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  5. Biden revoked a slew of Trump executive orders, including one restricting funds to 'anarchist' cities and one insisting on neoclassical architecture

Biden revoked a slew of Trump executive orders, including one restricting funds to 'anarchist' cities and one insisting on neoclassical architecture

Mia Jankowicz   

Biden revoked a slew of Trump executive orders, including one restricting funds to 'anarchist' cities and one insisting on neoclassical architecture
  • President Joe Biden on Wednesday undid a series of Trump-era executive orders and memoranda.
  • He's cutting "anarchist" city designations and will stop championing neoclassical federal buildings.
  • It's Biden's latest move to undo his predecessor's legacy, much of which he can do unilaterally.

President Joe Biden revoked seven Trump-era presidential actions at once Wednesday, including decrees on architectural style and what the previous administration called "anarchist jurisdictions."

Just over a month into Biden's term, they are the latest in a wave of actions undoing dozens of orders from Donald Trump's presidency.

He has nixed a ban on some diversity training, a travel restriction often referred to as the "Muslim ban," and a ban on transgender people serving in the military, among many other actions.

Wednesday's reversals include the cancellation of a review that described New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, as "anarchist jurisdictions" and threatened to revoke their federal funding.

In a memorandum in September, Trump ordered a review of federal funding to cities "permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction." The three cities subsequently identified by the Department of Justice had been hot spots of protest against racial injustice that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The cities immediately sued. Upon Biden's Wednesday order, Seattle's city attorney, Pete Holmes, said he was "glad to have this nonsense cleared from the decks," according to the Associated Press.

Biden also reversed an executive order titled "Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture," which was signed in the final weeks of Trump's presidency.

It championed the neoclassical style for federal buildings - examples are the White House and the Lincoln Memorial - over modernist architecture, which the order called "undistinguished" and unappealing to the public.

Citing numerous examples of modernist buildings that it said were built to please "elite" architects rather than people, the order said "the Federal Government has largely stopped building beautiful buildings."

A banking-regulations order from 2017 was also overturned. This had sought to weaken Dodd-Frank, an Obama-era law that tightened regulation of Wall Street in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

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