President Joe Biden will deliver his inaugural joint address to a mostly absent Congress, Supreme Court, and Cabinet in order to adhere to COVID-19 safety precautions.
Just 200 people will be sitting in the House for the event.
Instead of addressing a chamber packed with 535 members and a thousand more guests, including the presidential Cabinet, Supreme Court justices, and the diplomatic corps, Biden will be facing a partially empty room.
Even the press corps, which normally numbers in the hundreds, has been whittled down to only a few journalists.
Lawmakers were also pared back. Only 80 House lawmakers will be in attendance and just 60 senators, divided evenly between the parties.
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Chief Justice John Roberts will be the sole representative from the high court, while just two out of Biden’s Cabinet secretaries scored seats for the speech.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin will be in the chamber but not the rest of Biden’s Cabinet, which will watch the address virtually.
Typically, the chamber is packed with 1,600 people for the annual speech, and normally, it takes place in either January or February.
Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed the pandemic for the delay in the speech.
The sparse Cabinet turnout means that the White House, for the first time in modern history, will not appoint a “designated survivor” from the Cabinet who is kept away from the event to carry on government leadership in the event of a catastrophe.
First lady Jill Biden will be in attendance, along with Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris.
The usual array of invited guests will also be missing.
Pelosi has invited Dr. Kenneth Tai, the chief health officer at North East Medical Services, but only as “her virtual guest,” according to a press release.
Jill Biden also invited five virtual guests, including Javier Quiroz Castro, a nurse who arrived in the United States illegally as a child and hopes to be included in legislation to legalize “Dreamers.”
Other virtual guests include Tatiana Washington, a gun control advocate and organizer of “March for Our Lives,” and Stella Keating, a transgender teenager and advocate for the Equality Act, which would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
Pelosi told reporters she did not believe the reduced attendance will diminish the even, which she said would have “its own wonderful character.
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She added: “We go from 1,600 people to 200 people. That’s a different dynamic, but it has its own worth.”
