Pressed again today to speak about Republican congress members who are in the news for their antisocial behavior, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki refused to comment. “We don’t want to elevate conspiracy theories further in the briefing room, so I’m going to leave it at that,” she said.

The White House has also declined to comment on Congress, taking the constitutional position that the president should stay in the executive branch’s lane and let the legislative branch handle its own affairs.

Instead, Biden is moving his agenda forward quickly. He has signed at least 33 executive actions that direct the members of the executive branch on how they should implement laws. In addition to the military, the executive branch has more than 4 million people in it, and it includes the State Department, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Interior Department, and so on—a lot of people in a lot of positions.

The breadth of the executive branch is enabling Biden to turn the direction of the government by coordinating changes across a number of departments. So, for example, in an article in the New Yorker, environmentalist Bill McKibben called out Wednesday, January 27, as “the most remarkable day in the history of America’s official response to the climate crisis…. The Biden Administration took a series of coordinated actions that, considered together, may well mark the official beginning of the end of the fossil-fuel era.”