Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

The Impact of President Trump’s Executive Actions

Introduction: A Series on the Impact of President Trump’s Executive Actions

The Impact of President Trump’s Executive Actions
U.S. President Donald Trump signs a series of executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House on February 10, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Getty Images, Andrew Harnik

Since taking office, President Trump has fired off a barrage of sweeping executive orders that reach into the federal government, higher education, business, and other institutions. But how does all of this affect you and your family?

Lawyers Defending American Democracy (LDAD), a nonpartisan organization aimed at protecting democracy and the rule of law, hopes to answer that question through a series of deep dives into the actual impacts of all this frenetic activity.


Let's start with the fact that the Trump administration's broad and chaotic attacks on the government have little to do with waste and fraud. The real goal was set forth in Project 2025, an extremist blueprint created more than a year before the President was elected: “To…go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State."

The administration wants you to believe that federal workers are lazy and incompetent people who waste your tax dollars. Yet, as the first installment in our series will explain, these federal workers—whose duty is to serve the public interest—use their special skills and training to: protect public health; implement a fair tax system; help provide medical care and high-quality research; safeguard our financial and banking systems; help needy families and children; support seniors in retirement; promote safe air, rail, and highway travel; preserve U.S. national security; enforce the law; and protect our food supply, the water we drink and swim in, and the air we breathe.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Public opinion overwhelmingly supports these goals. Federal workers strive each day to make all of this possible. Carefully eliminating waste is one thing but randomly dismantling federal programs does nothing to improve efficiency while undermining the nation's security and prosperity.

Additionally, some of Trump's executive orders have already weakened consumer protections against unethical and potentially dangerous behavior. Our series will describe these impacts in careful detail.

The series will describe how the administration’s demolition of the federal government weakens the enforcement of legal protections that are more likely to cause harm to American families while benefiting wealthier individuals. History has proven that left unregulated, businesses may prioritize profit over consumer and public well-being. A broad-based elimination of regulations without careful consideration about what those regulatory programs are trying to accomplish will increase harmful practices and reduce public health and safety.

The series will also analyze how these dramatic cuts will have direct impacts on individuals. To provide just one example, drastically cutting staff at the Internal Revenue Service will make it easier for the wealthy to be protected by the administration as they exploit loopholes to avoid paying taxes. Those outside that elite category have no such advantages.

Another example can be found in how eliminating basic federal medical research funds will endanger families by leaving us without protection against deadly infectious and chronic diseases. Federal funding has been crucial in the race to find cures and treatments, provide ongoing research for diseases that devastate families—such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, and Parkinson’s—and eradicate once terrifying diseases, such as polio. Slashing funding for medical research will leave us unprepared for the next pandemic.

The series will also explain how reducing civil service protections for federal workers will result in a government of loyalists, not experts. As an example, the administration is already undermining the independence of the FBI and the Justice Department, allowing the President to use them as political tools.

As a result, the awesome coercive power of the federal government may be used not to pursue justice but to punish any individual who dares to express views that the administration regards as unacceptable. This has been the blueprint for the rise of autocrats in other countries where democracy and the rule of law are under attack.

The flood of executive orders and related actions is designed to overwhelm the public's ability to deal with these threats one by one. This series will focus on the larger picture while also examining specific actions in detail to reveal the serious impacts on all of us and the future of our democracy and the rule of law.

This is not the America that our founders envisioned. But it is not too late for an informed public to change our nation's course.


Lawyers Defending American Democracyis dedicated to galvanizing lawyers “to defend the rule of law in the face of an unprecedented threat to American Democracy.” Its work is not political or partisan.

Read More

Impact of Trump’s Executive Actions: Attacks on Lawyers and the Legal Profession

Someone tipping the scales of justice.

Getty Images, sommart

Impact of Trump’s Executive Actions: Attacks on Lawyers and the Legal Profession

Project Overview

This essay is part of a series by Lawyers Defending American Democracy explaining in practical terms what the administration’s executive orders and other executive actions mean for all of us. Each of these actions springs from the pages of Project 2025, the administration's 900-page playbook that serves as the foundation for these measures. The Project 2025 agenda should concern all of us, as it tracks strategies adopted by countries such as Hungary, that have eroded democratic norms and have adopted authoritarian approaches to governing.

Project 2025’s stated intent to move quickly to “dismantle” the federal government will strip the public of important protections against excessive presidential power and provide big corporations with enormous opportunities to profit by preying on America's households.

Keep ReadingShow less
Child Victims of Crime Are Not Heard

Shadow of a boy

Getty Images/mrs

Child Victims of Crime Are Not Heard

Justice is not swift for anyone, and even less so for children. In Mexico, as in many other countries, children who are victims of crime must endure not only the pain of what they have lived through, but also the institutional delays that, instead of protecting them, expose them to new forms of harm. If we truly acted with the urgency that child protection demands, why doesn’t the justice system respond with the same urgency?

Since January, a seven-year-old girl in Mexico, a survivor of sexual violence at her school, has been waiting for a federal judge to resolve an amparo, a constitutional appeal she filed requesting the right to participate in the criminal case against her aggressor in a protected and adapted manner. According to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (Mexico’s highest court), amparos must be used as urgent remedies when fundamental rights are at imminent risk. And yet, four months have passed with no resolution.

Keep ReadingShow less
Understanding The Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA)

Judge gavel and book on the laptop

Getty Images/Stock

Understanding The Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA)

Background

In November 2024, Elon Musk posted on social media, “There should be no need for [Freedom of Information Act] requests. All government data should be default public for maximum transparency.” His statement reignited discussions on the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, a federal law enacted in 1966 that requires federal executive branch agencies to disclose information in specific ways. Since its original passage in 1966, FOIA has been updated three times to tighten agency compliance, account for digital records, and allow citizens to request records online. Under FOIA, government agencies must disclose information by:

FOIA includes nine exemptions to protect against harms that might result from divulging certain records; these exemptions include cases like invasion of personal privacy, information related to national security, and information that would interfere with law enforcement proceedings.

Keep ReadingShow less
Supreme Court Weighs Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order Amid Constitutional Debate

Members of CASA advocacy group gather outside of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. toask justices to protect birthright citizenship on May 15, 2025.

Angeles Ponpa/Medill NewsService

Supreme Court Weighs Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order Amid Constitutional Debate

WASHINGTON- The Supreme Court on Thursday heard oral arguments over a Trump administration order that would deny automatic U.S. citizenship to children born on American soil to undocumented immigrant parents and others in the country temporarily. The order challenged more than a Century of legal precedent.

The case centers on Executive Order 14160, signed in January by President Donald Trump, which asserts that the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause does not apply to children born to noncitizens without permanent legal status. Lower courts swiftly blocked the policy, prompting a high-stakes showdown over both the scope of the amendment and the president's power to unilaterally reinterpret it.

Keep ReadingShow less