On his first day, President Biden signed 17 Executive Orders in an attempt to start the process of turning this big old ship of state on to a better, safer course.
He appeared in the Oval Office and signed the Executive Orders without a bunch of fawning sycophants crowding around him telling him how great he is and he didn’t even hold each orders up and show it around like some kind of 6th grade art project. It was almost strange until you remember that’s how it’s usually done. In fact, he only signed 3 orders on camera and then they shooed the press out of the room.
- An executive order requiring that people wear masks, and keep their distance from each other, on federal property.
- The launch of a “100 Days Masking Challenge” to encourage Americans to wear masks.
- The reversal of Trump’s decision to remove the US from the World Health Organization.
- An executive order that creates the position of Covid-19 response coordinator and restores the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, a team in charge of pandemic response, within the National Security Council.
- Calls to Congress to extend Covid-19 aid, and requests to various departments to extend eviction and foreclosure moratoriums and pause payments for federal loans.
- An “instrument” that will allow the US to re-join the Paris Agreement on climate change within 30 days.
- An executive order reversing actions Trump took that Biden’s agencies judge to have been harmful to the environment, public health, or the national interest, and asking agencies to revise these standards to tackle climate change.
- An executive order with the aim of “embedding equity across federal policymaking and rooting out systemic racism and other barriers to opportunity from federal programs and institutions.” This order will also disband the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission.
- An executive order reversing a Trump administration order that excluded undocumented immigrants from the Census.
- A memorandum directing officials to “preserve and fortify” the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
- An executive action repealing two proclamations, informally known as the “Muslim ban.” that restricted entry into the US from majority-Muslim countries.
- An executive order revoking Trump’s “harsh and extreme immigration enforcement” and directing agencies to set immigration policies more “in line” with the Biden administration’s “values and priorities.”
- A proclamation that will pause the construction of the border wall with Mexico and determine how to best divert those funds elsewhere.
- A memorandum to extend a designation allowing Liberians who have been in the US for a long time to stay.
- An executive order directing the government to interpret the Civil Rights Act as prohibiting workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, not just race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
- An executive order enacting new ethics rules for government officials.
- An executive order reversing “regulatory process executive orders” enacted by the Trump administration.
I am very glad that he’s off to a running start and I hope his team is ready to do the same because this was very dangerous. Let’s hope the new administration can pick up the pieces:
The Pentagon blocked members of President Joe Biden’s incoming administration from gaining access to critical information about current operations, including the troop drawdown in Afghanistan, upcoming special operations missions in Africa and the Covid-19 vaccine distribution program, according to new details provided by transition and defense officials.
The effort to obstruct the Biden team, led by senior White House appointees at the Pentagon, is unprecedented in modern presidential transitions and will hobble the new administration on key national security matters as it takes over positions in the Defense Department on Wednesday, the officials said.
Biden openly decried the treatment his aides were receiving at the Pentagon in December, calling it “nothing short, in my view, of irresponsibility” after meetings were canceled ahead of Christmas. He said his people were denied information on the SolarWinds hack, and said his team “needs a clear picture of our force posture around the world and our operations to deter our enemies.”
But people involved with the transition, both on the Biden team and the Pentagon side, gave POLITICO a more detailed picture of what was denied, saying briefings on pressing defense matters never happened, were delayed to the last minute, or were controlled by overbearing minders from the Trump administration’s side…
“They really should not be allowed to get away with this. It’s just completely irresponsible and indefensible,” said one transition official. “To play politics with the country’s national security is just really unacceptable.”
[…]
But people with the transition said the outgoing team’s conduct went far beyond the norm and pointed to loyalists installed by the White House as the main reason for the obstruction. Pentagon officials under President Donald Trump refused to provide information about current operations, particularly in the special operations realm, because they are “predecisional.” That means the Biden team now has limited visibility into key operational issues, including what counterterrorism missions are in the works.
Another area where the transition felt they did not have adequate access was Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s effort to develop and distribute Covid-19 vaccines. The Pentagon initially rebuffed the transition’s request to meet with Gen. Gustave Perna, Warp Speed’s chief operating officer.
Perna was present at a meeting between the Pentagon and Health and Human Services transition teams in mid-December, but he did not answer any questions. It wasn’t until last week that the DoD transition team got to meet with Perna in a smaller setting.
Transition officials said the delay in getting answers about Warp Speed will hamper the Biden administration’s plan to dramatically scale up the nation’s vaccination distribution effort over the next three months.
The Trump people lied and said this didn’t happen, of course.
But across the department, even when the transition team did meet with DoD officials, both civilian and military, they were often tight-lipped, as if they were given explicit guidance about what they could and could not talk about. Those suspicions were confirmed when the first transition official bumped into a “very high-ranking” military official a week after their meeting, and the officer apologized for his clipped answers.
“We were alone, and he told me ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to tell you more, but I was given very strict instructions,’” the transition official said.
In another interview with a combatant commander, the Biden team asked detailed questions about pressing national security matters, and received “very vanilla answers.”
Some of this reticence may have been due to the fact that in nearly every transition meeting, “minders” from the Defense Department General Counsel’s office were present and frequently cut off the civilian Pentagon officials, citing “predecisional operational matters.”
What the hell was this really about? Even if the Big Lie had worked and Trump somehow pulled of his steal, there was no harm in letting the Biden transition do their work just in case. What were they trying to hide?
I kind of hope we never find out because whatever it was didn’t happen. The stonewalling on the pandemic is just inexplicable.