biden signed a whole bunch of executive orders today, all of which aiming to undo damage done by trump. i’m by no means a fan of biden, he’s a centrist at best and has a history of sexual assault and i despise how he’s pushing for “unity” instead of accountability right now, BUT here’s the full list of executive orders, because a little good news is good for you sometimes (but mostly because the news sites with this stuff are behind paywalls):
- Completely abolishing the “Muslim ban” travel ban, which had blocked travel to the US from several Muslim-majority and African countries
- Restarting visa processing for people from the affected countries from the travel ban, and focusing on “addressing the harm caused to those who were prevented from coming to the US because of the ban”
- Reinstating ties with the World Health Organization (after Trump withdrew the US’s membership and funding last year) and making Dr. Anthony Fauci the head of the American WHO delegation
- Rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement and ordering federal agencies to start reinstating more than 100 environmental regulations that were weakened/rolled back by Trump
- Stopping the Border Wall construction and immediately terminating the national emergency declaration that allowed Trump to redirect billions of dollars to the wall
- Revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline’s construction
- Overturning Trump’s executive order that had stopped federal agencies, contractors, and other institutions from holding diversity and inclusion training
- Immediately ending Trump’s 1776 Commission, a committee that aimed to give American students “patriotic” history lessons, which were widely criticized by historians and civil rights leaders as being “racist lies” and “nationalist propaganda” that whitewashed history and greatly downplayed how bad slavery was
- Protecting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) and keeping Dreamers (people who were brought to the US as children) from being deported
- Extending the national ban on evictions
- Overturning a Trump executive order that had pushed “aggressive efforts” to find and deport immigrants
- Blocking the deportation of Liberians, a group Trump had targeted specifically
- Reversing the rollbacks to vehicle emissions standards
- Designating Susan E. Rice as the leader of a “robust, interagency” effort requiring all federal agencies to make “rooting out systemic racism” central to their work, and requiring federal agencies to submit detailed reports on equity in their ranks within 200 days
- Reinforcing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to require that the federal government does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, a policy that reverses actions by Trump’s administration
- Undoing Trump’s orders that slashed the size of several national parks (Trump had wanted to auction off parts of national parks and protected land, primarily to oil companies) and halting the oil and natural gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
- Restoring the directorate for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council, a group Trump had disbanded, and requiring social distancing. A mask mandate would be met with significant legal opposition, but this order also requires masks on all federal property and by all federal employees
- And lastly: immediately freezing all of Trump’s recent regulations he’d tried to sneak in at the last minute, so that the new administration can examine them much closer
also, this wasn’t an executive order, but in case anybody missed it: biden also chose rachel levine, a transgender jewish woman, as the assistant health secretary! from what i’ve seen, rachel seems great and has done a lot of good as pennsylvania’s health secretary, so that’s very exciting
