Victor Juhasz
This story is part of the Prospect’s series on how the next president can make progress without new legislation. Read all of our Day One Agenda articles here.
A year and a half ago, the Prospect started thinking about a Day One Agenda for an incoming Democratic president—and now, day one is here. Starting at noon on Wednesday, there’s nothing standing in the way of tangible material benefits for millions of Americans except the will of the president to take action on his own authority.
There is good news and bad news here. After significant chatter here and elsewhere about what Joe Biden can do without new legislation, the incoming administration has announced a Day One Agenda tour, so big that it will last through the rest of the month. A public memo from soon-to-be White House chief of staff Ron Klain, and a more substantive internal document, outline a series of steps expected from Biden. Klain attempts to position the executive actions as responding to what Biden has determined are America’s four key crises: the pandemic, the associated economic suffering, the climate crisis, and the racial equity gap.
It’s good that Biden has decided to take steps early on using his own authority. But let’s be clear, every president lines up some executive orders and memoranda at the top of their terms in office, to create the impression of momentum and make a clear break with the past. The fact of a Day One Agenda is not very surprising. The content of it that we know about so far strikes me as just about the bare minimum that Biden could do to make progress. And it leaves him with a lot of work to be done under his own power.
Here’s what we know about Biden’s Day One Agenda. On January 20, he will sign “roughly a dozen actions,” according to the Klain memo. Coronavirus-related actions include extending two relief measures his predecessor Donald Trump has in place: a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, and an extension of the pause in student loan payments and interest. As Biden has promised repeatedly, he will institute a 100-day mask mandate for federal property and interstate travel.
We certainly need to reverse the travel ban and stop funding the border wall, but restoring a status quo of four years ago isn’t enough.
Biden also plans to rejoin the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization; reverse the Trump ban on travelers from majority-Muslim countries; put a pause on the federal death penalty, which Trump had restarted in a flurry of last-minute executions; rescind the ban on transgender people serving in the military; end the national emergency Trump put in place that necessitated the building of (and the funding for) the border wall; and enact some reinstatement of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects from deportation so-called “Dreamers” who came to America as minors.
The common thread to all of these is a reversal of actions specifically taken by Trump, which is definitely a positive development, but which doesn’t exactly reflect a creative vision of executive authority. We certainly need to reverse the travel ban and stop funding the border wall, but restoring a status quo of four years ago isn’t enough.
The only announced January 20 action that isn’t the direct rebuke of something Trump did is a termination of the permits for the Keystone XL pipeline. That is definitely unexpected and welcome, signaling that limiting the output of carbon into the atmosphere will be a top priority in this administration. But that’s about it.
I reviewed the Prospect’s questionnaire to presidential candidates about the original Day One Agenda, which highlighted 30 specific actions that the next president could begin to take on day one to make progress. The day-one promises Biden has made only cover one of them—sort of. Before the pandemic, there were supposed to be global climate negotiations in November 2020; they’ve since been postponed a year. By vowing to rejoin the Paris agreement, Biden is perhaps signaling that he would have sent an envoy to those talks. But none of the other Day One Agenda items are reflected in Biden’s announcements.
That includes using compromise and settlement authority to cancel student debt. It includes initiating pilot programs on postal banking at the United States Postal Service (which they’re required to do under one of their union collective bargaining agreements). It includes lowering prescription drug prices by seizing patents and redistributing them to generic manufacturers who will sell them at an affordable price. It includes descheduling marijuana and making it effectively legal for use. It includes a host of actions on antitrust, financial regulation, the environment, tax policy, poverty, agricultural policy, the Federal Reserve, private equity, labor, immigration, federal contracting, foreign policy and national security, and much more.
Other executive actions are planned in the opening weeks of the Biden administration, though they are a little harder to decipher at this point. On day two, Biden will take action to diminish the spread of coronavirus by “protecting workers and establishing clear public health standards,” which could be a reference to directing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to enact a temporary emergency workplace standard (something that Trump’s OSHA refused to do). On day three, there’s something vague planned about delivering “economic relief to working families bearing the brunt of this crisis.”
Throughout the following week, the Klain memo references actions like “reforming our criminal justice system,” “addressing the climate crisis,” “expanding access to health care for low-income women and women of color,” “advancing equity and support communities of color and other underserved communities,” and “restoring dignity to our immigration system and our border policies,” which would include directing agencies to reunite families separated at the border. It’s nearly impossible to assess these actions because there’s no clue what they are. I hope they move in the direction of the Day One Agenda; we’ll have to see.
One positive step announced in the Klain memo is the strengthening of Buy American provisions, which can be done through ensuring domestic procurement with everything the federal government buys. That’s great, but of course federal contracting power can be used not merely to buy American, but also to increase the minimum wage for all companies with contracts, ensure paid sick leave, improve work conditions, bar forced arbitration agreements, and much more to protect and support workers.
I don’t want to over-analyze the first two weeks of a presidency that’s just beginning, although, of course, that’s my job. A lot of these Day One actions require having a team in place to do the work at the cabinet agencies, and only a handful of Biden’s picks have even gotten so much as a Senate committee hearing, let alone confirmation. Other such actions may be able to be started on day one but take many months, if not years, to go through administrative procedures and the inevitable legal challenges. Leadership that’s somewhat less than bold on day one doesn’t mean the end of the Day One Agenda.
But our monitoring of the Day One Agenda doesn’t end on day one, either. We will continue to scrutinize the Biden administration’s efforts to use executive authority because it’s critical to having a successful presidency. People want and need their government to act in their interests, and the way that government builds people’s trust is to deliver on that promise. Laws passed over 230 years give Biden the ability to take action right now. And we have a list of what those key actions can be. Whether it’s day one, one hundred, or one thousand, we’ll be watching.
