Analysis: Expect a flurry of measures from Biden that will restore US influence

Five policy areas that Joe Biden's administration is expected to get to work on early in its tenure.

President Joe Biden signs his first executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House yesterday. He has inherited a mess that historians may eventually compare to the Great Depression. Photo: AP/Evan Vucci

It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who set the standard for all future men and women who sat down in the Oval Office back in March 1933, vowing to take swift action in his first 100 days to halt the slide of the American economy into the abyss.

Historians place the Democrat alongside exalted names in American leadership such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln for his New Deal, which brought the country back from the brink.