Donald Trump's incoming administration may be in for some surprises next week when they take over from president Joe Biden, who issued a series of executive actions that could be hard to undo.
The outgoing president's actions have touched on nearly all areas of government and will likely continue up until his final hours in office, according to administration sources, and while that flurry of activity isn't unusual, the Washington Post reported that Biden's wide-ranging efforts reflect his belief that Trump presents a unique threat to American traditions.
"He’s designated national monuments in California and removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism," the Post reported. "He’s blocked a Japanese company’s takeover of U.S. Steel and extended temporary protected status to nearly 1 million immigrants. He’s commuted the sentences of nearly everyone who was on federal death row, and he’s granted to his son Hunter a sweeping pardon."
He's also considering action on advancing the Equal Rights Amendment, according to sources familiar with the discussions, and his team has been discussing preemptive pardons for individuals who Trump might target for retribution, and many of the recent moves have been the result of months of planning that began when Biden dropped out of the race, shared with his Cabinet in September and accelerated after the Nov. 5 election.
“This Cabinet meeting comes at a time when we have four months left in the administration,” the president told Cabinet members in September, when he asked them to take action to burnish his legacy. "We’re going to keep running through the tape, because the vice president and I are determined to keep making sure that the democracy delivers what the American people are asking for and what we provided.”
The administration has focused on spending money already allocated by Congress and proposing regulations that would make it more difficult for the incoming administration to derail those plans, but Republicans could use the the Congressional Review Act to disapprove more than 1,300 climate, education, health-care and labor regulations set forth by Biden.
"In another little-noticed example, the incoming Trump administration will find what may be an unwelcome surprise Tuesday, when a new rule becomes legally effective, giving a 12 percent pay raise to about 14,500 blue-collar employees who serve at three Army depots and some Veterans Affairs facilities," the Post reported. "The raise, authorized by the Office of Personnel Management in October, will appear as a final rule in the Federal Register on Jan. 21, meaning the incoming Trump administration will have to pay for it, at a cost of $150 million a year."
That move comes as Trump and his allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have vowed to cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget and drastically reduce the workforce, but they may find some of Biden's workplace protections are too well-established by now to overturn.
“It does strike me as reasonable to get your preference into place and make them as difficult as possible to overturn,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a professor at Bowdoin College who has studied executive actions. “A lot of this unilateral action is fragile, so it makes it limited to what you can do.”