President Joe Biden signed 50 new bills into law in a Christmas Eve signing spree as he wraps his last month in office. Among the new laws was legislation to fight child abuse at residential treatment facilities, to prevent hazing on college campuses, and a measure that finally designates the bald eagle as the national bird.
Many of the bills signed by the outgoing Democratic president on Tuesday were bipartisan efforts—including the bill finally acknowledging the bald eagle. Although the iconic bird of prey is featured prominently on symbols, including the government’s official seal adopted in 1782, the U.S. did not have an official national bird.
The efforts to make the bald eagle official were spearheaded by Preston Cook, the co-chair of the National Eagle Center in Minnesota, who first discovered that the country did not have a national bird, according to a Washington Post profile.
Other laws addressed longstanding controversies, including hazing on college campuses. The Stop Campus Hazing Act is the first federal anti-hazing legislation approved by Congress, on the heels of several high-profile deaths on college campuses. The bill directs any higher education institution that receives federal funding to report incidents of hazing in their annual security reports, and to produce publicly available campus hazing transparency reports.
Another bill, named the “No Congressionally Obligated Recurring Revenue Used as Pensions To Incarcerated Officials Now Act,” or “No CORRUPTION” act, was written to prevent former members of congress from collecting their retirement payments if they are convicted of “felonies related to their official duties,” according to Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV)’s office, one of the bill’s co-sponsors.
Another high-profile bill signed into law was the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, a bill championed by socialite Paris Hilton, who even testified before Congress in June about her own experiences of “inhumane treatment” at four schools for troubled teenagers she attended in her adolescence.
The House passed the SICA unanimously last week, and Hilton celebrated the win by teasing a future in politics or advocacy.
Tuesday’s signing spree comes in the middle of a flurry of action from the White House. On Monday, Biden signed an $895 billion defense spending bill that included controversial language added by congressional Republicans that bans the military’s health care from covering some gender dysphoria treatments for the children of service members.
In a statement on Monday, the Biden administration said it “strongly opposed” the section, arguing that it “undermines our all-volunteer military’s ability to recruit and retain the finest fighting force the world has ever known by denying health care coverage to thousands of our service members’ children.”
However, Biden still signed the bill into law, drawing criticism from LGBTQ rights organizations.
Biden also vetoed a law that would have expanded the federal judiciary by 66 judges—a formerly bipartisan law passed by the Senate in August but was only brought to a floor vote in the Republican-controlled House after President-elect Donald Trump won in November.
Biden promised to veto the legislation, criticizing it as a “hurried action [that] fails to resolve key questions in the legislation.”
