Former Vice President Joe Biden is preparing a bevy of executive orders to issue on his first day in the White House that will reverse some of the key policies of the Trump administration.
Biden, whom the Associated Press declared president-elect on Saturday, has already tasked his transition team with focusing on how to leverage the “executive power” of the Oval Office, according to the Washington Post.
Some of the orders that Biden plans to issue deal with hot button topics like immigration and national security. According to the Post, Biden plans to reverse the Trump administration’s decision to impose tight travel restrictions for individuals attempting to travel to the United States from countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Biden is also planning to issue orders to reinstitute protections for illegal immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and prioritize family reunification.
Upon taking office, Biden also plans to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and restore U.S. support for the World Health Organization (W.H.O.). Trump withdrew the U.S. from the former and terminated its support for the W.H.O.
The Biden team’s preparation of executive orders occurs as control of the U.S. Senate is set to be determined by two run-off elections in Georgia in early January. Republicans, who have held the Senate in 2015, need only to win one of the contests to maintain control of the chamber. Biden, in particular, appears ready to mobilize the full force of executive power if such an event occurs and the GOP hamstrings his agenda throughout the legislative process.
“I expect that to be freely used in a Biden administration at this point, if the Senate becomes a roadblock,” an adviser for the former vice president told the Post.
The readying of executive orders by Biden’s team comes even though the former vice president assailed some of his competitors during the Democrat primaries for spurning bipartisanship in favor of ruling through executive authority.
“You hear Democrats saying, ‘I’m going to get elected and I’m going to by executive order do the following,’” Biden told an audience in Iowa in November 2019. “Come on, executive orders are basically menus to abuse the power of the presidency.”