Joe Biden rejoins Paris Agreement, requires masks on federal property in swift Day 1 directives

Climate change, LGBTQ rights and the border wall are just a few items President Joe Biden addressed in signing his first executive orders. USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden wasted little time Wednesday in working to undo President Donald Trump’s policies that were anathema to Democrats during his four years in office.

Sitting in the Oval Office, Biden signed an order requiring masks and social distancing on federal property, followed by an order to provide support to underserved communities. As part of the third order he signed, Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement on climate change, a treaty the United States formally exited in November after Trump withdrew in 2017.

Biden signed 15 executive orders and two other directives Wednesday, and several more will come over the next 10 days. The first three were signed on camera from the Oval Office. 

Biden has ended construction of Trump’s signature wall on the U.S.-Mexican border by proclaiming the “immediate termination” of the national emergency declaration Trump used to fund it. He also rejoined the World Health Organization, which Trump abandoned in July.

Biden also took executive action to reverse Trump’s ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries.

President-elect Joe Biden wants to get back into the Paris Agreement to fight climate change on the first day of his term.

 (Photo: Matt Slocum, AP)

The swiftness is meant to demonstrate urgency to turn the page on a divisive four years under the Trump administration, experts said. Most of the actions hit what the Biden team calls “four overlapping and compounding crises” – the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting economic damage, climate change and lagging racial equity.

“He’s trying to show the American people, and the world more generally, that America is back to where it was before the Trump administration,” said Todd Belt, professor and political management program director at George Washington University. By signing so many orders so soon, Biden will deliver a “repudiation of Trump’s approach to governance,” Belt said.

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Keystone pipeline, racial equity, 1776 Commission, immigration and more 

Also on his first day in office, Biden canceled the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline to move oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, rescinding Trump’s approval of a project long criticized by environmentalists.

Biden also extended the pause on student loan payments and nationwide restrictions on evictions and foreclosures.

The president signed an order launching a government-wide initiative directing every federal agency to review its state of racial equity and deliver an action plan within 200 days to address any disparities in policies and programs.

The Biden administration created an equitable data working group to make sure federal data reflects the country’s diverse makeup and direct the Office of Management and Budget to allocate more federal resources to underserved communities. 

“Delivering on racial justice will require that the administration takes a comprehensive approach to embed equity in every aspect of our policymaking and decision-making,” Biden’s domestic policy chief Susan Rice said Tuesday.

Other Day One executive orders Biden signed include:

More action planned over next 10 days

Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s incoming White House communication director, called the executive orders “decisive steps to roll back some of the most egregious moves of the Trump administration” in an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “And he’s going to take steps to move us forward,” she added.

More orders will come Thursday, Biden’s first full day in office, when he signs several executive actions related to the COVID-19 crisis and reopening schools and businesses, Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, said in a memo outlining the first 10 days of the administration. That includes expanded testing, protections for workers and establishing public health standards.

Friday, Biden will direct his incoming Cabinet to “take immediate action to deliver economic relief” to working families struggling financially as a result of the pandemic, the memo said.

More: Biden introduces $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that includes $1,400  checks

Other orders confirmed by Biden’s team include revoking the ban on military service by transgender Americans and reversing the “Mexico City policy,” which blocks federal funding for nongovernmental organizations that provide abortion services abroad.

Next week, Biden will sign orders to carry out his “Buy American” pledge, “advance equity and support communities of color and other underserved communities” and implement criminal justice changes.

He will sign additional executive actions related to climate change, expanding access to health care – particularly for low-income women and women of color – and on immigration and border policies, including the process of reuniting families separated at the U.S.-Mexican border, according to Klain. 

“Of course, these actions are just the start of our work,” Klain said. “But by Feb. 1st, America will be moving in the right direction on all four of these challenges – and more – thanks to President-elect Joe Biden’s leadership.”

Just one piece of the Biden agenda

The Biden team acknowledged that congressional action will be required to achieve much of Biden’s early agenda. Topping that list is passage of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, dubbed the American Rescue Plan, that Biden introduced last week.

Biden promised to introduce an immigration bill “immediately” upon taking office. It will include an eight-year pathway to citizenship for immigrants living in the USA without legal status, an expansion of refugee admissions and the use of new technology to patrol the border.

“Over the first week and a half, he’s going to do everything he can, within his power, to move us forward,” Bedingfield said. “But that’s only one piece of the agenda. The second piece of the agenda will be working with Congress.”

More: Biden names White House team to work on racial equity, immigration and other domestic policy priorities

Biden begins his presidency seeking to unify a deeply divided nation, yet taking unilateral action. Executive orders became more common under the Obama and Trump presidencies, Belt said, as their administrations recognized it’s easier to govern through executive power than legislation that needs congressional approval. 

Trump issued eight executive orders by Feb. 3, 2017, and 210 over his four-year term. Obama had nine during the same time frame after inauguration and 276 over eight years. The last four presidents took only two Day One executive actions combined, according to the Biden team.

Other environmental orders in addition to Paris Agreement

Perhaps no other early action will deliver a bigger statement symbolically than rejoining the Paris Agreement, which will show the world the United States is ready to work multilaterally again, a departure from the isolationist tendencies of Trump, experts said. 

The historic deal signed by Obama in 2015 includes almost 200 nations in agreement to combat climate change. Although mostly nonbinding, the Paris Agreement requires countries to set voluntary targets for reducing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Nations have to accurately report on their efforts. Rejoining would mean the United States would again provide funding to developing countries for its climate change efforts. 

“It’s a very strong signal to the world that President Biden is sharply reversing the Trump policies and rejoining the national effort to fight climate change,” said Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “It will be warmly received by the rest of the world and put the U.S. back in a position of leadership.”

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The president plans to sign a broad executive order to reverse more than 100 Trump administration environmental policies and direct all agencies to review federal regulations and executive actions from the past four years to determine whether they were harmful to public health, damaging to the environment or unsupported by science, McCarthy said.

Within that order, Biden will direct the Department of Interior to restore protections for national monuments, including Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, which Trump sought to open to companies for mining and energy drilling, as well as place a temporary moratorium on all oil and natural gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The order will reestablish the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases to examine whether emissions and climate risks in governmental activities are fully accounted for. 

More: The US is out of the Paris climate change agreement; if Biden wins, that could change

“The Paris climate agreement itself is not particularly binding. It’s more what it symbolizes. But Biden is going to obviously be taking lot of other measures to carry out the promises of Paris,” Gerrard said.

Travel ban a ‘stain on nation,’ Biden team says

Trump’s travel ban, ordered during his first week in office but reworked after legal challenges, was struck down multiple times in lower courts for being unconstitutional but was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018. Trump campaigned in 2016 on banning Muslims from entering the USA. 

Trump’s travel ban suspended the issuance of immigrant and nonimmigrant visas to applicants from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea and Venezuela. Last year, the Trump administration added six countries by suspending overseas visas for nationals of Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar and Nigeria and adding restrictions on Sudanese and Tanzanian nationals.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan called the Muslim ban “nothing less than a stain on our nation.” 

“It was rooted in xenophobia and religious animus and President-elect Biden has been clear that we will not turn our back on our values with discriminatory bans on entry to the United States,” he said. 

Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called it “very welcome news” to see Biden rescind “what was a totally, we believe, totally unconstitutional, un-American policy barring people based on their faith.”

More: Trump expands controversial travel restrictions to six new countries

More: Supreme Court upholds President Trump’s travel ban against majority-Muslim countries

He said CAIR hopes Biden will soon repeal other Trump policies on immigration and refugees. That includes prohibiting the separation of parents from children at the  southern border and removing caps on refugees and asylum seekers.

“The actions taken on Day One are an indication of how they’re viewed as being important – issues that need to be introduced immediately,” Hooper said. “It’s good the Muslim ban is one of those issues.”

Reach Joey Garrison on Twitter @joeygarrison.

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