Throughout the presidential campaign, Joe Biden vowed to use executive authority to immediately undo President Donald Trump’s policies on the environment, immigration and other areas that dismayed Democrats and international allies.
That rollback begins Wednesday after Biden is sworn in as the 46th president. In a flurry of orders billed as “historic action on Day One,” Biden plans to sign 15 executive orders and other directives in the evening, followed by several more over the next 10 days.
Biden will end construction of Trump’s signature wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the president-elect’s transition team, by proclaiming the “immediate termination” of the national emergency declaration Trump used to fund it. He will also take action to end Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization, which Trump abandoned in July.
Biden also on Wednesday will rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change, a treaty the U.S. formally exited in November after Trump withdrew in 2017, and take executive action to reverse Trump’s ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries.