President Donald Trump speaks with reporters as he signs executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House, Monday, Feb. 10, 2025, in Washington.
President Trump, in a burst of presidential action unmatched in modern U.S. history, has loosed a flurry of executive orders to shore up the border and deport illegal immigrants, dismantle the Washington bureaucracy, oust his opponents in the deep state and reset global alliances.
It has been just four weeks since his return to the Oval Office.
Mr. Trump has issued 90 executive orders, memorandums and directives, an average of three per day. That’s more than three times the pace of his first administration and more in four weeks than the combined number of similar actions by Presidents Biden, Obama and Clinton.
“The velocity is overwhelming,” said Ross Baker, a political science scholar at Rutgers University. “It is the political equivalent of a major military offensive, and the ground game isn’t quite being fought yet.”
The blitz of activity has stunned Trump opponents, who are scurrying to decide where to direct the resistance. Democrats’ slow, sporadic and splintered responses have angered party officials and voters alike. Democratic leaders have grappled with which issues to emphasize. Should the fight focus on Mr. Trump’s defiance of judges trying to block his orders or the impact of reduced foreign aid? Should it defend the value of civil servants or zero in on the alleged economic threat of Trump policies?
Only recently have Democrats coalesced around attacks on Department of Government Efficiency director Elon Musk as a boogeyman bent on pickpocketing Americans’ data and wallets.
“This is how Trump operates. He creates shock and awe, and executive orders are his tool of choice because it allows speed and brutality in a way that other actions don’t,” said Matthew Schmidt, a political science professor at the University of New Haven. “His first deadline is the 2026 midterms in 18 months.”
Polls show that Mr. Trump’s early actions have been popular with voters, and his job approval rating remains positive.
Mr. Trump has governed primarily by executive fiat. He has signed only one bill, the Laken Riley Act.
Named after the Georgia student killed by an illegal immigrant, the law orders the Department of Homeland Security to detain and thus speed the deportation of illegal immigrants who commit theft, burglary or shoplifting offenses, as well as crimes such as assaulting law enforcement or killing or seriously injuring someone.
Although Republicans control both chambers of Congress, their thin majority in the Senate empowers Democrats to kill most legislation with a filibuster.
Mr. Trump has turned to executive orders to take a wrecking ball to the federal bureaucracy, which he blames for thwarting most of his first-term agenda. He has used executive action to reduce the size of the federal workforce through buyouts and layoffs.
The executive orders included creating DOGE, freezing federal hiring, offering buyouts to roughly 2 million federal workers and ordering government employees to stop teleworking and return to the office.
Mr. Trump signed half the orders on his first day in the White House. A month later, he is still going strong.
He has intensified efforts to shrink the federal workforce by ordering agencies to lay off all probationary employees without civil service protection. This will affect hundreds of thousands of workers.
He made it easier to fire Foreign Service employees and empowered DOGE to cut agencies or subagencies.
Mr. Schmidt said the workforce cuts will have the most significant impact because “it’s the way he’s trying to remake the government.”
Unions representing federal workers went to court to stop or at least delay the cuts. Last week, a federal judge lifted the temporary pause on the buyouts, allowing Mr. Trump’s order to proceed. About 75,000 workers took the deal, far fewer than the White House estimate of 200,000.
Overhauling the nation’s immigration system has been the second biggest target of Mr. Trump’s executive orders. He has declared an emergency that frees up more border wall funding, denied birthright citizenship for children of illegal migrants and designated international gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.
A federal judge blocked the birthright citizenship order, which spawned at least eight lawsuits from coast to coast challenging the directive.
Craig Shirley, a presidential historian and conservative political consultant, said immigration orders will be the most significant actions in Mr. Trump’s first month.
“Nothing else can happen unless we secure the border,” he said. “The border is the root cause of inflation because we are spending so much money on illegals coming here. So much money is being spent from the federal budget, and Trump needs to stabilize this if he wants to achieve the things he wants to achieve.”
Other executive orders have limited practical effect but send political messages, such as the revoking of security clearances of dozens of officials, including Mr. Biden and his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.
Another order changed the Gulf of Mexico’s name to the Gulf of America and renamed Alaska’s Mount Denali to Mount McKinley. Both changes are entirely symbolic, though the Gulf of America action ignited a feud between the White House and The Associated Press, which refused to use the new moniker.
Mr. Trump also removed the chairman of the Kennedy Center, a performing arts center in Washington, and placed himself in charge.
A CBS News/YouGov poll found that the actions have generated positive reactions from Americans. An overwhelming majority of Americans described Mr. Trump as “tough” (69%), “energetic” (63%) and “focused” (60%). He earned a 53% approval rating in the poll, with 47% disapproving of his job.
A cautionary sign in the survey was that most Americans (66%) said Mr. Trump wasn’t focused enough on lowering prices. That result could prove perilous for Mr. Trump, who won the election partly by criticizing Mr. Biden’s economy and the high inflation on his watch.
Only a few of Mr. Trump’s executive orders have targeted inflation, which remains stubbornly high. He has issued a handful of orders that impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, reciprocal tariffs against nations taxing U.S. imports, and tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China. The tariffs on Canada and Mexico were temporarily halted for one month after the nations agreed to bolster security at their borders with the U.S.
Mr. Trump has acknowledged that Americans could feel the sting of such tariffs but has argued that they could lower inflation. His strategy is to use the money raised from the tariffs to cover the cost of his proposed tax cut.
“Prices could go up somewhat in the short term, but prices will also go down,” Mr. Trump said Thursday. “So Americans should prepare for some short-term pain.”
Mr. Baker, the Rutgers University scholar, said lowering prices takes time but warned that Americans might become impatient with the president if grocery bills remain high.
“Trump has bought himself a certain amount of latitude with the American, but it can’t last forever,” he said. “If the price of eggs is $10 a dozen three months from now, the distraction value of the executive orders will fade and he’ll pay a political price for the cascade of activity.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/feb/16/trump-record-breaking-start-rattles-district-rankl/
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