Getting To Work

President Biden hit the ground running as soon as he took office.  I can imagine him sitting behind the Resolute desk for the first time, exhaling contentedly,  and saying to the staff assembled in his presence, "Okay, let's get to work!" 

That he did.  In advance of presenting a plan for getting out of the pandemic and rebuilding the economy - at a cost of nearly two trillion dollars - he signed numerous executive orders that set policies on COVID (including a face-covering mandate for federal properties), expanded food assistance and expedited stimulus checks to very low-income Americans, and raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour for the federal workforce.  He also signed executive orders putting the United States back in the Paris Agreement on climate change and also putting the country back in the World Health Organization.

The latter order has provided immediate results.  Dr. Anthony Fauci took part in the World Health Organization's conference meeting virtually this past week and provided invaluable counsel to the gathering on how the world can combat the pandemic.  At his first White House press conference since President Biden's inauguration, Dr. Fauci said he felt liberated in being able to speak the truth directly to the press.  Gee, I wonder what liberated him?

President Biden knows it's gong to take more than executive orders to make lasting change, and he's going big and aiming high, hoping to appeal more on patriotism than on partisanship to get his very expensive domestic program passed in an evenly divided Congress.  He gets it.  He knows that we don't need another New Deal.  He knows that we need another Great Society.  The pandemic exposed a lot of inequities that have to be addressed so we don't merely go back to where we were on March 10, 2020, the day before COVID was declared a global pandemic.

We need to . . . build back better.