Most significantly, Biden brought the United States back into the Paris Climate Agreement, a commitment to strive to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. Thus they effectively join the EU, Japan and South Korea as major economies with a net zero emissions by 2050 target.
The president also signed an order cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline expansion. The project was intended to bring more Canadian tar sands to refineries in the United States.
An executive order has stopped the US withdrawal from the World Health Organization. Dr Anthony Fauci has also been appointed to lead the US delegation, signalling a major upgrade in US investment in the multilateral body.
Interest and repayments on federal student loans were paused until 30 September. Home evictions and foreclosures have also been paused until 31 March.
Workplace discrimination based on gender and sexual identity was explicitly prohibited. Most famously, this includes the army.
Biden cancelled the alarmist “national emergency” declared by Donald Trump on migration from Central America. The faux-emergency was used to justify spending on the Mexico-US wall, the deportation of children, the exclusion of non-citizens from the census, and the extension of immigration policing within the US, each of which Biden overturned.
He also cancelled the so-called Muslim ban. This was a travel ban on citizens entering the United States from certain Muslim-majority countries, though it also included North Korea and Myanmar but not America’s medieval allies in Saudi Arabia.
Trump’s “1776 Commission” – intended to rewrite American history more “patriotically” for schools – has also been rescinded.
Biden obliged face-masks to be worn on federal property, as well as appointing a commissioner to oversee the White House’s efforts to distribute vaccines and medical supplies.
Lastly, he deferred the deportation of Liberians with a safe haven, required executive officials to sign an ethics pledge, and overturned Trump’s foreshortened regulatory approvals process.