On January 20, 2025, Joe Biden will leave the White House. When he does, his successor will not be someone he is ideologically aligned with and who will continue the work he started over the last four years, but Donald Trump. Trump’s immediate priorities, as he said us on the campaign trail, launch ‘largest deportation operation in American history,’ rolling back environmental regulations, revoking protections for transgender students, pardoning people who took part in Jan. 6 attack on Capitol and firing a special counsel. Jack Smith. (Later, he will likely address Project 2025 priorities as take an ax against abortion rightsthat his MAGA allies admitted after winning.) Trump also claimed he would quickly end the war between Ukraine and Russia in a way that critics fear will be extremely advantageous for his friends in the Kremlin.

All of this leaves Biden with just over 70 days to try to blunt the impact of the 47th president. Clearly, there’s little the current president can do to protect the country (and the world) from the policies the new commander in chief is determined to implement, but apparently he’s going to try, starting with Ukraine .

By Policy:

The Biden administration plans to disburse the last of more than $6 billion in security aid to Ukraine by Inauguration Day, as the outgoing team prepares for the flow gun ban ends once President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

The plan, described by two administration officials who were granted anonymity to discuss internal matters, is the only option the White House has to continue sending equipment to Ukraine to combat continued Russian offensives. But the problems are immense. It normally takes months for munitions and equipment to arrive in Ukraine after an aid package is announced, so anything deployed in the coming weeks will likely not fully arrive before the Trump administration is well underway, and the next commander in chief could stop the shipments before they are on the ground.

As Politico notes, another major obstacle is that weapons destined for Ukraine must be manufactured, and as Marc Cancian, a former Defense Department budget official told the outlet: “We send everything industry can produce every month, but the problem is you can only send these things as they come.” are produced. The administration could draw down stockpiles and send equipment more quickly, but it is not clear that the Pentagon would want to do so, as it would affect its own readiness.”

Ukraine, of course, is undoubtedly hoping that Biden will do everything he can to speed things up, knowing what is likely to happen in the coming months. “The first thing (Trump) would be to cut aid to Ukraine,” Jim Townsend, a former senior Pentagon official for NATO and Europe under Barack Obama told Politico. “I would expect him to make a big show of it. He’d say “promise kept”, but he’ll end it sooner, I’m sure.

Elsewhere, the president is taking steps to save the polar bears that Trump nearly killed during his last term, and he will likely do so again in January.

By The Washington Post:

The Biden administration moved Wednesday to narrow the scope of an oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, mandated under President Donald Trump. The plan underscores how the Biden administration is racing to solidify its environmental legacy just hours after Trump secured a second term. Trump has pledged to boost oil drilling in the refuge, part of broader plans to increase fossil fuel production on public lands across the country.

For nearly four decades, drilling has been banned in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, whose 19.3 million acres provide critical habitat for the southern Beaufort Sea’s remaining polar bears, as well as for tens of thousands of migrating caribou and waterfowl. But in 2017, Trump signed a tax bill requiring at least two lease sales in the refuge’s 1.6 million-acre coastal plain by the end of 2024. Two weeks before Before Trump leaves office in 2021, the Interior Department auctioned off the first of these leases to oil companies and an Alaska state agency.

The Biden administration later canceled those leases, arguing that the Interior Department had conducted an “insufficient analysis” of the impact of drilling in the region. Now, with time running out, it is trying to restrict the scope of the second lease while remaining within the confines of the 2017 law. On Wednesday, he said a “preferred alternative” would be to offer the minimum number of acres required by law and to avoid, in accordance with Job“important habitat for polar bears and calving grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd, and minimizing damage to the livelihood activities of Alaska Native communities.”

For his part, the president-elect is clearly not bothered by the environmental impact of his drilling projects, having promised in May, oil donors said he would expand drilling and effectively approve any projects they want during a second term.

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