President Joe Biden will have been in office for 100 days on April 28th. April 28th! Before writing this article, I don’t know if I would have been able to tell you three things Biden has done since coming into office. That could be because I had become used to the rampant media coverage that would follow Trump for simply being an idiot. Still, now that we have a comparatively more competent president, many of his actions don’t get documented in the news or become trending on Twitter.
With all this being said, I’m going to list out some of Biden’s most significant actions since being sworn into office.
Let’s start with who Biden named to his Cabinet. There are 16 people in his Cabinet, so I’m not going to name and describe all of them. I will say Biden has created one of the most diverse Cabinets (probably ever) with 11 women, the first Native American cabinet secretary (Deb Haaland), the first openly gay cabinet secretary (Pete Buttigieg), multiple people of color, and overall, individuals who have expertise in the departments they have been nominated to serve. For example, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency is Michael S. Regan, who was the top environmental regulator in North Carolina; this is a dramatic improvement over the former administrator in Trump’s Cabinet, a lobbyist for the coal and oil industry before being nominated by Trump.
In addition to creating his new Cabinet, Biden signed an executive order to rejoin the 2015 Paris climate agreement. For anyone who may not quite remember the Paris Agreement (since Trump pulled the U.S. out of it in 2016), it’s an international treaty that ultimately aims to reduce climate change by bringing down the Earth’s temperature by 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. Biden also repealed Trump’s bulls**t law that would ban transgender individuals from serving in the military.
For all the good Biden has done thus far, bombing Syria in early February was not something I wanted to see. It was a “small” retaliation to an attack by Iran-backed militias that killed a Filipino contractor and wounded six Americans. I can’t pretend to know all the answers to Middle-Eastern conflict or affairs, but I wasn’t looking for another president who thinks the answer to violence should be to bomb an already war-ridden country. But that’s just me.
Finally, in regards to COVID-19, Biden signed off on a $1.9 trillion relief package back in early March. The money from this package will go into vaccine research, direct payments of $1,400 to most Americans, and child tax reliefs. I don’t know who remembers, but getting Trump to sign a $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill in December of 2020 was like pulling teeth; there was almost a (another) government shutdown because no one could agree on the relief package.
