President-elect Joe Biden plans to take immediate executive action to turn the page on the Trump era after his inaugural speech this week, team chief Ron Klain said on Sunday after plotting Biden’s plan for his first day at work.
Biden is planning a 10-day executive action blitz on what his government is calling the “four crises” the country faces – Covid-19, the economic crisis, racial injustice and climate change.
“He will return to the White House after giving that speech at the Capitol and taking some immediate action to start moving the country forward,” Klain told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
Biden is set to officially take office on Wednesday at noon ET. Klain said that Biden’s inaugural speech would be “a message to move this country forward, a message of unity, a message of how to do things”.
Klain drew up Biden’s plans for his early days in a memo issued to the White House team, sent on Saturday, entitled “Overview of the first ten days”, which was provided to NBC News.
“We face four crises that overlap and combine: the COVID-19 crisis, the resulting economic crisis, the climate crisis and a crisis of racial equality,” Klain wrote in the memo.
“In his first ten days in office, President-elect Biden will take decisive action to tackle these four crises, prevent further urgent and irreversible damage and restore America’s place in the world,” added Klain.
Executive actions come in a variety of forms, including executive orders, presidential memos and guidelines for Cabinet agencies.
Among the first actions Biden will take on Wednesday include returning to the Paris climate change agreement and reversing President Donald Trump’s travel ban, which applies to several Muslim-majority countries. Biden will also require masks on federal properties and interstate travel and will take steps to extend eviction and foreclosure restrictions.
On Thursday, Biden will sign executive actions related to the reopening of schools and businesses, and on Friday he “will direct agencies in his office to take immediate action to provide economic relief to working families who support the impact of this crisis,” according to the memo.
The following week, according to the memo, Biden will take “significant initial actions to promote equity and support communities of color and other underserved communities”.
Biden will also take steps to tackle climate change, expand access to healthcare and “restore the dignity of our immigration system and border policies” that week, according to the memo.
The memo is sparse in detail and notes that Biden is spacing out executive actions to highlight activity.
He also notes that while the objectives behind executive actions are “bold”, they are underpinned by a “well-founded” legal theory and represent “a restoration of an appropriate constitutional role for the president”.
Klain wrote in the memo that legislation will be needed for the most ambitious items on the government’s agenda, including immigration reform and raising the federal minimum wage.
Biden unveiled his $ 1.9 billion Covid-19 bailout agenda on Thursday, which calls for measures to help the country combat the public health crisis, as well as new cash injections to help stimulate the economy. The plan would also raise the federal minimum wage to $ 15 an hour.
Democrats control the House of Representatives and will soon take control of the Senate, following the defeat of two Republicans in the second round of the Senate in Georgia earlier this month. But Klain said on Sunday that, given the narrow majority of Democrats, Biden’s team will put pressure on the Republican Party to support its plans.
Democrats have 222 seats in the House compared to 212 in the Republican Party, and the parties will split the Senate equally by 50-50, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris able to vote in a tiebreak.
“We will try to work hard with people from both parties,” Klain told CNN.
“The American people voted in November and voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden, no doubt, but they elected an equally divided Senate, they elected a narrowly divided Congress, we will have to find ways for Democrats and Republicans to do things,” he added.