In the first week of Donald Trump’s presidency, he issued of 37 executive orders, among a bevy of other executive memorandums and proclamations. He also revoked 78 executive actions taken by former President Joe Biden.
“There is no legal limit on executive orders. They’ve been doing them since the very first presidency,” said Dr. Charles Zug, a professor at the University of Missouri's Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.
The content of the orders spans the federal government. They aim to do everything from imposing new regulations on energy, renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and overturning Biden-era policy on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Instead of waiting for a Republican-dominated Congress to pass laws, Trump plans to kickstart his political agenda through direct action.
“The kinds of orders presidents issue, that’s where things get controversial. Presidents sometimes try to use executive orders to basically take actions that would otherwise require Congressional action,” Zug said.
In Trump’s first term, he signed a total of 220 executive orders over four years. By the beginning of his second term, a third of them had been revoked, primarily by former President Joe Biden.
“He had been developing this for quite a while beforehand … they had it ready to feed into the hopper in the event they got elected,” Zug said.
In addition to reversing Biden-era DEI initiatives, Trump has added Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism and reinstated his first-term ban on transgender individuals serving in the military.
In a shock decision, Trump froze hundreds of billions of dollars of federal grants and loans via memo on the evening of Jan. 28. That would have had the power to devastate state and local agencies reliant on federal loans and grants to function.
The memo instantly faced legal challenges. By the following afternoon, a federal judge ordered that all funds currently scheduled were to be distributed until at least Feb. 3. The court decision was not a permanent block to the order; a second hearing was scheduled for the following week.
By that afternoon, 23 state attorneys general had filed lawsuits against Trump’s memo.
Later that day, Trump rescinded the order.
“It got back to [Trump] how huge the fallout was going to be,” Zug said. “He didn't even go through with the legal challenge.”
Legal challenges at the federal level can be effective in reversing executive actions, but the process can take months. As many of Trump’s orders are written to take immediate effect, federal agencies may be left hamstrung.
Still, it is unlikely that all of Trump’s executive orders will come to fruition.
A Jan. 20 order that denies citizenship to the U.S.-born children whose parents are not citizens or lawful permanent residents is facing scrutiny from constitutional scholars. The order may be in violation of the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the country.
A flurry of lawsuits were filed by 24 Democratic states and cities and a host of advocacy groups. As a constitutional matter, the Supreme Court could expedite a review of the order.
“There is clear precedent that has been reaffirmed for over 100 years. But this court could easily overturn [precedent] with even a 5-4 ruling,” Zug said.
Even if lawsuits continue to follow Trump’s orders, reversals may not be instant.
“It comes down to a lot of political bargaining,” Zug said. “The courts can tie it up for quite a long time, for months.”
Congress has the authority to intervene. Their options include conducting Congressional investigations into the president and his orders or drafting new legislation to undermine them. In the extreme, Congress maintains the power to impeach and remove the president.
However, Republicans maintain majority in both chambers of Congress, so congressional challenges may not be likely to succeed unless GOP officials see deleterious effects in their districts.
“When Trump [ordered the freeze] … he definitely heard from a lot of members of Congress from his own party about what the effects were going to be,” Zug said. “Congress can do things of that sort behind the scenes and shape the outcomes.”
As of Jan. 31 none of Trump’s other executive actions had been revoked.