US President-elect Joe Biden has no time to waste. Despite President Donald Trump's unwillingness to concede, Mr Biden began appointments of his inner circle in the White House, shaping his strategy to address the coronavirus pandemic and declaring some of the main features of his economic policies. The president-elect underlined the ability of his team to prepare the ground for a smooth transition from the outgoing president. But his frustration began to grow in the last few days with remaining sidelined on national security matters and the coronavirus vaccine distribution strategy, which is a huge logistical undertaking. In his first step to building his administration, Biden announced Tuesday the first wave of appointments of senior White House staff. Representative Cedric L Richmond of Louisiana will oversee public outreach as a senior adviser in the White House, a position that mirrors his work in the inner circle of Biden's campaign and transition team, which he also co-chairs. Mr Richmond, 47, will inherit a job once occupied by Valerie Jarrett when she worked in the West Wing for former president Barack Obama. Jen O'Malley Dillon, who successfully managed Mr Biden's presidential campaign, will be deputy chief of staff, to help to oversee White House operations for Mr Biden. In the role, she is expected to serve alongside Biden's recently announced chief of staff Ron Klain. Ms O'Malley Dillon, who became the first woman to lead a Democratic campaign to victory, joined Biden's team in March just as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold of the country. During her tenure, she helped to grow the campaign's digital operation and set record-breaking fundraising totals that helped lead to Trump's defeat. Steve Ricchetti, a long-time confidante, will serve in the White House as a counsellor to the president, replacing Kellyanne Conway who served as counsellor under President Trump. Mr Ricchetti served as Mr Biden's chief of staff when he was vice president. All three will likely have offices just down the hall from the Oval Office, making them among the most senior aides in the West Wing. The announcements come as Mr Biden moves quickly to establish both his governing agenda and the team he will need to put it into effect once he takes office. Other staffers expected to take on senior White House roles are Campaign Senior Adviser Symone Sanders and Deputy Campaign Manager and Communications Director Kate Bedingfield, sources familiar with internal personnel discussions told ABC News. The president-elect is under pressure to fill those jobs with people of diverse backgrounds, ethnically and ideologically, making good on promises he made during the campaign. But the appointments of Mr Richmond (African American), Ms O'Malley Dillon, and Mr Ricchetti — all loyal lieutenants to Mr Biden — also suggests the premium that he is placing on surrounding himself with people whose advice he implicitly trusts. With one eye on filling senior posts in the White House, Mr Biden's other eye is on the urgent matter of coronavirus. The president-elect warned of disastrous consequences if Trump and his administration continue to refuse to coordinate with his transition team on the coronavirus pandemic and block briefings on national security, policy issues and vaccine plans. The remarks were Biden's toughest to date on Trump's failure to acknowledge his election loss and cooperate with the incoming administration for a peaceful transfer of power. “More people may die if we don't coordinate,” Biden told reporters during a news conference Monday in Wilmington, Delaware. “We're going into a very dark winter. Things are going to get much tougher before they get easier,” Biden said of the pandemic. Biden urged Congress to pass pandemic relief legislation. Talks on such legislation stalled for months before the 3 November election. Biden repeated his belief that Trump's refusal to concede is “more embarrassing for the country than debilitating for my ability to get started”. On his economic agenda, Biden said he plans to pursue “a fairer tax structure” with corporations paying their fair share, and added that he wanted to see a $15 hourly minimum wage nationwide. Biden said no government contracts will be given to companies that do not make products in the United States. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris held a video conference with several chief executives including General Motors Company's Mary Barra, Microsoft Corp's Satya Nadella, Target Corp's Brian Cornell and Gap Inc's Sonia Syngal. The president-elect will inherit an economy that has suffered millions of job losses during a pandemic that has killed more than 246,000 people in the United States. US Covid-19 cases are surging as Biden prepares to take office 20 January. Cooperation between the outgoing and incoming administrations, traditionally a key component of the peaceful transfer of power in the United States, takes on heightened significance this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, which is escalating dramatically heading into the holiday season. Biden has vowed to spend trillions of dollars to reinvigorate US manufacturing, expand healthcare coverage and combat climate change, among other priorities. But his chief priority remains controlling the pandemic, which is surging to record levels and forcing state and local leaders to implement new rounds of restrictions on local businesses. Mr Biden said he supported a national mask mandate to help curb the rise of the virus and that Congress should provide trillions of dollars in financial support to workers, businesses and state and local governments. “For millions of Americans who've lost hours and wages or have lost jobs, we can deliver immediate relief and it need be done quickly,” Mr Biden said. “Congress should come together and pass a Covid relief package” along the lines of the $3 trillion bills that House Democrats passed earlier this year. Most economists support another round of stimulus funding, including loans to small businesses, extended unemployment benefits and support for states and cities. Congressional Democrats have previously backed another $2 trillion in aid. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, has pointed to the falling unemployment rate as evidence that much less stimulus is needed. Biden and his aides — and a small but growing group of Republicans — have emphasised the importance of being briefed on White House efforts to control the pandemic and distribute prospective vaccines. The Trump administration is working on its own distribution plan, while Biden's chief of staff indicated his transition team will proceed with their own planning separately because of the obstruction. Republican Senator Susan Collins said it's “absolutely crucial that the apparent president-elect and his team have full access to the planning that has gone on” for vaccine distribution. “It is no easy matter” to distribute a vaccine, Collins said, so “it's absolutely imperative for public health, that all of the planning that's gone on, for which the current administration deserves credit, be shared with the new administration.” Collins' remarks were echoed by Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Last week, a larger group of Republicans in Congress called on the Trump administration to allow Biden to begin receiving national security briefings. The outgoing president has refused so far to bend to pressure from Democrats or Republicans as he continues to dispute his loss to Biden who is leading Trump by more than 5.5 million votes nationally. Biden called the vaccine distribution a “huge, huge undertaking”, and said that if his team has to wait until he takes office to dig into the government's distribution plan, they'll be “behind, over a month, month and a half”. But on whether Biden should receive coronavirus briefings, many of Trump's allies on Capitol Hill remained dug in. “We've been working for the past year to make sure the vaccine will be delivered and it will be starting to be delivered probably in December, so he won't even be president of the United States when the vaccine starts,” Senator John Cornyn, the Texan Republican, said in pushing back against Biden's comments. “He can be privy, but he won't have anything to do with it,” Cornyn said. “I mean, I hope by the time he's inaugurated that we're going to be well underway.” In London, British sources have denied any relationship between changes made by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in his inner circle in Downing Street and the upcoming Biden administration. After days of briefing and counter briefing, Johnson fired with immediate effect his two senior advisers in Downing Street, his Chief Adviser Dominic Cummings, and his Director of Communications Lee Cain. Sources told Al-Ahram Weekly that recent changes are related to internal disagreements that have nothing to do with Biden's election. Cummings and Cain are ardent Brexit supporters, a project that Biden and his close aides have repeatedly described as a “major threat” to Europe and to British-American relations. Biden has frequently warned that his upcoming administration will not tolerate any threat to peace on the island of Ireland or a threat to the Good Friday Agreement due to Brexit. Biden's stand makes Johnson's final Brexit decisions in the coming few weeks extremely tricky. *A version of this article appears in print in the 19 November, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
