Executive orders: suggestions or laws?
This section of the president’s job description since George Washington has the force of law but can be challenged in numerous ways.
Since George Washington, every American president has issued executive orders, except for one, William Henry Harrison. Some of our earliest presidents only issued one, but most issued dozens or hundreds on a wide variety of subjects.
The American Presidency Project at the University of California Santa Barbara tracks this unique and powerful element of the president’s job that has been making the news since Donald Trump said the oath of office for his second term in the White House. The American Presidency Project says Trump issued 26 orders on Monday, a faster pace than the four he issued during the first week of his first term, over which he issued 220 orders during four years. That compares to 162 from President Joe Biden and 276 from President Barack Obama, over eight years. Wartime presidents seem to issue the most executive orders, in case you’re interested in more details.
Here’s a list of some of the orders Trump made on his first day:
–Renaming America’s highest mountain from Denali back into Mount McKinley.
–Telling the secretary of state to put “America First” in all our dealings with other countries.
–Insisting that U.S. policy should only recognize two sexes: male and female and not use sex and gender interchangeably.
According to the story on WBAL TV, on Monday Trump revoked 67 executive orders and 11 presidential memorandum signed during the Biden administration.
On Joe Biden's first day in office, he signed nine executive orders, five of which reversed executive orders from the Trump administration.
On Tuesday, some of Trump’s orders were already being challenged in court – notably the order attempting to do away with birthright citizenship, a right that is part of the Constitution. Legal review is part of the executive order process, although many orders are relatively mundane and just help move government along toward a goal or even just to signal a proposed change that will require Congress to act to make it happen.
The authority to make executive orders comes from Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which describes the job of the president and lists his or her powers, such as being commander in chief of U.S. armed forces and appointing people like the attorney general or the secretary of state.
Although executive orders can have the force of law, they are not supposed to be an attempt to sidestep Congress, which has primary responsibility for making the nation’s laws.
A PBS NewsHour interview with Andrew Rudalevige, professor of government at Bowdoin College and author of “The New Imperial Presidency,” dives into the power of these orders and their limits. Rudalevige describes these as giving “the president the ability to try to implement the law in a way that's consonant with his preferences.” He says an executive order can’t go beyond what the Constitution or an existing law allows the president to do.
Twenty-two states are already suing to overturn Trump’s order to stop recognition of the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants as citizens, according to The New York Times. Those attorneys general argue that neither the president or Congress has the ability to overturn the right to U.S. citizenship for people who are born here, which is in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
States sued and won a legal challenge of Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” executive order from his previous administration. That order was his attempt to prevent people from traveling to the United States from certain majority Muslim countries, as one attempt to stop refugees from coming here.
In addition to lawsuits and other presidential action, executive orders can also be revised or stopped by an act of Congress or by the Supreme Court.
Perhaps the most famous presidential executive order was Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, although some things I read said this was not really an executive order but purely a proclamation. That distinction doesn’t make sense to me since executive orders are more like laws and the Emancipation Proclamation changed the law of the land.
According to FindLaw, President Harry S. Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948 with an executive order. In 2012, President Obama started with an executive order the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or the Dream Act to protect undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children. And orders to join and leave the Paris Climate Agreement were executive orders from Biden and Trump.
Go deeper: More to read
PBS interview with a scholar about the power of presidential executive orders:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-power-of-presidential-executive-orders-and-their-limits
Read all the Trump executive orders so far:
More on how executive orders work:
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/21/nx-s1-5269600/trump-executive-actions-orders-memoranda-proclamation