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WASHINGTON — President Biden and his aides have spent their final days in office announcing 32 executive actions — on topics from immigration to offshore drilling — aimed at tying up President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.
The lame-duck 82-year-old’s flurry of late moves to try to make himself a hero to Democrats and obstruct his successor’s agenda include:
* Granting Temporary Protected Status to almost 1 million people, meaning they are protected from deportation and entitled to work permits. The action, decreed by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Jan. 10, shields 234,000 Salvadorans, 1,900 Sudanese, 104,000 Ukrainians and 600,000 Venezuelans for a period of 18 months.
Trump’s appointees at the Department of Homeland Security can move to revoke the TPS designations, but it will likely require a lengthy legal fight.
In late 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Trump’s decision to revoke the status for 300,000 people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan — two years after the 45th president issued the order.
* Banning drilling for oil and natural gas off most of America’s coastline, done via presidential memorandum on Jan. 6. The massive new off-limits ocean zone is larger than the states of Alaska and Texas combined.
Trump pledged to “unban it immediately,” but the president-elect faces a legal hurdle due to the fact that the law Biden used, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act of 1953, has no clear mechanism for future presidential reversals, meaning Congress may need to repeal Biden’s memo themselves.
Senate Democrats can block non-budget reconciliation legislation with the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote supermajority to overcome.
* All but clearing out federal death row — using executive clemency powers to commute the death sentences of 37 of 40 men awaiting execution on Dec. 23, sparing at least five child killers, several mass murderers and nine found too dangerous to live after butchering fellow inmates.
Trump sped up federal executions at the end of his first term — overseeing five shortly before Biden took office — and was expected to lift a moratorium that Biden put in effect.
Trump cannot reverse his predecessor’s clemencies, but delivered a parting shot on social media: ” I refuse to wish a Merry Christmas to those lucky ‘souls’ but, instead, will say, GO TO HELL!”
* Spending down congressionally allocated funds for Ukraine and environmental projects. Biden aides have hastily allocated $74 billion for anti-climate-change projects — leaving just $20 billion within Trump’s grasp from the $369 billion in green spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, according to The Guardian. Biden also granted a final $500 million in US weapons to Ukraine on Jan. 9 — after presiding over the passage of $183 billion in aid to resist Russia’s invasion.
Trump has said he hopes to end the war before taking office Monday — though that appears unlikely — and has jeered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the “greatest salesman on Earth” while his incoming national security adviser, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), last month criticized Biden’s “blank check” strategy to bring peace.
* Using a trio of authorities through the Department of Education on Jan. 13 to forgive $4.23 billion in federally owned student debt for people with disabilities, those who were allegedly defrauded by schools and public-service workers — bringing to $183.6 billion the value of loans he’s sought to transfer to taxpayers through a piecemeal initiative after the Supreme Court struck down an earlier plan.
Trump’s team reportedly has considered ways to roll back at least some of the relief — with Republicans arguing the write-off is an unfair transfer of resources to the college-educated — though the ultimate outcome may be determined by the courts.
The Supreme Court is poised to hear a case in the coming year on nearly $20 billion in pending debt forgiveness for those allegedly swindled by educators.
