding for foreign organizations that offer abortions or simply talk about it. Typically, the rule only takes effect in Republican governments. Trump reinstated her on her first business day in office.
But Biden said his top priority will be to demonstrate a much more vigorous federal approach to the pandemic than Trump’s strategy of leaving the problem to the states.
It would use the power of the office to invoke the Defense Production Law, since the Korean War era, it allows the president to order companies to manufacture the products necessary for national defense, to increase supplies more aggressively.
The new president will try to increase the use of the mask against Covid-19 by demanding protection in all federal buildings and offices, in an executive decree that should arrive in the first hours or days of the new government. Biden already warned that he had also required masks on all interstate transportation.
In addition to returning to the climate deal, Biden made it clear that he will immediately begin using the levers of executive orders to reinstate Obama’s regime of environmental regulations, which Trump systematically destroyed during his tenure.
This will likely include a swift completion of a decree issued by Trump at the beginning of his term calling for the repeal of all regulations dealing with climate change and instead promoting the development of fossil fuels and their replacement with one declaring the intention of the Biden government to reduce greenhouse gases that warm the planet.
“Repeal of executive orders can be done immediately,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, who studied what climate regulation might look like under a Biden administration. “This is very important, because the decrees guide administrative agencies on how to exercise their agency and what are the priorities of the administration.”
Biden can also act quickly to restore the national monuments that Trump has reduced shortly after taking office; stop the Trump administration’s accelerated reviews of fossil fuel projects like pipelines; and reversing a 2017 order to “encourage energy exploration and production” offshore.
The White House could also make efforts to help poor communities, often located near polluting sites and suffering the consequences of climate change. This would include creating screening tools to better understand environmental disparities across the country and increase pollution control.
Passing larger parts of Biden’s environmental agenda, such as eliminating fossil fuel emissions from the energy sector by 2035, would almost certainly require Congress to pass a specific clean energy law. The law will most likely take the form of a determination that electricity generated in the United States is produced by zero emission sources, such as wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and possibly nuclear.
But Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, which supports the use of fossil fuels, notes that “if history is any guide,” Republicans would hardly support this type of law. “It will be limited to carefully crafted executive orders and regulations,” he predicted, in relation to Biden’s role in this matter.
