President-elect Joe Biden plans to reverse a number of policies enacted by Donald Trump in his first days in office, a memo to the senior employees from his incoming chief of staff Ron Klain revealed, as cited by CNN.
The executive orders and policies Biden is planning to enact shortly after 20 January inauguration include the following:
- Mask mandate: Wearing personal protective equipment would be made mandatory on federal properties and during travel between states for a hundred days, a so-called "100 Day Masking Challenge".
- Return to Paris Agreement: On the first day in the office, the new US president plans to rejoin the 2015 Paris Climate Accord which the US officially left in November 2020. Trump argued that the agreement had put the US at a “permanent disadvantage” and undermined the national economy.
- Reversal of Travel Ban: Biden will reportedly cancel a series of Donald Trump’s executive orders enacted in 2017, which came down in history as “Muslim ban.” The first executive action, aimed at “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”, according to its wording, limited a travel to the US of citizens from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Later Chad, North Korea, Venezuela, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria and Tanzania were also added to the list, while Iraq was removed.
Travel Ban Reversal & Mask Mandates: What to Expect From Biden's First Executive Orders
© REUTERS / Lucas Jackson
Travel Ban Reversal & Mask Mandates: What to Expect From Biden's First Executive Orders
© REUTERS / MICAH GREEN
Travel Ban Reversal & Mask Mandates: What to Expect From Biden's First Executive Orders
© AP Photo / Sandra Sebastian
Klain, however, acknowledged in the memo that the “full achievement” of these set of policy objectives requires “not just the executive actions the president-elect has promised to take, but also robust Congressional action”.
He argued that Joe Biden’s purported actions will be taken “not just to reverse the gravest damages of the Trump administration — but also to start moving our country forward”.