CLEVELAND — With a new president comes new executive orders as President Biden has signed more than a dozen on the day he takes office.
So what do the orders mean for Ohioans?
“It’s very popular in the first couple of days because it allows for immediate action,” says University of Akron political science professor, Dave Cohen. “It’s a stroke of the pen, law of the land. You don’t have to worry about congress.”
The executive orders signed by the president today address everything from the Covid pandemic to the border wall. They also reversed a travel ban, require masks and distancing in all federal buildings and on federal land and reenlist the U.S. in the World Health Organization.
President Biden has also rejoined the Paris agreement on climate change and addressed DACA, but where Ohioans will feel an immediate impact is with the extensions on eviction and foreclosure moratoriums and a student loan pause until October.
“It’s huge. We bought a house a few years ago so obviously we’re still paying the mortgage on that,” says Rachel Murry, a University of Akron grad that’s still paying off student loans. “We’ve got car payments, we’ve got child care costs, which are astronomical right now, but it’s nice to know that if we needed to, we could pause the student loan payments and we’d be able to direct those funds to things we needed to pay instead.”
Cohen says, “There are a lot of people that are facing eviction right now. There are a lot of people staring at homelessness right around the corner. This is really going to save a lot of households,”
The executive orders also set a tone for his administration and could give us a clue on what to expect will be his focus over the next 4 years.
“This is a really good window into what we’re going to be looking at over the next year, two years or four years,” says Cohen. “The coronavirus pandemic is going to be his number one priority, without a doubt.”
We reached out to MetroHealth, University Hospitals and Cleveland Clinic to see how these orders would affect the local Covid response. Each hospital system said they’re still looking into how this impacts their operations, so for now it’s too early to speculate.
More inauguration coverage: