WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump is back in the White House, ready to immediately overhaul the government using the quickest tool he has: executive orders.
A new president signing a wave of decrees is a common practice. Executive orders allow a president to exercise power without intervention from Congress. But there are also limits to what commands can achieve.
An overview of how presidential power works and its often ephemeral impact:
What are decrees?
Basically, these are signed statements about how the president wants the federal government to be run. These may include instructions to federal agencies or requests for reports.
Many orders can be unobjectionable, such as granting federal employees the day after Christmas. They can also set major policies. For example, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to create a structure to establish regulations on artificial intelligence. But executive orders – and their political counterparts, the proclamation and political memorandum – are also used by presidents to pursue agendas that they cannot pass through Congress.
New presidents can – and often do – issue orders to reverse the orders of their predecessors.
As the American Bar Association notes, the orders do not require congressional approval and cannot be directly overturned by lawmakers. However, Congress could prevent an order from being fulfilled by removing funding or creating other obstacles.
How common are executive orders?
Throughout the history of the United States, there have been several thousand decreesaccording to data collected by the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. George Washington signed eight executive orders, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed 3,721.
During his first term, Trump, a Republican, signed 220.
Biden, a Democrat, has signed 160 as of December 20.
Decrees are often political messages
Trump planned to sign up to 100 decrees the first day, which would perhaps cover expulsions, the US-Mexico border, national energy, Appendix F rules for federal workers, school policies regarding gender and vaccination mandatesamong others Day 1 promises made during his campaign. He also promised an executive order to allow more time for the sale of TikTok.
Trump asked Representative Jeff Van DrewRN.J., to draft an order stopping the development of offshore wind turbines to produce electricity.
Many of Trump’s measures are likely to arouse opposition from Democrats.
And in several major cases, orders will largely be declarations of intent based on campaign promises made by Trump.
There are limits to the power of decrees
Congress and the courts can potentially block executive orders.
For example, in 1992, Congress revoked an executive order by then-President George H. W. Bush that called for the creation of a human fetal tissue bank for scientific research, passing a measure that the executive order “n ‘will have no legal effect’. Congress can also deny funding to agencies and stall enforcement of an order.
There are also legal challenges based on the argument that a president has exceeded his legal powers. When President Harry Truman attempted to seize steel mills during the Korean War, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he did not have the authority to seize private property without Congressional authorization.
