On January 20, 2025, after taking the Presidential Oath of Office for the second time, Donald J. Trump traveled across downtown Washington to a rally and indoor parade at the Capital One Arena. During the inaugural festivities, Trump himself took the stage and began signing presidential directives, theatrically tossing his pens into the crowd. The centrality—but also the dramaturgy—of executive action in the second Trump administration was crystal clear.
During the inaugural festivities, Trump himself took the stage and began signing presidential directives, theatrically tossing his pens into the crowd. The centrality—but also the dramaturgy—of executive action in the second Trump administration was crystal clear.
By the end of that Inauguration Day, Trump had issued 26 executive orders (EOs) as well as more than 15 presidential memoranda and substantive proclamations. Joe Biden’s own aggressive use of early executive power in 2021 had set a new recent record, with more than 50 EOs and memoranda during his first 100 days in office (Hickey et al. Reference Hickey, Merrill, Chang, Sullivan, Boschma and O’Key2021). However, the Trump White House soon would credibly claim that the president had taken “hundreds of executive actions” within his “first 100 hours” in office. This surpassed not only Biden but also Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had issued 99 EOs in his own first 100 days. Trump got to his 100th EO on March 25 (Day 65) and to No. 143 on Day 100.
This article places Trump’s tidal wave of early executive action in the context of what scholars know about presidential unilateralism. Were Trump’s actions out of the ordinary in quantity or kind? Which actions drew on past assertions of presidential authority and which were distinctive? What did he use them for? And what might be their lasting impact?
COUNTING AND CATEGORIZING
Presidential directives have become an increasingly important part of how presidents govern (Cooper Reference Cooper2014; Howell Reference Howell2003). Their reliance on administrative tactics grew along with the scope of the administrative state and the fecklessness of Congress.
Over time, statutes that enlarge federal functions have granted presidents a wide range of discretionary authority. Presidents cannot change the law simply by putting their views on White House letterhead. They can, however, adjust the way the executive branch implements a given statute—at least until a lawsuit intervenes. Presidents have every interest in portraying themselves as strong leaders, acting to please key constituencies even when the actions they announce might not do much in practice. Although EOs receive the most public attention, there are numerous types of directives in the presidential toolbox (Relyea Reference Relyea2008; Woolley and Peters Reference Woolley and Peters2023), including memoranda, substantive proclamations, and efforts to control the promulgation of regulation. Meanwhile, polarization in Congress has hindered legislators’ ability—and desire—to push back even on extreme overreach. If one check on unilateral action is the anticipated reaction of other political actors (Howell Reference Howell2003), then those governing partners have given presidents little to fear in recent years.
In short—as in any good crime novel—presidents have the means, motive, and opportunity to act unilaterally. They have done so frequently enough to be accused of pushing the law and the US Constitution to their limits (Fisher Reference Fisher2018; Shane Reference Shane2009): Joe Biden’s invocation of emergency powers was criticized as “sidelining the checks and balances that safeguard our liberties and democracy” (Goitein Reference Goitein2022). Biden also expanded the use of the pardon power, granting wide amnesty for low-level federal drug offenses. More controversially still, he issued preemptive, protective pardons to numerous people from his siblings to Dr. Anthony Fauci to the congressional investigators of the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection (Parloff Reference Parloff2025).
Thus, the new Trump administration had ample past practice on which to draw. But even from this baseline, 2025 marked a dramatic uptick in the use of executive action. This was true in several respects. Scholars who analyzed Trump’s unilateral agenda from 2017 to 2021, for example, found that, “by the numbers,” he did not sharply diverge from past practice (Potter et al. Reference Potter, Rudalevige, Thrower and Warber2022). Trump 1.0 issued a total of 220 EOs. But Trump 2.0 had issued 217 by Thanksgiving, only 10 months into his second term.
It was true compared to broader historical trends as well: in the preceding five decades (1975–2024), the annual average number of EOs issued was only 46. The last time 100 EOs were issued in a single year was 1952.Footnote 1
Furthermore, Trump’s tactics also diverged from the scholarly finding that unilateral directives serve as a complement to new law more than they substitute for it (Bolton and Thrower Reference Bolton and Thrower2022). The 143 EOs of Trump’s second first 100 days accompanied a record low of five new laws enacted. Instead, Trump promoted unilateralism as another aspect of the “ubiquitous presidency” (Scacco and Coe Reference Scacco and Coe2021), hoping to convince the public that each EO represented an additional unit of executive authority.
It is important to stress, however, that the one-to-one relationship is far overstated. First, the numbers are manipulable: Barack Obama, accused of overstepping his power, cut back on the use of EOs even as he substituted other types of administrative action to achieve the same outcomes (Korte Reference Korte2014). In 2025, Trump did the opposite, converting not only memoranda but also the equivalent of press releases into EOs. In past administrations, those who developed such directives often stressed that “an executive order is not the appropriate document” for a given objective (Rudalevige Reference Rudalevige2021, 57, 184). Trump’s complaint-by-EO about weak water pressure in American showers was one of many that seemed exempt from such internal pushback.Footnote 2
As this example suggests, another problem with treating the count of directives as a linear proxy for “power” is that some are mostly exercises in public relations (as Lowande Reference Lowande2024 argued), and even those that shape policy vary widely in their significance (Chiou and Rothenberg Reference Chiou and Rothenberg2017; Howell Reference Howell2003). On the other side of the ledger, other important aspects of unilateralism (e.g., a president’s use of force abroad) are rarely expressed in these types of directives. Thus, the impact of Trump’s orders is not revealed simply by enumerating them. The following discussion categorizes them instead by subject matter, highlighting those with greater substantive heft. Where his actions mirrored his predecessors’—and where new claims of presidential power emerged—is evaluated next. The discussion includes not only EOs but also memoranda and proclamations where EOs alone did not capture the range of presidential action.Footnote 3
TOPICAL TRENDS
Two useful studies provide illustrative analyses of the topics addressed by Trump’s early directives. These closely track closely his 2024 campaign priorities linked to immigration, the economy, culture-war issues related to race and gender, and his war against the “deep state.”
Doan and Ingram (Reference Doan and Ingram2025) examined Trump’s first 100 EOs. Of these, a small plurality (17%) addressed the creation and activities of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE first was tasked simply with modernizing federal information technology but immediately took (and was given) far greater power to reshape the wider bureaucracy. A parallel analysis (Lotz and Habeshian Reference Lotz and Habeshian2025) that tracked EOs, memoranda, and proclamations during Trump’s first 100 days likewise placed efforts to “reshape the federal government” at the top of the heap, with 36 actions.
The next most-frequent subject in Trump’s first 100 EOs was trade (16), followed by energy and climate (10); immigration ranked fourth when only EOs are considered. However, if substantive proclamations and presidential memoranda issued during that period also are included, then immigration is in a virtual tie with the DOGE and trade categories, with more than 25 actions taken.
Another grouping of early EOs was labeled “retaliatory orders on Trump investigators”—another category that increases in size by moving beyond EOs as well as by considering its mirror image: the provision of rewards for Trump sycophants. These directives included a memorandum ordering the US Department of Homeland Security to prepare “appropriate remedial or preventative actions” against former DHS official Miles Taylor (whom Trump called “a traitor”), as well as a proclamation that provided a blanket pardon to the felons convicted of storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021—including those who violently assaulted police officers.Footnote 4 Presumably, Biden’s preemptive pardons forestalled at least some additional actions in this arena; certainly, Trump’s rhetoric continued to target those who Biden had pardoned.
OLD AND NEW ALL AT ONCE
Personalized retribution via the Federal Register broke with presidential precedent. Many of Trump’s directives, however, did not. Or, to clarify, they did not do so in kind—they often did so in degree or in the breadth of the claims they made to justify action. Many of the directives built on an expanded version of the unitary executive theory (UET) that has gained traction among conservatives since the 1980s (Dearborn Reference Dearborn2025; Howell and Moe Reference Howell and Moe2025). This theory posits that the grant of “the executive power” in Article II of the US Constitution made the president the personification of the entire executive branch, whose four million denizens were simply his rather numerous “limbs.”Footnote 5
Such actions led to many claims of centralized control over executive administration that built on past practice but went beyond it. For instance, rescinding prior presidents’ directives is standard practice for new presidents (Thrower Reference Thrower2017). In 2021, Biden had sought to fend off criticism of “the number of executive orders that I have signed” by arguing “I’m not making new law; I’m eliminating bad policy” by revoking dozens of Trump’s orders (Hickey et al. Reference Hickey, Merrill, Chang, Sullivan, Boschma and O’Key2021). Trump felt even more strongly about his predecessor. In one fell swoop on January 20, 2025, he rescinded 78 of Biden’s EOs and memoranda, and he soon would purge more than 100 directives issued by multiple presidents across six full decades.Footnote 6
Executive actions that add conditions to federal procurement and grant funding also are common presidential practice. The most significant theme of contracting orders has been the protection of disadvantaged groups (Morgan Reference Morgan1970), going back at least to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 directive that banned racially discriminatory employment practices in war-related workplaces. Successive administrations strengthened and extended such protections; Obama, for instance, prohibited those discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity from receiving federal contracts (Gitterman Reference Gitterman2017). Trump’s twist on the practice was to demand instead that contractors certify that they did not “operate any programs promoting DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.”Footnote 7 Yet what constituted “illegal DEI” was far from clear. As one federal court held, Trump officials had “decided that they are going to ‘eradicate’ something that they cannot define” (Purdy Reference Purdy2025).
Trump also declared discretionary grant funding suspended until its recipients showed that they would “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” This meant they could not “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” efforts toward racial diversity; undercut the administration’s desire that there be a “sex binary in humans”; or, indeed, pursue “any other initiatives that…promote anti-American values.”Footnote 8 Another order stated that federal funding for school districts would require the “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling characterization of America’s founding and foundational principles”—at least as those aligned with the administration’s vision of what it deemed a “patriotic education.”Footnote 9
The Government Establishment
Bureaucratic reorganization, regulatory review, and personnel management are also common themes for administrative directives. In this case, too, Trump both joined the crowd and jumped ahead of it. On the routine side, he reorganized the National Security Council and created new advising bodies such as the Make America Healthy Again Commission. The creation of DOGE seemed to join a series of presidential management initiatives dating back to the early-twentieth century (Arnold Reference Arnold1998).
But DOGE quickly diverged from that precedent and became a de facto operating agency, even before multiple additional directives gave it a role in approving contracts, loans, and grants; reducing agency regulations; and “eliminating waste, bloat, and insularity” in federal employment.Footnote 10 This was part of a wider effort to centralize presidential control over career civil servants. Trump disavowed collective-bargaining agreements, imposed additional political controls over promotion to the Senior Executive Service, and reissued his first-term “Schedule F” order (rescinded by Biden) that created a new exemption from the career service for officials with duties over policy making.Footnote 11
This vision of a highly politicized federal workforce was presented as a matter of high principle, flowing from the strong version of the UET. In this view, Congress could not buffer any executive employee from presidential control; Trump pushed past previous presidential claims along these lines by firing not only career officials (especially in the Justice Department) but also appointees serving on regulatory commissions with statutory protections over their tenure (Shane Reference Shane2025). The administration hoped to prompt the US Supreme Court—by 2025, overweighted with UET proponents—to overturn its past precedents that allowed Congress to limit a president’s removal power.Footnote 12
New Meanings for Old Laws
Until the Supreme Court weighed in, at least, those firings pushed beyond extant law. However, and more generally, Trump—again, like his predecessors—used executive directives to reinterpret statute to match his preferences. As Derthick noted (Reference Derthick2012, 56), “much of the activity of American policy making consists of attempts not to pass new laws but to invest old ones with new meanings.”
Thus, Trump could not change “the immutable biological reality of sex,”Footnote 13 but he could change how his administration used the Education Amendments of 1972—in this case, as a cudgel against transgender athletes taking part in interscholastic competition. The 1964 Civil Rights Act likewise was repurposed to punish universities accused of tolerating antisemitism. Trump even tried to reinterpret the US Constitution itself, purporting to protect “the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” in the 14th Amendment by excluding children born to parents who were not in the country legally or permanently.Footnote 14 Trump again hoped the Supreme Court would overturn precedents flatly contradicting his approach (Law Reference Law2025).
Although also grounded in statute, another set of directives warrants separate emphasis: namely, declarations of emergency that unlock additional authorities. Past expansions of presidential power have often flowed from crisis. Whereas previous presidents (including Biden and Trump in his first term) have been accused of abusing emergency powers, Trump in 2025 was unique in how frequently he grounded his directives in claims that the United States faced immense threat from without or within. One January 20, 2025, proclamation stated that the United States was battling an “invasion” composed of the “unauthorized entry of innumerable illegal aliens.” Other declared emergencies targeted the southern border; national energy; drug traffic across the northern border; and even the notion that global trade relations constituted an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States, necessitating the imposition and frequent revision of tariffs. Most of these directives invoked some combination of the 1976 National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA), although in another case, Trump reached back 225 years—to the 1798 Alien Enemies Act—in his attempt to accelerate the deportation of Venezuelan gang members.
These laws assume good faith; they do not require that there be an emergency to access their powers, only that the president declare one. However, the crises Trump invoked seemed to have little connection to actual facts on the ground (Liptak Reference Liptak2025). The Alien Enemies Act required an actual war or invasion. Canada was not a major provider of fentanyl to US addicts. The importation of kitchen cabinets (or, for that matter, the existence of trade deficits) did not threaten national security. Indeed, Brazil was punished because Trump was angered by that country’s criminal prosecution of its former president; Canada was targeted anew because of its sponsorship of advertisements pointing out that Ronald Reagan had favored free trade.
Domestically, Trump ordered federalized National Guardsmen into Los Angeles to “take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.” The deployment rested on a law allowing use of the National Guard when regular forces are insufficient to enforce federal law. In a June memorandum, Trump claimed that protests against his immigration policy constituted “a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” (Liptak Reference Liptak2025). However, there was little evidence that local and state personnel were unable to protect federal agents as they carried out their duties. Trump’s rationale carried over into subsequent deployments of federal troops into Chicago and Portland, Oregon, against local officials’ wishes. Courts struggled to balance the undoubted discretion granted to presidential judgment in law with the quasi-fictional nature of this president’s claims.
DIVERGENCES
In at least two categories of executive action, Trump’s second term stood even farther apart from past presidencies: (1) in customizing directives as tools of personalized retribution or reward; and (2) in using the directives to prevent the law from being executed.
As noted previously, Trump aimed a salvo of directives at entities and even individuals who had displeased him, while crafting others to benefit his allies and financial benefactors. One EO, for instance, claimed that “global law firms have for years played an outsized role…in the destruction of bedrock American principles,” taking specific aim at a lawyer associated with Trump’s 2024 New York felony conviction for financial fraud. Another EO attacked the “dishonest and dangerous activity of the law firm Perkins Coie LLP,” which had represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.Footnote 15 In these and other iterations, Trump ordered federal agencies to cancel contracts with the firms and even to prevent their employees from entering federal buildings.
A series of individualized directives revoked security clearances of past officials who had criticized him, and another allowed Trump to personally bestow clearances on staffers who otherwise would have been denied them. The former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—a Trump appointee who had undercut charges of fraud in the 2020 election—earned a memorandum entitled “The Risks from Chris Krebs,” which targeted those who “weaponized their undeserved influence to silence perceived political opponents.” Ironically, the very first EO of Trump’s second term claimed to “en[d] the weaponization of the federal government”—one had to read closely to realize that the only “weaponization” of concern was that allegedly pursued “over the past four years.”Footnote 16
Executive directives are fundamentally justified by their utility in fulfilling the constitutional command to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Thus, orders not to obey the law raise an immediate red flag. To be sure, past presidents have invoked “prosecutorial discretion” in ways that critics argue undermined faithful execution. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and Obama’s revision of statutory deadlines in the Affordable Care Act are often cited (Rudalevige Reference Rudalevige2014). However, although controversial, those actions dealt with the implementation of laws rather than their interment. By contrast, via multiple EOs, Trump ordered the Attorney General not to enforce the statutory ban on use of the popular TikTok app—a law passed by wide margins and upheld by the Supreme Court.Footnote 17 By presidential fiat, the law no longer existed.
As former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith (Reference Goldsmith2025) noted, this was “an astounding assertion of executive power.” Neither was it the only example. Another EO ordered that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act not be enforced.Footnote 18 Still others simply declared that regulations promulgated pursuant to law were no longer in effect, without going through the legally required process of revision or revocation.
Another strand of this strategy claimed a presidential power of the purse. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon insisted that he could dictate whether to actually spend appropriated funds. Nixon lost that battle—the 1974 Impoundment Control Act (ICA) was one result—but, in 2025, the Trump administration reopened hostilities. Budget director Russell Vought argued that the ICA was unconstitutional, and the administration froze or canceled millions of dollars in already-allocated monies. Appropriations language (and the discretion that the executive might have over disbursement) varies item by item within the federal budget, making it difficult to assess when administrative action moves from legal pause to illegal impoundment. But budget “apportionment” documents, released by court order pursuant to a 2022 law, soon revealed stringent conditions on spending not present in appropriations law (Parlapiano, Badger, and Lemonides Reference Parlapiano, Badger and Lemonides2025). By June 2025, the congressional Government Accountability Office was conducting almost 40 investigations into alleged impoundments. For comparison, a team of scholars found that there were no such decisions during the Obama years, eight during the first Trump administration, and two during the Biden presidency (Pasachoff, Schulman, and Superable Reference Pasachoff, Schulman and Superable2025).
IMPACT AND IMPLICATION
In summary, Trump’s second-term tidal wave of executive actions both reflected and departed from past practice. However, even those directives similar in kind to previous iterations were often different in degree; together, they greatly expanded the range of observed values on past claims. The UET, for instance, was not new. But like many of Trump’s other actions, it was taken to a new extreme.
Which permanent changes would ultimately result was unclear—much depended on the outcome of the dozens of court cases the Trump directives prompted (Lawfare 2025) as well as on future elections and the actions of future presidents. Again, count should not be substituted for consequence, especially when the theatricality of Inauguration Day continued in the public-facing aspect of many of the directives. These often were portrayed as sufficient in themselves to solve the dilemma they described. On January 20, 2025, for instance, a Trump memorandum “hereby order[ed] the heads of all executive departments and agencies to deliver emergency price relief…to the American people.” Two days later, a White House fact sheet praised Trump for having delivered that price relief—because he had signed the memorandum.Footnote 19 Prices themselves did not decline.
Indeed, an increasing share of the Trump directives’ text was given over to long paragraphs attacking the Biden administration and its allies or enablers, evocative but hortatory language with no legally binding effect. The proportion of this type of press-release–style “preamble” language had increased in the first Trump and the Biden administrations (Rudalevige and Yu Reference Rudalevige and Yu2024) as well. However, by the first six months of Trump’s second term, it comprised almost 25% of the average EO.Footnote 20
Nevertheless, Trump’s executive actions were, clearly, collectively consequential. By mid-2025, there were troops in the streets of American cities, billions of dollars in new tariffs, and thousands of scientists and service organizations defunded. Rescinding EOs alone will not restore institutional infrastructure or policy expertise; structural changes to the civil service or reorganization authority may in fact appeal to future presidents.
In this sense, the present-day unwillingness of Congress to act—even to defend the power of the purse—is astonishing. However, the decisions of past Congresses—failing, for instance, to reform the NEA, the IEEPA, or the Insurrection Act of 1807—also warrants a hard look. In 1944, after all, Justice Robert Jackson warned of legal language lying “about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.”Footnote 21 With the weapons of executive discretion embedded in vague language across numerous statutes, all that was needed was a president willing to indiscriminately fire them. In 2025, one arrived.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank George C. Edwards III for organizing this symposium; Victoria E. Yu for quick-fire data analysis; and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful queries and comments.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The author declares that there are no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
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