
Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Donald Trump signs an executive order to create the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Oval Office of the White House, January 20, 2025, in Washington, as White House staff secretary Will Scharf watches.
Donald Trump is president, and he wants you to know that on his first day, he got things done. A lot of things. Almost 100 things, or maybe 200 things; whatever number it takes to give the appearance of forward motion. This was a key insight that Joe Biden, now a private citizen, never bothered to learn: In a 24/7, post-by-post information environment, presidents making it clear that they are “doing things” matters a lot more than the substance, at least in short-term public perception.

Let’s speak the truth, a rare commodity over the next four years: The federal government takes action 200 times on a slow day. Like, that’s a day-after-Christmas level of workload. And many of these “actions” are just plans to make plans, or plans to write reports, many of which in Trump’s first term were not completed (I know, I tracked them all). Others are really important, though sometimes not in the way you think. Others are asking for legal challenge so deeply that there’s already litigation in place.
What this moment calls for is clarity: to contextualize and explain, clearly and succinctly, what Trump is doing and who really benefits. So that’s what we’re going to do today. Below, you will find a rolling tally of the most important executive orders and their meaning, compiled by our staff. Keep checking back for updates.
As David Dayen noted, one of the most futile of Trump’s executive orders is the one titled “Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis.” It recalls King Canute’s command to hold back the tide—and is worth a closer look.
The order directs all heads of executive departments to take “appropriate actions to: lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply; eliminate unnecessary administrative expenses and rent-seeking practices that increase healthcare costs; eliminate counterproductive requirements that raise the costs of home appliances; create employment opportunities for American workers, including drawing discouraged workers into the labor force; and eliminate harmful, coercive ‘climate’ policies that increase the costs of food and fuel.” The agencies are to report back within 30 days.
The problem is that the federal government has no short-term leverage over any of these prices. Ironically, long-term leverage would require the very progressive policies that are anathema to Trump.
Lower the cost of housing? How about a major social-housing program, or rent control? How about “drawing discouraged workers into the labor force” with higher wages? And how about much tighter regulation of abusive health care industry practices to reduce “rent-seeking” in that sector?
On the more visible sources of inflation, such as the price of eggs (mainly the result of bird flu), or the prices of commodity crops such as coffee that have risen because of extreme weather events, Trump’s executive order has even less leverage.
According to the King Canute legend, the king was well aware that the tide would wet his trousers. He issued the command to show his courtiers that some things were beyond even the command of kings. Does Trump know as much? –Robert Kuttner
Our new president wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Something in excess of 90 percent of the Gulf is in international waters, so Trump’s jurisdiction chiefly extends to the waves that flood states from Texas to Florida during hurricane season. Still, Trump surely sees this as the kind of zero-sum statecraft that humiliates the loser and thereby elevates him: in this case, boosting America while bashing Mexico (and confusing mapmakers), and owning the libs and RINOs in the process.
Historically, though, how have the world’s major bodies of water gotten their names? The Atlantic was first so dubbed by a sixth-century BCE Greek poet who called it the Atlantikôi pelágei, the “Sea of Atlas.” The Pacific was named by the first global circumnavigator, Ferdinand Magellan, who, after battling torrential waves while rounding the southern tip of South America in 1520, was so relieved to find calm waters on the far side of the Atlantic that he named those waters the Mare Pacificum.
Get the picture? It’s usually not heads of government who name, let alone rename, the great waters that separate the continents and that border on many sovereign states that could claim naming rights of their own. To be sure, the Roman Empire termed the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum—our sea. That bit of chutzpah, however, didn’t outlive the Roman Empire, until the Italian neo-chutzpadik and paleo-fascist Benito Mussolini revived that name when he came to power in the 1920s. It died again, alongside Italian fascism and Mussolini himself, as World War II ground to a close.
Today, however, Italian fascism is back, and if there was ever a Mussolini wannabe, he’s in the White House now. Invading Panama would hark back to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, going to war for no apparent reason except that the country you’re invading clearly can’t fight back and will yield a quick victory. Personalizing government and surrounding oneself with flunkies was, and is, the only modus operandi that these megalomaniacs deem suited to their unchallengeable powers of judgment. Trump’s affinity for the columns of neoclassical architecture (yet another executive order requires new federal buildings to conform to that style) goes Il Duce (a fan of fascist-moderne) one better by harking all the way back to the grandeur of the Roman emperors. And as for slapping your name on a property you don’t actually own … hell, that’s how Trump’s been doing business for decades. Around the next bend of the river, Mare Trumpus awaits. –Harold Meyerson
You may have heard of the latest enemy of the Trump administration: a three-inch Californian fish called the delta smelt. Trump issued an executive order requiring California to pump more water from the delta smelt’s native habitat in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta down to Central Valley farms and southern cities.
Trump and the smelt have been at war since his first administration, when Trump put forth a proposal that would redirect water from the delta to the south of the state.
To quickly sum up California’s water woes: Water isn’t evenly distributed across the state, forcing California to decide who gets what water, and how. But the process of pumping water from one part of the state to another can damage ecosystems like the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, salinating the water and disrupting the balance that allows its species to thrive.
In 2020, California Gov. Gavin Newsom sued to block the Trump administration from pumping all that water out of the delta, citing concern for native species like the winter-run Chinook salmon and, yes, the delta smelt.
Trump argues that Newsom’s block of the water diversion policy is the reason Southern California is struggling to fight its devastating fires this winter. The executive order creates a false choice between the life of a fish and the lives of Californians, used conveniently to justify a policy of getting cheap water to wealthy conservative agribusiness interests in the Central Valley. But the order confuses the issue. According to Mark Gold, a water official in Southern California, the Metropolitan Water District currently has a record amount of water stored.
The real issue that’s made the fires so devastating is the dryness of the vegetation in the area caused by years of drought. The hillsides are tinderboxes. At the end of the day, California’s water and fire management will always be a balancing act between the environment and the needs of cities and farms. But destroying the habitat of a fish won’t do anything to stop the climate crisis that has exacerbated California’s drought and made the fires so horrific. –Emma Janssen
One of the most anticipated day one actions from President Trump was an executive order signed yesterday temporarily allowing TikTok to remain active in the U.S. For at least 75 days, the Trump administration will not enforce the existing law against TikTok or service providers like app stores that host the platform, until the government can work out an arrangement to keep it active under new ownership.
It’s highly unlikely that an executive order can be used in this way to un-enforce standing law passed by Congress, or that this action was even necessary in the first place.
Last year, Congress passed a bill forcing TikTok to divest its ownership or face a ban in the U.S. because of national-security concerns about an adversary nation, in this case the Chinese Communist Party, controlling a major communications platform. That law, which became effective on January 19, includes a potential 90-day extension while new ownership is being sorted out. This provision indicates that Trump could have invoked that extension to legally keep the platform active. But he didn’t. Why the Trump administration chose 75 days and a separate nonenforcement order instead isn’t clear.
Legal experts doubt that an executive order can just void statutory law and believe it will likely face a court challenge. On top of that, boilerplate language in the order says that it “is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States,” when dropping enforcement of a law does precisely that.
The weekend before the inauguration, the Supreme Court issued a 9-0 ruling upholding the law and striking down TikTok’s claim that it was infringement on its First Amendment rights for corporations. TikTok then mounted a pressure campaign to rile up its user base by voluntarily discontinuing services for about 24 hours. For several hours, an image on the site notifying users about the shutdown thanked Donald Trump for pledging to save the site. TikTok sponsored an inauguration party for the president, and CEO Shou Chew attended the ceremony.
But Trump didn’t really help out TikTok with this order; he put them and companies that distribute the app in ongoing legal peril. –Luke Goldstein
Let’s get this renaming stuff straight.
By executive order, President Trump has declared that Denali—North America’s highest mountain, in Alaska—will revert to its old name, Mount McKinley. In 2015, President Obama de-McKinleyized the mountain by giving it the name by which Alaska’s tribes had long called it, and that Alaskans (including a Republican legislature and governor) had asked for.
In recent weeks, though, President William McKinley (1897–1901) has become a Trump favorite for having refashioned the United States from a republic to an empire by waging the Spanish-American War and converting its spoils into colonies, both de jure (the Philippines, Puerto Rico) and de facto (Cuba). But the mountain wasn’t named for McKinley in tribute to his seizure of foreign lands. In fact, his name was first floated for mountainhood in 1896 and 1897, while McKinley’s war and foreign seizures didn’t even begin until 1898.
Rather, it was named after McKinley by a venture capitalist of that day: a prospector hoping to find and speculate in gold during the great Northwest gold rushes of the 1890s. He named the mountain for McKinley because, as the Republican presidential nominee in 1896, McKinley favored keeping U.S. currency on the gold standard, while his Democratic rival, William Jennings Bryan, favored minting silver coins, which he believed would bring down interest rates as wished by his political base, America’s farmers. Bryan ran the most anti-bank campaign since Andrew Jackson, and also assailed the huge corporations that had arisen since Jackson’s time.
The commonality between McKinley and Trump is their dependence on the nation’s richest men. Because Bryan posed so fundamental a threat to America’s great fortunes, McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, persuaded the masters of the Gilded Age to fund McKinley’s campaign, marking the first time the nation’s OG robber barons plunged into presidential politics. John D. Rockefeller coughed up a cool quarter-million, while J.P. Morgan did the same. If that sounds paltry by today’s standards, $250,000 in 1896 amounted to nearly 0.002 percent of the gross national product (then $16 billion), and you have to go all the way to 2024 to find a contribution so large that it’s even remotely comparable to theirs (Elon Musk’s $277 million, which comes to just under 0.001 percent of the nation’s current GDP of $29 trillion). Trump historical ignorance is such that he surely doesn’t realize his real link to McKinley is that each is his respective generation’s robber barons’ boy. –Harold Meyerson
For the second time in five years, the United States is on the outs with the global community on climate change. The signatories of the Paris Agreement, negotiated by some 200 countries in 2015, had hoped to stave off increases in planetary warming and substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The agreement also put developed countries on notice that it is incumbent upon them to aid small developing countries with climate mitigation and renewable-energy strategies.
After acrimonious rounds of debate at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, the annual meeting of the signatories, countries pledged to raise at least $1.3 trillion through public and private contributions each year to finance a climate rescue package for these countries. The U.S. and other developed countries were on the hook for $300 billon each year, three times their previous pledge of $100 billion per year. President Biden had raised the country’s total climate finance contributions, including those pledges, from $1.5 billion in fiscal 2021 to $9.5 billion in fiscal 2023.
After his inauguration, President Trump announced his intention to exit the agreement—just as he did in 2017, explaining it doesn’t jibe with the country’s values or environmental and economic goals. The order specifically pointed to the U.S. International Climate Finance Plan, which was intended to boost climate finance and “enhance its impact.” That plan was “revoked and rescinded immediately.” (The “COP 29 Update to the U.S. International Climate Finance Plan” has been deleted from the State Department website.)
Removing the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter from the pact is a decisive blow to international efforts to moderate temperatures on an overheating planet. It also hampers the financial effort to provide assistance to small countries and island nations that are already suffering from the effects of rising seas and increasing temperatures. –Gabrielle Gurley
President Trump’s pardon last night of the thugs who attacked and in some cases seriously injured the Capitol Police four years ago raises some interesting questions. Should the Capitol Police not have tried to defend Congress? By extension, should any police put themselves at risk when Republicans are attacked? At minimum, shouldn’t they be required to ascertain the politics of the attackers before they put themselves on the line?
Keep in mind that Trump is not alone in his belief that Congress’s cops should not have defended Congress. A number of House Republicans voted against a bill to award gold medals to the cops who’d protected them on January 6th. It was a minority of House Republicans, to be sure, but now that Trump has pardoned his goons, congressional Republicans, in best Kevin McCarthy–Mike Johnson fashion, are obliged to go along.
These are questions that should be put to Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI, when the Senate holds his confirmation hearings. If the new governmental policy that Trump has just rolled out means that elected Republicans oppose their being protected by police, the nation should hear about it. That would enable police to focus their duties on protecting and serving everybody else. Win-win, as they say. –Harold Meyerson
Project 2025’s most obscure yet widely discussed provision involved something called “Schedule F,” a means to purge the federal workforce of anyone disloyal to the king by rewriting civil service protections. Specifically, the concept redesignates tens of thousands of federal employees who undertake so-called “significant duties” as “Schedule F” hires, making them fireable at the will of the president.
Trump issued a Schedule F executive order in October 2020, and Joe Biden reversed it. On day one, Trump reissued the 2020 order, pitching it as an accountability measure for “policy-influencing” bureaucrats. They amusingly took out the whole “Schedule F” designation and changed it to “Policy/Career,” presumably because Schedule F got a bad rap when liberals found it in Project 2025. There’s also a funny addition insisting that Schedule Policy/Career employees “are not required to personally or politically support the current President or the policies of the current administration,” in a bid to eliminate any coerced-speech problems. But right after that, it says that these employees must follow administration policy under the authority of the president.
The basic concept—making it easier to fire certain federal workers—remains. But earlier this month, the researchers at Governing for Impact (GFI) made the case that rescheduling federal workers is wholly unlawful. Essentially, the order blows open a narrow exception to civil service protections for senior political officials and applies it to thousands of career workers across the government. That is at odds with federal statute and even the Constitution; the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 does not give the president authority to roll back protections for “policy-making” employees who are not political appointees, and this was restated in formal rules just last year by the Office of Personnel Management. If anything should trigger the “major questions” doctrine, it’s Trump finding the authority to fire tens of thousands of workers in a narrow, defined exception. And the due process clause of the Constitution prohibits at-will firings without statutory procedures being followed, GFI says, particularly if the redesignation was made after the employee was hired and granted these rights.
So this idea of making America use the spoils system again isn’t legally sound, and I’d expect federal workers to sue to block it. UPDATE: The lawsuit has been filed. –David Dayen
President Trump’s first action regarding American automakers was a direct assault on the Biden administration’s historic programs to cut American transportation emissions. Trump signed an executive order that would terminate all funding under the Inflation Reduction Act, including funding for electric-vehicle chargers.
If successful, Trump’s action would first plunge a knife into the back of legacy American auto companies and their workforces. It is plainly obvious that the global car industry is going to settle on EV technology sooner or later, and these companies have spent tens of billions of dollars, helped by billions in federal funding, retooling their factories to try to keep up with Chinese automakers, which are far ahead on the technology curve. Key to that effort is sufficient public charging infrastructure so as to enable long trips. This action cuts the legs out from under Ford, GM, and others just as those investments were starting to pay off.
But more importantly, Trump is attempting to overturn the constitutional structure of how America spends money. As budget analyst Bobby Kogan explains, the president cannot just halt spending authorized by Congress without a new law being passed. Such “impoundment” was explicitly banned by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. But should this action stand, Trump will have a free hand to steal your tax dollars and give them to whomever he wants—perhaps himself. –Ryan Cooper
Trump’s zeal for executive actions is a real problem for Congress. The rules of budget reconciliation say that all budgetary changes must zero out after the ten-year budget window. The Republicans want to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. That’s going to cost something like $5 trillion, making any offsets to the tax revenue loss precious.
But if Trump sticks a reversal of something that saves money into an executive order, that savings cannot also be used in legislation. The offset is “lost” for the purposes of budget scoring. And Republicans in Congress don’t have any offsets to lose.
Republicans know this; it’s why they pleaded with Trump to leave anything that can be scored by the Congressional Budget Office as saving money out of the initial EO flurry. But what’s that story about the scorpion and the frog?
Trump, in his “Unleashing American Energy” executive order, announced plans to suspend the so-called “EV mandate,” which refers to a rule by the Environmental Protection Agency that reduces tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. Eliminating the tailpipe emissions rule was one of the budget-saving options in the House Ways and Means Committee, worth $467 billion over ten years according to the document. It’s hard to imagine how they arrive at that figure, but the point is that this $467 billion is now gone, unavailable to offset the tax cuts. If this continues, there won’t be enough left for the tax cut bill, and Republicans will have to resort to another time limit or (heaven forbid) fewer tax cuts. –David Dayen
While many of Trump’s day one executive orders take effect immediately, his order for an “America First Trade Policy,” uncharacteristically, kicks the can down the road. Trump has talked about 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, across-the-board tariffs on all imports, and even more severe retaliatory measures targeted against China.
But his executive order does none of these. Rather, it is an extended series of directives to different agencies of government on the feasibility of different trade and tariff measures. It almost looks like the work of a president who is serious about governing.
The directives include reports on the causes of the chronic U.S. trade deficit, the possible creation of an External Revenue Service to administer tariffs, a tally of unfair foreign trade practices, the impact of the USMCA, currency manipulation, likely countries for bilateral or sectoral trade negotiations, the “de minimis” exemption, discriminatory extraterritorial taxes, impact of trade agreements on federal procurement, the results of the China Phase 1 deal from his first term, and a good deal more.
Why this most un-Trumpian approach? First, someone has persuaded him that trade policy really is complicated. Second, his administration is divided between Wall Street internationalists and MAGA yahoos.
It’s too soon to break out the (imported) champagne, but this pause at least slows down Trump’s most reckless impulses. –Robert Kuttner
One of the Biden administration’s successful law enforcement operations against the forces of Trumpian lawlessness was the prosecution of the January 6th putschists. The Department of Justice spent tremendous amounts of time and money (so much that it reportedly interfered with the prosecution of Trump himself) successfully prosecuting almost 1,600 people for crimes like criminal trespass, assaulting police officers, insurrection, and seditious conspiracy.
Now Donald Trump is president once again, and among his first actions was a blanket pardon or commutation of everyone charged in this investigation. Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys who was serving 22 years for seditious conspiracy, got a pardon, while Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, got a commutation. Robert Keith Packer, who wore a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie to the putsch, got a pardon; Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who reportedly wore a Hitler mustache to work for the Navy, got a commutation.
This has two immediate effects. The first is to set loose a large number of dangerous insurrectionists who may well form the core of a Sturmabteilung-style paramilitary force. The second is a signal that federal law enforcement will almost certainly not hold anyone who commits crimes or violence on behalf of Trump accountable so long as he is president. –Ryan Cooper
Nowhere is the imaginary nature of many executive actions in this flurry more apparent than in the one entitled “Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis.” It starts with a false preamble about inflation being brought about from domestic spending and regulatory burdens; the words “COVID” and “pandemic” do not appear, nor is the global nature of inflation addressed. There’s a section about an alleged “assault on plentiful and reliable American energy”; for better or worse, America is producing more fossil fuel energy than ever before and became a net energy exporter for the first time since the 1950s. And the man who signed into law the largest amount of domestic spending to increase pandemic demand was, of course, Donald Trump.
But that’s not where the absurdity comes in. To reverse this regulatory burden (the whole thing about spending gets forgotten midway through a five-paragraph executive order), Trump demands “all executive departments and agencies to deliver emergency price relief, consistent with applicable law, to the American people.” Oh! I didn’t realize there was a button that said “emergency price relief” in every executive agency. Why didn’t anyone think of that!
This is really just an invitation to deregulate, on the theory that companies will gratefully lower prices if their compliance burden is lifted. Forgive me for invoking the theory of supply and demand, but something tells me that’ll play a role! (There’s a small nod to increasing housing supply, but first-term Trump opposed housing density policies on the grounds that they would “destroy the suburbs,” so what’s the new plan?)
The fun part about this is that there’s a rolling 30-day deadline for reporting about what the Trump administration did to lower prices in this emergency. There’s also a 30-day update on inflation, which has been slowly rising of late. So we can check this work against reality. I don’t think the boss will be pleased. –David Dayen
The first order signed on Monday was really 80 orders in one. Trump rescinded executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations spanning the length of Biden’s presidency, including one issued just three days earlier. In all, Trump rescinded 42.4 percent of all the EOs Biden signed during his term. And he reserved the right to rescind future orders recommended by his team within the next 45 days.
It’s notable what orders, for now, Trump left alone: one that increased the minimum wage for federal contractors, for example, or the expansive order promoting competition in the U.S. economy, or every single EO Biden made to protect access to reproductive services. Orders on caregiving, HBCUs, murdered Native Americans, and even reducing gun violence were left alone.
But the rescinded order that caught my eye was Executive Order 14006, which eliminated the use of privately operated criminal detention facilities. Keep in mind that Trump billed this effort primarily as rooting out “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from the government. Bringing back privately operated detention doesn’t serve that purpose at all. It simply enriches the private prison duopoly, GEO Group and CoreCivic. Both company’s stocks have soared since the election, and now, both stand to gain billions in federal contracts, mostly to detain undocumented immigrants. It’s a big win for GEO Group’s former lobbyist, attorney general nominee Pam Bondi. –David Dayen