Biden Plans Immediate Series of Executive Orders To Reverse Trump’s Policies

Biden campaign insiders say that there are very concrete plans to reverse some of the policies that Trump put into place while he was in office, through a series of executive orders that will be signed as soon as Biden becomes president on January 20th of 2021.

Sources close to Biden told the Washington Post that the planned executive orders are intended to signal that that country’s politics have shifted, and that his presidency will work to implement this cultural shift in the political system. As with all of the Post’s stories, this article is locked behind a paywall. 

The president-elect’s most pressing priority upon entering office will be a change of attitude towards the COVID-19 pandemic, with the formation of a new task force that will be co-chaired by former surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy and David Kessler, a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner. The COVID pandemic efforts will also include increased resources for vaccines, contact tracing, and personal protective equipment.

Biden also plans immediate executive orders on issues like climate change, gun control, and the controversial ban of travelers from Muslim-majority countries that was implemented by Trump early in his presidency. Biden plans on rejoining the World Health Organization (WHO), which the Trump administration abruptly pulled out of earlier this year after disagreements over the COVID pandemic. He also plans on signing an executive order to rejoin the Paris climate accords, an environmental agreement made between numerous other countries.

He also plans to reinstate the “dreamers” program, which allows immigrants who have been in the country since they were children to stay regardless of their immigration status. Another plan is to immediately reverse Trump’s rollback of 100 public health and environmental rules.

However, given the Republican majority of the Senate, it could be difficult to pass certain pieces of legislation through congress.

“The policy team, the transition policy teams, are focusing now very much on executive power. I expect that to be freely used in a Biden administration at this point, if the Senate becomes a roadblock,” a Biden campaign insider told the Post.

“Just by virtue of the calendar and how many positions are filled, that’s always a possibility. Because the Senate moves so slowly now, so much more slowly than it used to,” they added.

In addition to executive orders, Biden also plans to send bills to congress reversing Trump-era tax cuts, and bills on gun control measures as well.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign continues to reject the reported results of the election, insisting that votes were stolen or fabricated by the Democrats, and promising a wave of legal efforts to challenge the results. Trump has also fired three high ranking officials since the election, including Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, and the first woman to oversee the agency in charge of the nuclear stockpile.

Two other high-ranking officials were fired this week. Bonnie Glick, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development was replaced by acting Administrator John Barsa, and Neil Chatterjee, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was also replaced.