Understanding a New Presidency in the Age of Trump. Joseph A. Pika

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      The travel ban saga extended well beyond the ninety-day delay that the administration had originally sought. After two circuit courts also blocked the order, the Supreme Court agreed in June 2017 to take up the merits of the case in its fall term. In the meantime, the Court allowed parts of the ban to go into effect, while exempting those travelers with “formal, documented” business connections or “a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”⁸⁷ The government quickly held that such a relationship might include parents but not grandparents, prompting yet more lawsuits over the precise scope of the exemptions.

      By the end of his first hundred days, Trump had issued over thirty executive orders (plus numerous presidential memoranda to department heads issuing similar sorts of directions).⁸⁸ That amounted to a faster pace than any new president since 1945, when Harry Truman assumed the presidency after Franklin Roosevelt’s death and issued fifty-seven such orders. By comparison, in their first hundred days in office, Barack Obama issued nineteen executive orders; George W. Bush, eleven; and Bill Clinton, thirteen.

      Presidents frequently use executive orders (EOs) to implement provisions of new laws. Since more laws are passed during periods when one party controls both the presidency and Congress, the number of EOs generally rises then as well. The Trump EOs, however, substituted for legislation rather than supplementing it—an approach far more common during periods of divided government, such as Obama’s last six years in office, as opposed to the period of unified government that prevailed in 2017. President Trump employed executive actions in at least eight of the ten policy areas in which he had pledged to send bills to Congress. These orders served as placeholders on complicated questions of infrastructure and energy, community safety, national security, immigration, ethics, tariffs, education and health care. Some of the directives had an immediate impact, such as urging far more aggressive deportations of individuals illegally resident in the United States; others had important but symbolic resonance, as in the formal removal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact (which had not yet even come into existence).

      Beyond Congress and the courts, Trump also needed executive branch cooperation to implement his orders, since many of them directed departments to review laws and regulations with an eye towards proposing revisions to existing policy or agency organization. For example, his February 9 EO declared that “it shall be the policy of the executive branch to reduce crime in America” and demanded that the attorney general report at least once a year on ways to improve government efforts in that regard. An April 25 order replaced the Rural Council created in 2011 with a twenty-plus person task force with a 180-day deadline for recommendations aimed at “promoting agriculture and rural prosperity in America.” Other directives setting similar deadlines—such as identifying tax burdens, reviewing environmental rules, reorganizing government departments, and setting regulatory budgets—were scheduled to come due throughout Trump’s first year in office. Here too, though, the slow pace of sub-Cabinet appointments meant that fewer resources were available to conduct and monitor the many studies the various directives put in motion. A study by The Intercept