Before his inauguration, Donald Trump promised to issue a total of 100 or so executive orders once he regained the presidency. These orders reset government policy on everything from immigration enforcement to diversity initiatives to environmental regulation. They also aim to undo much of Joe Biden’s presidential legacy.
Trump is not the first U.S. president to issue an executive order, and he certainly won’t be the last. My own research shows executive orders have been a mainstay in American politics – with limitations.
What is an executive order?
Though the Constitution plainly articulates familiar presidential tools like vetoes and appointments, the real executive power comes from reading between the lines.
Presidents have long interpreted the Constitution’s Article 2 clauses – like “the executive power shall be vested in a President” and “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed” – to give them total authority to enforce the law through the executive branch, by any means necessary.
One leading way they do that is through executive orders, which are presidential written directives to agencies on how to implement the law. The courts view them as legally valid unless they violate the Constitution or existing statutes.
Executive orders, like other unilateral actions, allow presidents to make policy outside of the regular lawmaking process.This leaves Congress, notoriously polarized and gridlocked, to respond.
Thus, executive orders are unilateral actions that give presidents several advantages, allowing them to move first and act alone in policymaking.
How have they historically been used?
Every U.S. president has issued executive orders since they were first systematically cataloged in 1905.
In March of 2016, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized President Obama’s use of executive orders.
“Executive orders sort of came about more recently. Nobody ever heard of an executive order. Then all of a sudden Obama – because he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him – he starts signing them like they’re butter,” Trump said. “So I want to do away with executive orders for the most part.”
Little in this statement is true.
Obama signed fewer orders than his predecessors – averaging 35 per year. Trump issued an average of 55 per year.
Against conventional wisdom, presidents have relied less on executive orders over time. Indeed, modern presidents used drastically fewer orders per year – an average of 59 – than their pre-World War II counterparts, who averaged 314.
Executive orders have been used for everything from routine federal workplace policies like ethics pledges to the controversial 2017 travel ban restricting entry into the United States.
They have been used to manage public lands, the economy, the civil service and federal contractors, and to respond to various crises such as the Iran hostage situation and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Presidents often use them to advance their biggest agenda items, by creating task forces or policy initiatives and directing rulemaking, the process for formally translating laws into codified policy.
Limitations in their use
Why don’t presidents always issue executive orders, a seemingly powerful policy device? Because they come with serious constraints.
First, executive orders may not be as unilateral as they seem. Drafting an order involves a time-consuming bargaining process with various agencies negotiating its content.
Second, if they are issued without proper legal authority, executive orders can be overturned by the courts – although that happens infrequently.
Trump’s 2017 travel ban faced several legal challenges before it was written in a way to satisfy the court. Many of his initial orders, on the other hand, didn’t face legal scrutiny because they simply requested agencies to work within their existing authority to change important policies like health care and immigration.
Congress is another barrier, as they give presidents the legal authority to make policy in a certain area. By withholding that authority, Congress can deter presidents from issuing executive orders on certain issues. If the president issues the order anyway, the courts can overturn it.
Legislators can also punish presidents for issuing executive orders they do not like by sabotaging their legislative agendas and nominees or defunding their programs.
Even a polarized Congress can find ways to sanction a president for an executive order they don’t like. For example, a committee can hold an oversight hearing or launch an investigation – both of which can decrease a president’s public approval rating.
Congresses of today are equipped to impose these constraints and they do so more often on ideologically opposed administrations. This is why scholars find modern presidents issue fewer executive orders under divided government, contrary to popular media narratives that present executive orders as a president’s way of circumventing Congress.
Finally, executive orders are not the last word in policy. They can be easily revoked.
New presidents often reverse previous orders, particularly those of political opponents. Biden, for instance, quickly revoked Trump’s directives that excluded undocumented immigrants from the U.S. Census.
All recent presidents have issued revocations, especially in their first year. They face barriers in doing so, however, including public opinion, Congress and legal limitations.
Regardless, executive orders are not as durable as laws or regulations.
Constraints on Trump
Some of Trump’s executive orders, particularly those focused on the economy, will require legislation since Congress holds the purse strings.
Though Trump inherits a Republican House and Senate, their majorities are marginal, and moderate party dissenters may frustrate his agenda. Even so, he will undoubtedly use all available legal authority to unilaterally transform his goals into government policy.
But then again, these directives may be undone by the courts – or by the next president with the stroke of a pen.
Sharece Thrower is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on how both Congress and the courts constrain the president’s use of various policy instruments such as executive orders, signing statements, rule making and regulatory review.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.