The first 100 days of a new presidency have historically become somewhat of a benchmark for how the president will get things done in office, since Franklin Roosevelt set a ‘first 100-day standard’.
As history has shown, if the incumbent fails to deliver on his 100-day promises, chances are, he will not legislatively succeed later on in his term.
In 2021, for Joe Biden, the new president-elect in office, the first 100-day plan has become a long list of executive orders that will undo President Trump’s most controversial decisions.
While Trump built walls, Biden aims to build bridges in a timely fashion, with the headline “We can change the path we’re on. We’ve got to act now, time is running out”.
After Biden’s inauguration ceremony on the 20th of January, alongside DC being in the state of a military lockdown, the pandemic surging through US states one by one and the Senate being held up with upcoming impeachment trial, Biden is wasting no time.
Like many before him, Biden has sworn on a plethora of changes, the first one being to re-join the Paris Agreement.
The US formally pulled out of the legally binding decision in November, after Trump’s administration intended to do so in 2017.
Biden has named the climate crisis “the existential threat of our time”.
The plan includes various executive orders to recover pollution rules that the Trump administration has either failed to uphold or removed altogether.
Hitting a net-zero mission target by 2050 has been the foundation of Biden’s campaign.
Additionally, the Covid-19 pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of over 400,000 Americans is a top priority.
Democrats are aiming to enforce things that Trump did not in order to fight the pandemic, the first being a mask mandate on federal property.
Biden has shown that he does not intend to be passive, with the promise to vaccinate 100 million people in his first 100 days.
To do this, Biden says he will ask Congress for $415 billion to scale up testing, vaccination and genomic surveillance, and to equip an army of national health workers.
A major foundation to Joe Biden’s campaign has been race, gender and other domestic social issues.
The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act (2019) is a top priority for the 100-day plan.
He is also committed to make enactment of the Equality Act as well as immediately reversing Trump administration actions that that allowed for discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans.
Arguably, his most controversial and challenging task is to increase the minimum hourly wage to $15, which has been criticized as unachievable.
Amongst other promises made in the list of changes, Biden focuses on the economy and employment, committing to deliver financial relief to families and small businesses.
With more than 20 million unemployed Americans, the Democratic party are pledging to immediately invest in sustainable job creation, promising more than 250,000 jobs to counteract impacts of the dwindling mining industry.
Biden is also committed to making changes to immigration and reversing Donald Trump’s border family separation policies.
He is pledging to introduce a brand new legislative reform bill, in the nearest future, to provide a roadmap to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US.
The Democrats are set to strengthen the Europe-US bond, in particular the post-Soviet sphere of influence, and to support NATO, another organisation that Trump had alienated, as well as removing the travel ban placed on several Muslim countries.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr