IT is doubtful if any of President Joe Biden’s predecessors, with the possible exceptions of George Washington and Franklin D Roosevelt, ever entered a presidency so crowded with crises.

The coronavirus pandemic that has killed 400,000 Americans, climate change, domestic terrorism, racial unrest, an economy blasted by the virus, foreign policies made on the hoof by Donald Trump – no wonder President Biden went straight to work yesterday afternoon.

In his first Tweet on the official presidential account, he said: “There is no time to waste when it comes to tackling the crises we face. That’s why today, I am heading to the Oval Office to get right to work delivering bold action and immediate relief for American families.”

He was expecting to sign no fewer than 17 Executive Orders and instructions of action as soon as he got into the Oval Office, some of them reversing or cancelling what his team have called “the gravest damages” of the Trump administration.

In what he referred to in his inaugural address as a “winter of peril”, measures to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and climate change were top of his list.

He said at the Capitol that the virus has taken as many lives in one year than America lost in the whole of the Second World War, and he also made climate change a huge priority – practically his first order was to immediately release more than 100 specific Trump actions for review by the affected agencies in a bid to reverse the previous administration’s attacks on scientific integrity in particular.

“We must set aside politics and finally face this pandemic as one nation,” Biden said. “We will get through this together.”

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The new president was due to issue three eye-catching executive orders – stopping the building of Trump’s wall with Mexico, rejoining the World Health Organisation and getting the USA back into the Paris Accord on Climate Change, raising the possibility that he might come to Glasgow for the COP26 conference in November, if the pandemic has receded.

On coronavirus, he was due to issue mask mandates for federal employees and contractors, and has appointed a new coordinator, Jeffrey Zients, to unite and coordinate the federal agencies’ response to the pandemic.

Always a politician who battled racism, Biden’s new White House team said yesterday that he would be “putting equity at the centre of the agenda with a whole government approach to embed racial justice across federal agencies, policies, and programs. President Biden will take bold action to advance a comprehensive equity agenda to deliver criminal justice reform, end disparities in healthcare access and education, strengthen fair housing, and restore Federal respect for Tribal sovereignty, among other actions, so that everyone across America has the opportunity to fulfil their potential.”

Immigration reform is a priority and his first executive order as reported by the American media was to undo Trump’s 2017 ban on immigrants from Muslim countries, followed by an order undoing Trump’s exclusion of non-citizens from the census and the apportionment of congressional representatives.

He has already begun work on building on one of the great achievements of his time serving as vice-president to Barack Obama.

White House staff said: “He will build on the Affordable Care Act to meet the health care needs created by the pandemic, reduce health care costs, and make our health care system less complex to navigate.”

Biden was also a foreign policy specialist during his 40 years in the Senate, and yesterday he pledged to renew ties with countries that Trump didn’t like, but he made no specific comments on any country.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that, in the coming days and weeks, President Biden will be “announcing additional executive actions that confront these challenges and deliver on the president-elect’s promises to the American people, including revoking the ban on military service by transgender Americans.”