On Day One, Biden moves swiftly to undo Trump's legacy

Washington

PRESIDENT-ELECT Joe Biden will unleash a full-scale assault on his predecessor's legacy on Wednesday, acting hours after taking the oath of office to sweep aside President Donald Trump's pandemic response, reverse his environmental agenda, tear down his anti-immigration policies, bolster the sluggish economic recovery and restore federal efforts aimed at promoting diversity.

Moving with an urgency not seen from any other modern president, Mr Biden will sign 17 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations from the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, according to his top policy advisers.

Individually, the actions are targeted at what the incoming president views as specific, egregious abuses by Mr Trump during four tumultuous years.

Collectively, his advisers said Mr Biden's assertive use of executive authority was intended to be a hefty and visible down payment on one of his primary goals as president to, as they said Tuesday, "reverse the gravest damages" done to the country by Mr Trump.

"We don't have a second to waste when it comes to tackling the crises we face as a nation," Mr Biden said Tuesday night on Twitter after arriving in Washington on the eve of his inauguration. "That's why after being sworn in tomorrow, I'll get right to work."

His actions largely fall into four broad categories that his aides described as the "converging crises" he will inherit at noon on Wednesday: the pandemic, economic struggles, immigration and diversity issues, and the environment and climate change.

In some cases, Mr Biden plans to unilaterally and immediately reverse policies and procedures that Mr Trump put in place. In other instances, limits on his authority require the new president to direct others in his administration to act or even to begin what could be a long process to shift the federal government in a new direction.

"A new day," Jeff Zients, the coordinator of Mr Biden's coronavirus response, said on Tuesday. "A new, different approach to managing the country's response to the Covid-19 crisis."

One of Mr Biden's first actions on Wednesday will be to sign an executive order making Mr Zients the government's official Covid-19 response coordinator, reporting to the president. The order will also restore the directorate for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council, a group that Mr Trump had disbanded.

Mr Biden will also sign an executive order that Mr Trump had steadfastly refused to issue during his tenure - imposing a national mandate requiring masks and physical distancing in all federal buildings, on all federal lands and by all federal employees, officials said.

And he will terminate Mr Trump's efforts to leave the World Health Organization, sending Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease specialist, to participate in the group's annual executive board meeting on Thursday.

Aides said many of Mr Biden's actions Wednesday were aimed at reversing Mr Trump's harshest immigration policies.

He will sign an executive order revoking the Trump administration's plan to exclude non-citizens from the census count and a second order aimed at bolstering the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme that protects "Dreamers" from deportation, which Mr Trump had sought for years to end.

Mr Biden will repeal two Trump-era proclamations that established a ban on travel to the United States from several predominantly Muslim and African countries, ending one of his predecessor's earliest actions to limit immigration.

Advisers said Mr Biden would direct the State Department to develop ways to address the harm caused to those prevented from coming to the US because of the ban.

Another executive order will revoke enhanced enforcement of immigration violations aimed at people already inside the United States. Another will block deportation of Liberians who had been living in the US.

And another will halt construction of Mr Trump's border wall - which was devised to keep immigrants out of the country - while Mr Biden's administration examines the legality of the wall's funding and its construction contracts.

Susan Rice, who will lead the president's Domestic Policy Council, said Mr Biden would sign a broad executive order aimed at requiring all federal agencies to make equity a central factor in their work.

The order will, among other things, require that they deliver a report within 200 days to address how to remove barriers to opportunities in policies and programmes.

Another executive order will require that the federal government does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, a policy that reverses action by Mr Trump's administration. Another will overturn a Trump executive order that limited the ability of federal government agencies to use diversity and inclusion training.

And Mr Biden will cancel Mr Trump's 1776 Commission, which released a report on Monday that historians said distorted the history of slavery in the US.

Many of Mr Trump's most significant actions as president were aimed at limiting regulation of the environment and pulling back from efforts to combat climate change. Mr Biden's earliest actions as president will take aim at those policies, officials said.

On Wednesday, he will sign a letter indicating that the US will rejoin the Paris climate accords, reversing Mr Trump's departure from the global organisation.

He will then sign an executive order beginning the process of overturning environmental policies under the Trump administration, including rescinding rollbacks to vehicle emissions standards; imposing a moratorium on oil and natural gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline; and reestablishing a working group on the social costs of greenhouse gasses.

"The day one climate executive orders will begin to put the US back on the right footing, a footing we need to restore American leadership, helping to position our nation to be the global leader in clean energy and jobs," said Gina McCarthy, Mr Biden's national climate adviser.

As he promised during the campaign, Mr Biden will also take several steps Wednesday to help Americans struggling through continued financial hardship brought on by the pandemic, in some cases reversing policies embraced by his predecessor.

He will extend a federal moratorium on evictions and ask agencies, including the departments of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development, to prolong a moratorium on foreclosures on federally guaranteed mortgages. The extensions would all run through the end of March.

Another order targets Americans with heavy educational debt, continuing a pause on federal student loan interest and principal payments through the end of September. NYTIMES

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