WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is poised to unleash a series of executive actions on his first day in the Oval Office, prompting what is likely to be a yearslong effort to unwind President Trump’s domestic agenda and immediately signal a wholesale shift in the United States’ place in the world.
In the first hours after he takes the oath of office on the West Front of the Capitol at noon on Jan. 20, Mr. Biden has said, he will send a letter to the United Nations indicating that the country
will rejoin the global effort to combat climate change, reversing Mr. Trump’s
decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord with more than 174 countries.
Mr. Biden’s afternoon will be a busy one.
He has vowed that on Day 1 he will move rapidly to confront the coronavirus pandemic by appointing a “national supply chain commander” and establishing a “pandemic testing board,” similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime production panel. He has said he will restore the rights of government workers to unionize. He has promised to order a new fight against homelessness and resettle more refugees fleeing war. He has pledged to abandon Mr. Trump’s travel ban on mostly Muslim countries and to begin calling foreign leaders in an attempt to restore trust among the United States’ closest allies.
“Every president wants to come out of the gate strong and start fulfilling campaign promises before lunch on the first day,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a senior adviser to President Barack Obama and helped choreograph Mr. Obama’s first days in the White House. “Executive orders are the best way to do that.”
