Biden Considers Convening First-Ever Meeting Of His Cabinet

WASHINGTON—Exploring his options for responding to several crises mounting across the country, President Joe Biden told reporters Tuesday that he was seriously considering the prospect of convening the first-ever meeting of his cabinet. “It’s a pretty drastic step, so you don’t want to do something like this unless you have a good reason, but I was thinking of inviting all the heads of the federal agencies down to the White House for a meeting to discuss where we’re headed as a country,” said Biden, adding that it would be nice to see Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the first time since his inauguration, and that it would be good for everyone to meet the secretary of health and human services, since he wasn’t sure who he or she was. “It’s been a while since I got elected, so I think it makes sense to do it now. We could probably start off with some meet-and-greets so that everyone gets a chance to say a little bit about themselves and what they’d like to accomplish in a Biden administration. Maybe some of them even have thoughts on how things have been going so far, which I would certainly be interested in hearing. Ultimately, though, I don’t want to force people to sit in a room just to sit in a room, and if it doesn’t feel like we’re going to have a productive cabinet meeting, we can probably just give it a rain check and meet some other time.” Biden added that along with his first cabinet meeting, he had recently begun mulling over the idea of calling a couple senators he hadn’t spoken to in a while to find out what was happening over in Congress.