Power Up: Biden’s biggest controversy so far is how fast he’s issuing executive orders

It was all done by executive action, which appears to be the first controversy of the fledgling administration. NBC News counts a total of 45 Biden executive executive actions – including proclamations and memorandum – during his nine days in office.

• Key quote: “Industry executives expressed dismay at the scope, speed and direction in which Biden is heading, saying he is going much further than President Barack Obama ever did, while environmentalists said the danger that Earth faces is far more dire now than it appeared during Obama’s tenure and requires an extraordinary response,” according to my colleague Juliet Eilperin.

So far, Biden has moved to:

• Halt construction of the Keystone XL pipeline
• Mandate climate change as a priority across agencies
• Return the U.S. to the Paris climate accord
• Impose new limits on oil and gas drilling on federal lands
• Direct the federal government to spend 40 percent of its sustainability investments on disadvantaged communities

Biden’s ambitious environmental agenda, aimed at putting the U.S. on a path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, was lauded by Democrats and liberal activists — and panned by Republicans and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who slammed Biden’s actions on climate as a “piecemeal Green New Deal.” 

According to The Post’s tracker, the new president added 12 new environmental protections and overturned 10 of Trump’s environmental rollbacks through executive action. But there’s perhaps no better example of the limited impact that even a historic week of climate action from the administration can have without buy-in from Congress – especially as it might take years for the Biden administration to re-instate environmental rules and regulation weakened by the Trump administration. 

• “One question is whether net zero by 2050 can become a consensus national goal, the way building the interstate highway system or going to the moon were,” Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, told the New York Times’s Brad Plumer. 
• “… it’s kind of a very transitory way to govern,” Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University, told Reuters’s Jarrett Renshaw. 

Not so fast: The pace at which Barack Obama’s former vice president has used his “pen and phone” to take major action – not only on the environment but also on health care, and by rescinding the travel ban on people from majority-Muslim countries and stopping construction of Donald Trump’s border wall – has not only angered Republicans but also the New York Times editorial board, which urged Biden this week to “ease up on the executive actions, Joe.”

It also flies in the face, some argue, of Biden’s calls for unity when he’s attempting to pass a major coronavirus relief package through a 50-50 Senate. Congressional Democrats are already calling for the use of a partisan procedure requiring only their votes to make that happen.

• Pro: “Democrats and White House officials insisted that they want Republicans to vote for the emerging bill. At the same time, arguing the matter is urgent, they announced they would move forward next week with a budget bill that would allow subsequent party-line passage of the sweeping covid relief package,” report my colleagues Erica Warner, Seung Min Kim and Jeff Stein.
• Con: Advancing legislation via [budget] ‘reconciliation’ allows it to pass the Senate with a simple majority vote, instead of the 60 votes normally required for major bills. That could allow the Democrats who control the Senate to pass the legislation with no GOP support, although it would be a struggle because the Senate is split 50-50 between the two parties. Democrats have the majority because Vice President Harris can break ties.”
• Sidebar: “Democrats said yesterday that they are focused on moving quickly to an economic recovery package, particularly with nominations and the impeachment trial for President Trump looming next month, which could kick climate and green infrastructure to the second round of reconciliation,” E&E News’s Nick Sobczyk and George Cahlink report. 

The defense: Environmentalists and Biden officials defend their robust executive actions as necessary following Trump’s reign and warn it will take years to turn back the damage done by Trump.

• “He’s not going to take executive action alone,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters yesterday. “That’s why he’s put forward a number of packages that he’s actively working with members of both parties to move forward on.”
• Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama senior adviser wrote that “Joe Biden won the election. Republicans lost. Joe Biden doing the things Americans elected him to do is not divisive. The Republicans may not like it, but that’s their problem.”
• “A majority of Americans voted to rejoin the Paris Accords, repeal the Muslim ban, implement more comprehensive pandemic measures and so on. Pushing forward on agenda items supported by the majority of Americans is not divisive just because [Republican Sens.] Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson find it irksome,” per Pfeiffer.
• From White House chief of staff Ron Klain: 

And Biden’s communications director:

?: “The Biden administration has halted an effort to install several Trump loyalists on Defense Department advisory boards … as the new administration considers a series of unusual appointments that were made in the waning days of the Trump administration,” our colleague Dan Lamothe reports. 

• Key quote: “The move effectively prevents a number of Trump allies, including his 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and deputy campaign manager David Bossie, from actually serving on panels tasked with providing advice to the defense secretary, at least for the time being,” Politico’s Lara Seligman first reported. 
• The other key quote: “The effort is aimed at scrubbing the members of the advisory boards ‘to determine if appointments were politically motivated vice professionally made,’ said one of the people.

TO TRUMP OR NOT TO TRUMP, THAT IS THE QUESTION: “Two weeks after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) enraged Trump by saying that he considered the former president responsible for the violent mob attack at the Capitol, the two men met on Thursday for what aides described as a ‘good and cordial’ meeting,” Maggie Haberman at the New York Times reports. 

• “It was the latest evidence that top Republicans, many of whom harshly criticized Mr. Trump after the assault, have quickly swung back into line behind him and are courting his support as he faces a second impeachment trial.”
• The Republican National Committee is planning to invite Trump to its spring donor meeting, Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reports. “The RNC is also expected to invite other potential 2024 candidates and Republican leaders to the retreat, which is to be held in Palm Beach, Fla., April 9-11.”
• Follow the money: “The thinking in Trump world is that the GOP is likely to win back the House in 2022, and the president can help with fundraising,” Punchbowl News reports.

McCarthy has a delicate needle to thread after the House voted to impeach Trump following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

• “Trump defenders and Trump rejecters are in open war over the impeachment vote,” Politico’s Olivia Beavers reports. “Look no further than Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Trump ally, who is heading to Rep. Liz Cheney’s home state of Wyoming this afternoon to actively campaign against her.” 

McCarthy is also faced with what to do about Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has supported QAnon and other conspiracy theories and made racist comments.

• “This week, social media postings surfaced showing she had liked Facebook posts that advocated violence against Democrats, including one that suggested shooting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the head,” Colby Itkowitz and Mike DeBonis reported.
• Greene, who was this week assigned to the House Education and Labor Committee, “spread conspiracy theories that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was a ‘false flag,’ and new videos showed her stalking and harassing David Hogg, a Parkland student turned advocate of stricter gun safety laws, who was a teenager at the time.”
• Democratic leaders are exerting maximum pressure on the Republican leadership to denounce Greene — and one Democrat advanced a resolution to expel her from Congress.
• Key Quote: “Assigning her to the education committee when she has mocked the killing of little children at Sandy Hook Elementary school. When she has mocked the killing of teenagers in high school at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School … What could they be thinking — or is thinking too generous a word about what they might be doing. It’s absolutely appalling,” Pelosi said. 
• Through a spokesman, “McCarthy described Greene’s comments as ‘deeply disturbing,’ and said ‘Leader McCarthy plans to have a conversation with the congresswoman about them,’” my colleagues report.

MONEY PROBLEMS: Last year was the worst year for economic growth since World War II. “The U.S. economy shrank by 3.5 percent in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged factories, businesses and households, pushing U.S. economic growth to a low not seen since the United States wound down wartime spending in 1946,” Rachel Siegel, Andrew Van Dam and Erica Werner report. 

• Despite the enormous challenges, the economy bounced back in the fourth quarter. But, “the 1 percent growth signaled a faltering recovery and a long road ahead, with 9.8 million jobs still missing and 23.8 million adults struggling to feed their families.”
• “Economists project that growth will pick up this year once the pandemic is under control, though the coronavirus remains a threat to the global economy,” Harriet Torrey at The Wall Street Journal reports. 
• Key quote: “2020 has no precedent in modern economic history,” said David Wilcox, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

• “Given these economic numbers, the need to act big and bold is urgent,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “Given the fact that the GDP sunk by 3.5 percent last year, we need recovery and rescue quickly.” Stay tuned. 
• Also pushing the bill forward with new urgency are Georgia Democrats Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael G. Warnock, who campaigned on delivering stimulus checks to their constituents. 

The stock market was plagued by volatility: After making eye-popping gains, “shares of GameStop and other companies plummeted yesterday, even as leading brokerages moved to limit trading in the stocks — a decision that infuriated lawmakers and the ordinary retail investors who had used those stocks to wage a populist war against big Wall Street hedge funds,” Tory Newmyer and Hannah Denham report. 

• “GameStop stock rocketed from below $20 earlier this month to close around $350 Wednesday as a volunteer army of investors on social media challenged big institutions who had placed market bets that the stock would fall,” Alex Veiga  of the Associated Press reported. On Thursday, “the stock swung between $112 and $483 before closing down 43.2% at $197.44.”
• But “as the trading frenzy continued, Robinhood and Interactive Brokers announced that they would restrict users’ trading in the stocks seeing the most action, sparking fury among the app’s users — catching the attention of an unlikely pair of lawmakers”:

Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) announced he plans to hold a hearing on “the current state of the stock market” in response to this week’s volatility. 

• Key quote: “People on Wall Street only care about the rules when they’re the ones getting hurt. American workers have known for years the Wall Street system is broken — they’ve been paying the price,” Brown said in a statement.

But Robinhood is well prepared: The brokerage firm “has an arsenal of political power brokers it can deploy on its behalf,” Axios’ Lachlan Markay reports.

• Robinhood’s chief legal officer Daniel Gallagher is a former SEC commissioner, and the company “has hired lobbyists from four firms, including former officials at the SEC as well as the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees.” 

SCIENCE CAN’T KEEP UP WITH COVID.

New vaccines are not ready for new variants: “A highly transmissible coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa was reported in the United States yesterday, hours before Maryland biotech company Novavax announced that its coronavirus vaccine was highly effective in preventing illness — except against that variant,” Carolyn Y. Johnson reports. 

• The variant, B. 1.351, first identified in South Africa contains mutations that seem to increase transmission, worrying scientists about its spread
• In South Carolina, “the patients’ lack of travel or a connection to one another suggests that the variant is spreading in the community following an undetected introduction,” Joel Achenbach and Carolyn Y. Johnson report. 

What you don’t (want to) know can hurt you: 

• The New York attorney general “accused the state of drastically undercounting covid-19 deaths in nursing homes, saying in a stinging new rebuke of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration that the official tally of about 8,500 may be off by as much as 50 percent,” Politico reports.
• A dangerous homecoming: When the first American evacuees fleeing the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, touched down at a California military base a year ago, “they were met by U.S. health officials with no virus prevention plan or infection-control training — and who had not even been told to wear masks,” Dan Diamond reports. 

This is AOC’s response to Cruz’s thumbs up on her tweet: