Joe Biden
Joe Biden faces rocky transition as work of
undoing Trump's damage begins
President-elect
preparing taskforce to tackle coronavirus
Daniel
Strauss in Wilmington and agencies
@danielstrauss4
Sun 8 Nov
2020 15.07 GMTLast modified on Sun 8 Nov 2020 17.01 GMT
Joe Biden
won the race for the White House on Saturday, but compared with what lays
ahead, that may have been the easy part.
In his
first address to the nation, the president-elect said he would unveil a group
of scientists and experts on Monday to help him craft a plan to tackle the
coronavirus pandemic and it’s economic fallout.
Biden said
“our work begins with getting Covid under control”, adding Americans “cannot
repair the economy, restore our economy or relish life’s most precious moments”
without doing so.
Biden’s
presidential transition team has already spent months planning for his first
term, and accelerated their activities in the hours prior to his win becoming
official. The team launched its presidential transition website a day before
the election was officially called for Biden
Now, Biden
and the transition team have to build a government largely remotely, during the
pandemic, and while contending with a Senate that could stay in Republican
hands, a House sure to feature fewer Democratic allies than it did previously,
and a public that includes more than 70 million people who voted for Donald
Trump over Biden.
Biden is
already said to be planning to sign a series of executive orders soon after
being sworn into office on 20 January that would reverse the work of the Trump
administration, including rejoining the Paris climate accords, and reversing
Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO).
With the
president refusing to concede on Saturday, it is not clear how collaborative
the Trump administration will be during the transition process. The transition
process formally starts once the General Service Administration determines the
winner based on all available facts. That’s vague enough guidance that Trump
could pressure the agency’s director to stall.
It’s also
unclear whether the president would meet personally with Biden. Obama met with
Trump less than a week after the election.
By law,
presidential campaigns have to set up a transition team and begin the early
steps needed to inherit the entirety of the federal government. Long-time Biden
aide Ted Kaufman, a former senator from Delaware, was appointed to run the team
back in April.
A senator
for decades and vice-president for eight years, Biden has a deep understanding
of the workings of government, and he’s surrounded by a small group of top
advisers with equally deep institutional knowledge.
“The Biden
team is the most experienced, most prepared, most focused transition team ever,
commensurate with the challenges that Biden will face” after the inauguration
on January 20 2021, said David Marchick, director of the Center for
Presidential Transition at the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service. The
center advises presidential candidates on the transition.
But even
with so many months to prepare, there are a few bumps ahead for the transition
team.
Biden has
vowed to form one of the most diverse cabinets in history, including
Republicans to stress his belief in bipartisanship, and a record number of
women as well.
South
Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking House leader whose
coveted endorsement helped resurrect Biden’s flagging presidential bid early in
the primary season, has already said he’d like to see the cabinet include one
of Biden’s best known African American advisers, Louisiana Representative
Cedric Richmond.
Biden’s
team has also suggested it is open to including progressive champions in high
ranking positions in his administration, though Biden himself is considered to
be more moderate.
Vermont
senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who both ran
against Biden in the Democratic primary, have taken steps to position
themselves to be secretary of labor and secretary of the treasury.
Liberal
Democrats have already begun pushing the transition team to fill out his
administration with as many progressives as possible. Other interest groups
have also reached out to Biden, his allies, and the transition orbit to push
names on them.
The rub for
the Biden team is it remains unclear which party would control the Senate, the
body that confirms cabinet secretaries. Biden will have to name 4,000-plus
political appointees, including more than 1,200 requiring Senate confirmation.
Republicans have signaled they would block the more “radical” nominees that
Biden makes to fill his cabinet.
Chris
Murphy of Connecticut predicted Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell,
Republican of Kentucky, “will force Joe Biden negotiate on every single pick.”
Biden and
his allies have, in response, raised the prospect of refraining from nominating
any senator to his cabinet, which in turn would limit the pool of top
prospects, including longtime friends of the president-elect, like
sitting-Delaware senator Chris Coons.
A key
member of Biden’s inner circle who is likely to move into a top administration
job is Ron Klain, a former Biden chief of staff. Klain served as President
Barack Obama’s Ebola response “czar” during the outbreak of that disease in the
US in 2014.
Biden’s
potential foreign policy team is subject to some of the most intense
speculation. Coons and his allies have signaled interest in serving as
secretary of state. Antony Blinken, another longtime Biden ally and former
deputy secretary of state, is another name commonly found on foreign policy
shortlists for the Biden administration. And former South Bend mayor Pete
Buttigieg, who also ran against Biden in the Democratic primary for president,
is frequently mentioned as a potential ambassador to the United Nations.
Last week
some of Biden’s more technocratic plans for his administration came into public
view. He’s expected to bring in Gary Gensler, the former chairman of the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulatory organization, to advise on
regulating Wall Street, according to the Wall Street Journal. Bringing in
Gensler suggests that Biden plans to satiate calls from some liberal
organizations to include regulators with high regard in liberal circles like
Gensler.
But Biden
has said his first priority is the economy and instituting a new nationwide
effort to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
The
tradition during the transition period is for potential candidates for the next
cabinet to avoid saying directly that they are either very interested or
uninterested in serving in an incoming administration. Susan Rice, a former
national security adviser, for example, has repeatedly refrained from saying
whether she was talking with the Biden team about serving as secretary of state.
Associated
Press contributed to this report
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