First 100 days pace: Joe Biden’s breakneck start to presidency busiest since FDR
Joe Biden in the coming week will extend the busiest opening salvo from a US leader since Franklin Roosevelt.
President Joe Biden in the coming week will extend the busiest opening salvo from an American leader since Franklin Roosevelt and his famous line, the "first 100 days’’, by overhauling his predecessor’s immigration regime.
He will announce plans to “modernise” America’s immigration system on Tuesday US time, including a taskforce for reuniting parents and children separated at the border under the Trump administration, the White House said on Friday US time.
It will be led by Alejandro Mayorkas, a former Cuban refugee who is awaiting confirmation as the head of the Department of Homeland Security.
In his first 10 days Mr Biden, 78, has authorised dozens of executive orders, covering everything from coronavirus, racial justice, climate change, and access to abortion, prompting opponents to accuse him of governing by decree and forsaking a campaign pledge to forge bipartisan consensus.
The Republican National Committee claimed that the President was ruling by “executive fiat”, overlooking the White House record of Donald Trump, who averaged 55 executive orders a year, more than any president since Jimmy Carter.
Even The New York Times urged Mr Biden to “ease up on the executive actions”, describing them as “a flawed substitute for legislation”.
Executive actions are presidential instructions to the federal government that have the force of law but are not new laws in themselves.
They can easily be overturned by the next White House occupant. When Mr Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017, Republicans thwarted much of the Obama White House agenda.
Mr Biden’s executive actions began on his first day when he made mask-wearing compulsory on federal property, rejoined the World Health Organisation and the Paris Climate Accords, abolished the Trump administration’s ban which prevented people from several majority Muslim countries from entering the US, and restored protection from deportation to thousands of immigrants.
Since then there has been a steady stream of directives each day. The clear intention has been to reassure Americans that capable professionalism has returned to the White House.
“When all anyone’s thinking about is the pandemic and the economic fallout from the pandemic, the fact that they are projecting competence in what they’re saying and how they’re saying it is exactly the right message,” Tommy Vietor, a former senior aide in the Obama White House, said.
He doubted that the complaints of Republican politicians would inflict lasting damage. “The vast majority of the country has no clue what’s being debated or discussed in Washington on a daily basis [but] they’ll know if they’re able to get vaccinated in the next couple of weeks.”
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, confirmed that the President does not believe executive action should be used for everything but “there are steps, including overturning some of the harmful, detrimental and immoral actions of the prior administration that he felt he could not wait to overturn”.
Lara Brown, director of the graduate school of political management at George Washington University, said: “I don’t imagine he is going to keep this pace up but he has gotten here knowing that there are things that must change immediately,” she said.
“Most presidents have steep learning curves. Biden, for all intents and purposes, is already up to speed.”
The Times
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