On issues that don’t require an immediate solution, the president prefers to be more deliberative, the senior White House official said. “He does take more time, consult broadly, measure twice before cutting,” the official said. “That’s what the country said it wanted after Trump, and that’s basic to good leadership.”
Administration officials who have taken part in internal policy discussions with Mr. Biden said he often asks advisers to debate the merits of a particular issue, interjecting with pointed questions and sometimes expressing frustration if he feels the answers that aides provide aren’t adequate. Mr. Biden has also invited senior officials—including the defense secretary, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of state and the Treasury secretary—to the president’s daily brief to discuss policy issues in more depth.
Sometimes, he asks his advisers to dig deeper on a particular element of the policy being discussed and return with more information later. The president also requests written briefing materials laying out, for example, the long-term fallout of a particular policy or its effects on low-income people. During internal debates, he encourages his advisers to explain a policy in plain-spoken language, an approach that helps him think through how he would sell the issue to the public, the officials said.
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