We face too many crises to wait for things to change in Congress. Let’s stop pretending the status quo is okay and start doing things with executive action. We can and must exercise all the power we have to help people.
We’re in crisis 🔥
We face overlapping crises – cataclysmic climate change, the continued threat to black lives, and an economy that doesn’t work for working people. Millions of Americans are unemployed “and struggling to afford adequate food and pay…rent” without a safety net. The raging coronavirus pandemic is only exacerbating our longstanding problems.
Congress has failed 📉
Congress has failed to deliver for the American people. Greenhouse gas emissions have risen and the planet has continued to burn, yet Congress has been unable to pass legislation to combat the existential threat of climate change. Real wages for the bottom 50% of Americans have declined and the majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. But the federal minimum wage still sits at $7.25 an hour, with Congress unable to pass an economic agenda to help working people.
Restore voter trust 🗳️ 🤝🏽
Right now it’s difficult for voters to draw a connection between elections and outcomes, since Congress is filled with veto points and doesn’t produce change on the scale we need. Voters “keep asking politicians to help solve their problems, and their problems keep not getting solved.” This breeds cynicism about government, and voters become disengaged from the political process.
Help improve lives 🛠️ 🚧
We have big problems to solve. And the biggest tool we have to fix them, Congress, is broken. Republicans work tirelessly on behalf of corporations while Democrats try to meet them in the middle rather than fighting for a transformative working-class agenda. And with reflexive obstruction, an undemocratic Senate that disproportionately benefits small states, and use of the filibuster to routinely block the passage of popular legislation, it’s difficult to carry out the most basic function of government – to help improve people’s lives.
Demand executive action 🖋️🚀 🎆
We must fight to pass a bold, ambitious agenda, including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, but the legislative branch is only one arena for change. Our problems are too grave to wait for action from Congress. While the critically important fight to fix the Senate, make structural changes, build institutions and grassroots power to exert pressure on politicians, run on popular ideas, and to elect members of Congress who will vote for transformative change continues, we must demand action using the executive authority granted to the President and executive agencies.
Exercise power 🏋🏽
There are many expansive laws already on the books that can be used to materially improve people’s lives. We can still do things without Congress. But only if we act aggressively and creatively to use the powers at the disposal of the executive branch, and only if we appoint people “who work–and think–in the public interest.” Executive action should not be viewed as a last resort when it can deliver significant and lasting change. When casual voters see results because of bold executive actions, they may become permanent, even passionate voters.
Seize this moment of crisis 🚨 🚨 🚨
We can’t be afraid to use the extraordinary powers given to the executive branch to end needless suffering. Let’s seize this moment of crisis and deliver change now.
Ten actions the Biden-Harris administration can take without Congressional approval.
Click + signs to expand ⤵
+ Cancel student 👨🏽🎓 debt 🏦.
No one should face decades living with the crushing burden of student debt simply because they sought an education. Especially not in the richest country on earth.
The government must fix the problem it created, since “the explosion of student debt in America was orchestrated by deliberate government policies.” Fortunately, the President has the power to forgive student debt through the Department of Education under “compromise and settlement” authority.
The federal government holds a staggering $1.6 trillion in student debt. And it’s incredibly difficult for the average borrower to pay off their debt. We face a “crisis of non-repayment,” which is only getting worse. For borrowers who started college in the mid 1990s, “over one quarter…defaulted on their loans within 20 years—about half of all Black borrowers and a third of all Latino borrowers.”
Canceling student debt would help close the racial wealth gap, since 4 years after graduation black students have “an average obligation of more than $50,000, compared to less than $30,000 for the average White student.”
Debt forgiveness would also help the economy, since student loan debt prevents people from buying a home or starting a business. And the social costs of student debt include delayed family formation, and adverse mental health outcomes.
+ End the billionaire’s 💰 tax loophole. 👋 Bye 👋 Bye!
Progressive taxation in the U.S.* has a big asterisk next to it. The carried interest loophole allows “wealthy private equity managers, hedge fund managers and real estate investors to pay the lower capital gains rate” of 20% on their income “rather than the rate on ordinary income (a maximum of 39.6 percent).” It’s how Warren Buffet pays less in taxes than his secretary. And it “contributes significantly to income inequality, by inflating…the ‘alpha income’ of financiers in the top one per cent of the one per cent.”
Repealing this giveaway to the rich “could raise as much as $200 billion in revenue over ten years—enough to double the amount of federal dollars allocated to college financial aid.”
The President can unilaterally direct the Treasury Department to end the loophole under US Code Section 707.
For decades, prominent figures on the left and the right have called for an end to the loophole. It’s time to finally put it out of its misery and restore a bit of fairness to our tax code.
*Not actually progressive
+ Regulate Climate Change 🌍 Risks.
We know the science. We know what will happen if we fail to act. Yet we still haven’t done enough about it.
By 2100, the “unmitigated warming produced by worst-case emissions trajectories could make climate change more deadly than all infectious disease in the world combined,” according to the Climate Impact Lab. It’s no hyperbole to say that “the global climate has become a man-made menace,” and that “without a rapid transition to a non-carbon economy, the moral arc of history may bend toward water wars.”
We must continue to fight for the Green New Deal, but there’s a lot that can be done with the laws already on the books. Because climate change poses systemic risks to our financial system, financial regulators can act to protect “the financial system from a potential meltdown,” but also to “rein in fossil fuel financing and fight global warming.”
Many financial institutions invest in businesses “that are significant drivers of climate change” And “over the past three years, the six largest U.S. banks provided over $700 billion in fossil fuel financing.” Under the Dodd-Frank Act, regulators like the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the Federal Reserve have “financial authorities at their disposal to force Wall Street to divest from fossil fuel financing, including higher capital charges for financing fossil fuel projects and deforestation, stress tests that account for the true financial risks from climate change, and even portfolio restrictions on financing projects that drive fossil fuels and deforestation.”
“The difference between continuing with business as usual, and failing to act, is unbearable. We’re talking 150 million climate refugees by mid-century…I would say that actually the unrealistic thing to do right now would be to do nothing; to look down at the greatest ecological and humanitarian crisis that has ever faced human civilisation, and to sit on our hands, and fail to act.”
— Varshini Prakash, Co-founder, Sunrise Movement
+ Postal 📬banking 🏦.
Millions of low-income Americans are unbanked or underbanked, “meaning that they [are] without access to a checking or savings account.” While the U.S. has a sophisticated banking system, it fails to meet the most basic needs of many Americans, with six percent of Americans having “no bank account at all—including 14 percent of black people and 11 percent of Hispanics.”
Overdraft fees and other charges “can make keeping even a basic checking account at a major bank a burden, especially since those fees are mostly paid by low-income people.” This state of affairs pushes people “toward predatory operators: payday lenders who give borrowers fast cash for interest rates that can amount to more than a 600 percent APR, for example, or check cashers who exchange quick money for checks for a fee.”
But what if your neighborhood post office could solve this problem? It can! The United States Postal Service can “use its existing authority to offer retail bank accounts” to remedy this problem, without Congressional approval. And the post office already has a presence in “many low-income neighborhoods that have been long deserted by commercial banks.”
+ Raise the minimum wage 💵 for federal contractors 👷🏽♀️ 💼.
It’s hard to believe, but the federal minimum wage has stood for over a decade at the unconscionably low poverty wage of $7.25 an hour. Things have only gotten worse over time, as “today’s low-wage workers earn less per hour than their counterparts did 50 years ago.” If we treated workers with dignity and respect, by raising the minimum wage “at the same pace as productivity growth since the late 1960s, it would be over $20 an hour today.
”
We must fight to pass legislation to raise the federal minimum wage for all workers. But in the meantime, the President can act without Congress to “raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 an hour, from $10.10 an hour. This action can be taken in concert with eliminating “all subminimum wages for tipped workers, youth workers, and workers with disabilities.” In 2014, President Obama, through the Department of Labor, acted without Congress to “raise the minimum wage to $10.10 for all workers on Federal construction and service contracts.”
The vast majority of Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, support raising the federal minimum wage. In an August 2020 survey, “a majority of Republicans backed raising the minimum wage to a level where full-time workers earn more than poverty wages. Overall, more than seven in 10 respondents supported raising the minimum wage.
” In fact, every single ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage since 1996 has won at the polls.
“…In a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person…should be too poor to live.”
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
+ Lower ⬇️ drug 💊prices.
Prescription drugs should be free to those who need them. A person’s health shouldn’t depend on the success or failure of a GoFundMe page. Until we get there, the least we can do is lower sky-high prescription drug prices. American exceptionalism means that we don’t “regulate or negotiate the prices of new prescription drugs when they come onto market,” like other countries. And we pay significantly more for medication than citizens of other high-income countries. Tragically, 29 percent of adults reported “not taking their medicines as prescribed at some point in the past year because of the cost.” This means “higher mortality rates, and higher rates of avoidable hospitalizations.” More needless death, more needless suffering.
The President has authority to lower prices for drugs like insulin and naloxone under “Section 1498 of the federal code—the so-called ‘eminent domain for patents’” Section 1498 “says the government can intervene to take over patents without a company’s permission if the price is too high. The government can then create competition to bring down prices by importing those products from abroad or manufacturing them.”
This authority has been used before, including under the Bush Administration “to get a better price on Ciprofloxacin, a high-powered antibiotic used to treat anthrax.” And there is bipartisan support for increased government regulation of prescription drug prices.
“I received a call that no parent ever wants to receive or expects to receive. I was told that my son was found dead in his apartment, on his bedroom floor all alone…Unfortunately, Alec was about a week from payday so he did what too many diabetics have done, he began to ration what insulin he left. Alec was found dead 3 days before payday.”
— Nicole Smith-Holt, testimony before the U.S. Senate
+ Fight 🥊 Corporate Power 👔.
Corporations have gotten too big and they’re wrecking our economy, by increasing prices for consumers and lowering wages. Mega-corporations can also buy political power, drowning out the voices of regular people. From Big Tech’s predatory business practices, to the meat industry cutting checks to try to “obtain special legal immunity for coronavirus-related suits,” concentrated corporate power threatens our economy and democracy. The President can fight corporate power by appointing officials to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice who will “revive federal antimonopoly enforcement after 40 years of little action.”
There’s plenty we can do to fight monopoly power with executive action. The President can “instruct the DOJ and FTC to publish new merger guidelines that follow a bright-line rules-based framework.” These guidelines could “establish simple market share and concentration thresholds for deciding whether a merger is illegal.” And the agencies could treat “a merger that creates a firm with 10 percent or more of a market as illegal and state they will block it in court.”
Americans once “recognized concentrated power as a genuine democratic threat…[and] acknowledged that corporate moguls, left to their own devices, didn’t just want to take our money but to take control.” Political power belongs in the hands of the people so “we need to restore [the] sense of government always pushing back against concentrated power.”
“…The new Gilded Age was not inevitable and is the product of many political choices. Presidents from both parties, Federal Reserve chairs, titans of industry, and libertarian thinkers restructured the economy to confer supremacy on the very wealthy and, accordingly, disempower everyone else.”
— Sandeep Vaheesan, Legal Director, Open Markets Institute
+ Build a More Just Criminal Justice System 👩⚖️👨🏿⚖️⚖️.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These unalienable rights are inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and serve as a reminder of the founding aspirations of the nation. Yet, it’s self-evident that we have failed to live up to these ideals. A nation that prides itself on its commitment to liberty cannot in good conscience incarcerate 2.2 million people. The horrors of the criminal justice are profound.
The President can build a more just criminal justice system without Congress:
• Stop aggressive prosecution. We can reverse “the current DOJ policy requiring prosecutors to seek and only accept pleas to the highest possible charge and, instead, empower federal prosecutors to exercise restraint in charging decisions…”
• Reduce mass incarceration through clemency. Right now “a single person petitioning for clemency must go through seven layers of review within DOJ before their petition might make it before the President.” Historically, “clemency was used frequently, with every president pardoning thousands of people up until the time of President Gerald Ford.” To fix this, the President can “create an independent White House clemency advisory board to speed the pace of clemency decisions” and address the fact that too “many people serving disproportionately long federal sentences…have no hope for relief other than presidential clemency.” The President can also use clemency powers to “shorten the sentence of anyone serving a mandatory minimum.”
• Abolish the federal death penalty. The President can institute “a moratorium on executions and halt all action while his administration studies the punishment’s use,” and “can push states to slow down executions, by withholding federal grants unless states guarantee that death row prisoners have access to DNA tests that may help them prove their innocence.” The President can also use clemency powers to commute “the sentences of the more than 50 people currently on federal death row, if he believes that the death penalty system is too broken to be fixed.”
“It wasn’t always like this. Just forty years ago, in the 1970s, our incarceration rate was one-fifth what it is today. It was comparable to that of most European countries, and it had been relatively stable all the way back to the mid- to late 1800s.”
— John Pfaff, Professor of Law, Fordham University
+ Finance Main Street 🏠, not Wall Street 🏦.
During a time of upward economic redistribution, “criminally negligent pandemic management,…a burgeoning eviction crisis, widespread unemployment, and historic inequality” it should be abundantly clear that we can’t keep doing things the way we used to. We have tremendous productive capacity. What we need now is massive public investment.
To make those urgently needed investments, “just like Bush and Obama did in 2008–09” the President, without Congress, could “work with his secretary of the Treasury and the chair of the Fed to make available trillions of dollars in low-interest loans.” But “instead of lending only to banks, the Fed would make long-term, productive investments to help small businesses struggling because of the pandemic, modernize existing industries, and build the industries of the future.” In this moment of crisis we can “remake America’s infrastructure, vehicle fleets, and energy industry…a recipe for reviving shared prosperity and achieving climate sustainability.”
How exactly would this work? New Consensus explains:
• “The details of where that productive investment should go can…be managed directly through a Biden administration without the need for congressional authorization or approval. Specifically, the Biden administration should create two new bodies within the executive branch: a National Development Council, which Biden could form from relevant cabinet members and other officials, with the mandate of converting Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan into an executable national economic development strategy and a National Development Bank, housed in the Treasury, which could contract federal agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers to fund projects that are more public in nature such as nationwide infrastructure upgrades.”
Let’s seize this opportunity to finance Main Street rather than Wall Street, and remake America.
“In the ’08 bailout…the Fed gave all this near-zero-interest money out — the result of that was we saved the banking system, but we didn’t actually build anything new,”…“As opposed to in the past, when we spent all this money, we built the interstate highway system. We built the Apollo space program. ... So there’s this chance this time to do it right.”
— Saikat Chakrabarti, President, New Consensus
+ Justice for Immigrants ✊🏾✊🏼✊🏿.
This country was built by immigrants, but now inflicts maximum suffering on those who are simply trying to escape violence or seek a better life. The immigrant detention system is a moral disgrace, run by rogue agencies. But we can do something about it:
• Stop Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from “detaining people beyond a brief period for processing — including asylum seeking parents and kids” because the agency “simply must not have responsibilities that it’s proven incapable of handling.” CBP has been “at the heart of some of the greatest moral horrors of the last four years, personified in stories that we cannot forget” like “the children breathlessly crying for their parents after being separated at the border” or “the children sleeping in the dirt in open air cages…”
• Expand asylum. The government can only grant asylum to someone if the “dangers from which they fled their home country…fit into one of five categories…” But these categories are outdated and “don’t take into account the sorts of reasons people become refugees in the 21st century—like targeted gang violence…” The President’s “attorney general has tremendous power over immigration courts” and given that “immigration law is full of vague, malleable phrases and concepts, the definitions of which are only laid out in ever-evolving legal precedent…a Biden attorney general could…work to redefine” the outdated asylum categories.
“A 28-year-old Cuban woman told me about spending five days sleeping on the ground in an outdoor cage run by Border Patrol, the ‘perrera’ — a place for dogs. That was followed by 17 days in the ‘hielera,’ a frigid room. She had been denied a shower the entire time…Whatever we call them, America’s immigration prisons are antithetical to the free society we claim to be. We must do all we can to dismantle this system.”
— Naureen Shah, Senior Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU
This compilation synthesizes and distills the work of many people and organizations, including the excellent work of The American Prospect and contributors to its Day One Agenda.