
Matt Rourke/AP Photo
President Donald Trump throws pens used to sign executive orders to the crowd during an indoor inauguration parade event in Washington, January 20, 2025.
Since the inauguration, the Prospect has been dedicated to contextualizing and explaining, clearly and succinctly, what Donald Trump is doing in office with his early executive actions, and who really benefits. You can find our first two days of roundups, with nearly two dozen explanations of various executive actions, here and here. We continue that work today. Keep checking back for updates throughout the day.

During the 1,461 days of his first term as president, Donald Trump spent 133 of them in his Mar-a-Lago mansion and 24 of them in his Trump Tower apartment on New York’s Fifth Avenue, as well as visiting his golf courses in Bedminster, New Jersey, 99 times, in Northern Virginia 85 times, and West Palm Beach 83 times. You might think our peripatetic president would therefore understand that some of the million-plus federal employees might also find it easier to work from home on occasion.
Apparently not.
On Wednesday, Trump’s Office of Personnel Management ordered all federal departments and agencies to issue full-time Return to Office orders by tomorrow (Friday), stipulating that those orders had to be fully in effect for all employees within the next 30 days. The order requires those departments and agencies to unilaterally abrogate contractual agreements with unionized employees that allowed for periods of work from home, but hey, since when do contracts with workers have to be honored?
The order notes that “President Trump was elected with the mandate to increase the efficiency and accountability of the federal workforce.” As I noted in my commentary on another Trump executive order, which requires federal employees to inform on any of their fellow workers who they think are surreptitiously refusing to dismantle DEI policies or are working in DEI positions, and which actually threatens federal employees if they don’t rat out those fellow workers, Trump believes that nothing will increase the efficiency of the federal workforce like having some workers spy on and seek to terminate their fellow workers. Or spy on and seek to terminate fellow workers not themselves involved in DEI but who haven’t informed on fellow workers who are.
So getting everyone back into the office creates a critical mass of workers sufficient to split that office into Trump flunkies and everybody else, and thus creates a pathway to getting rid of everybody else. What better way to purge our government of the unduly conscientious or those besotted by empiricism? –Harold Meyerson
One of only two Republicans to vote against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense was Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. And like a number of Alaska Republicans, she was annoyed with President Trump’s executive order renaming Denali as Mount McKinley. “You can’t improve upon the name that Alaska’s Koyukon Athabascans bestowed on North America’s tallest peak, Denali: the Great One,” Murkowski said in a statement.
Trump’s only mode is transactional, so it’s amusing that in the realm of executive orders, he tried to compensate for the disappointment Alaska politicians felt about Denali by giving the state its own separate executive order about all the great natural resources he wants to pull out of the ground below Alaskans’ feet. Trump framed it as ending “the assault on Alaska’s sovereignty,” by restarting Alaska liquefied natural gas projects, reopening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling, inviting logging in the state’s Tongass National Forest, and moving forward on the Ambler Road project that would increase mining.
ANWR, of course, is a key priority of Murkowski’s; she inserted a provision into the 2017 Trump tax law that required lease sales there. And when Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), who also opposes the renaming of Denali, was asked about it by Semafor, he could only gush about the second order on energy production. “Read that executive order,” Sullivan said, taking it out of his pocket to show to the reporter. “Yesterday was a great day for Alaska.”
Trump is just doing what he did as a private businessman: buying off politicians. In this case, to get America’s tallest mountain named after his hero again, he’s promising to exploit every last inch of Alaska for hydrocarbons. And the oil-soaked establishment in The Last Frontier are loving every minute of it. –David Dayen
As everybody knows, the way to produce the most effective workforce—a primary concern of Elon Musk and other Trump efficiency experts—is to set that workforce against itself. The ensuing lack of trust in one’s colleagues creates the kind of Hobbesian state of nature that invariably produces results (albeit not invariably positive ones). The kind of “nasty, brutish, and short” life that Donald Trump is now urging on federal employees will doubtless spur the kind of worker turnover that has led companies like Amazon (where the yearly rate of turnover among warehouse workers is 150 percent!) to record stock valuations.
To this end, an executive order sent out to tens of thousands of federal workers yesterday threatened them with “adverse consequences” if they didn’t report on fellow employees who were slow or deficient in scrapping diversity, equity, and inclusion criteria at their respective department or agency.
“There will be no adverse consequences for timely reporting this information,” the message reassuringly began. “However, failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.” The Trump appointees at the Department of Homeland Security, clearly made of sterner stuff, changed the wording from “may result” to “will result.”
In other words, not only is working in DEI sufficient grounds for dismissal, but failure to rat out such scoundrels is grounds for dismissal, too. There’s ample precedent for such policies, of course. Joseph Stalin famously encouraged neighbors to turn on each other and workers to accuse their superiors of disloyalty during Stalin’s purges. This enabled the commendably ambitious to move into their neighbors’ suddenly vacant apartments or get their onetime bosses’ jobs. It also produced the kind of upwardly mobile yet cohesive society that is the reason why the Soviet Union thrives to this very day. –Harold Meyerson
The effort to overhaul birthright citizenship is now stalled thanks to U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour in Washington state, a Reagan appointee who did not hold back in his contempt for this jurisprudential malpractice.
Interestingly, Coughenour gave the states standing, because they would lose out on federal funding if they had fewer American citizens for certain per capita grants, as well as operational costs to carry out the executive order. Citizens of the states also had standing. The student loan relief cases, ironically, broke the seal on granting states more widespread standing in federal litigation. It’s going to come back to haunt the Trump administration. See here for more on that.
Meanwhile, Coughenour said there was a “strong likelihood” that the executive order was unconstitutional on the merits, citing past cases that confirmed the birthright citizenship grant in the 14h Amendment. In a hearing today, he was far more direct. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order. Where were the lawyers when this decision was being made? … Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.”
This is a temporary restraining order, granted for 14 days as the case plays out. But it’s not exactly good for Trump that the judge labeled this the easiest decision he’s ever had to make. –David Dayen
Not that this is in any way surprising, but there are two kinds of police in the world according to, and nation ruled by, Donald Trump. There are bad police, whom it’s perfectly OK to attack when they defend lawmakers who decline to elevate Trump’s interests over the requirements of constitutional law, and the expressed wishes of American voters. And there will be bad police if they decline to separate children from their parents in enforcing Trump’s war on immigrants, or decline to arrest governors who refuse to go along with such practices.
On the other hand, there are good police if they shoot first and ask questions later (if at all), or wound or murder the people they’re arresting (whether or not they’re resisting) or just chasing for a broken taillight—and most especially, it seems, when the alleged miscreants are Black. That latter principle was made clear yesterday when Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice ordered the Civil Rights Division to halt any pending cases or settlements with police departments that have engaged in such practices. Three such settlements were the consent decrees that the Biden Justice Department had reached with the police departments of Memphis, Louisville (where the police had killed Breonna Taylor in her bed), and Minneapolis (where a policeman had slowly choked George Floyd to death). Those consent decrees required the departments to change the practices that had led to these killings and other gross violations of rights; now, they are in limbo, and appear almost certain to be discarded.
A good Trump cop, that is, uses violence against Blacks, liberals, and just plain citizens who place constitutional principles over Donald Trump’s desires. A bad cop, outrageously, defends the equal administration of justice under law. Is that perfectly clear? –Harold Meyerson
The conservative argument against affirmative action has always been based on fairness. It’s wrong, by this view, to reserve jobs or university slots in any way for women or minorities when (supposedly) equally qualified white men are available. That’s the argument the right-wing Supreme Court majority used in banning even a modest form of affirmative action in universities recently.
Now, of course it is highly unfair for people to experience centuries of discrimination and not receive any compensatory action when that discrimination ends, and many of the right-wing scare stories about affirmative action turn out to be fabricated.
But we are now seeing that the fairness argument was a head fake. The actual conservative goal is to bring back explicit discrimination.
To wit: In his first spree of executive orders, President Trump first banned all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs across the entire federal government. But then, in a much more alarming set of steps, he revoked President Johnson’s 1965 executive order banning discrimination among federal contractors; his appointees at the Department of Justice have now ordered a halt to all civil rights litigation, and even “signaled that it might back out of Biden-era agreements with police departments that engaged in discrimination or violence,” The New York Times reports.
It was always preposterous to think that discrimination magically ended in the 1960s. When the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act back in 2013, removing “preclearance” requirements in Southern electoral districts with a history of egregious racism, those districts immediately went back to discriminating blatantly.
Some conservative elites are not even bothering to hide what they are up to. Richard Hanania wrote an entire book about how the dread phenomenon of “wokeness” can be traced to civil rights legislation. In response to a liberal critic pointing out the right’s anti–civil rights agenda, the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo recently posted a gloating “gigachad” meme on Twitter. The logical conclusion is the MAGA right intends to create a national version of Jim Crow: a permanent Republican one-party state enforced by terrorist violence. –Ryan Cooper
The set of executive actions dealing with energy have been interesting. First off, they exist in an alternate reality where we are in an energy “emergency,” when we’re a net exporter of fossil fuels, the biggest natural gas exporter in the world, etc. (To the extent we are in an emergency, lending public support to a massive ramp-up in energy use at AI data centers might be one reason!)
Second, Trump made a big deal out of ending the pause on approving LNG terminals when in fact a federal judge had already overturned that pause.
Third, I have been told for the entirety of the Biden administration that any changes in permitting would solely benefit renewable energy, because fossil fuel companies can already get their projects permitted easily. That’s not what Donald Trump thinks! His energy orders seek to create “permit by rule” to greenlight multiple projects at once. But this is only for oil and gas pipelines, coal plants—infrastructure that relies on hydrocarbons—along with a few other favored industries (biofuels, hydropower, nuclear). It’s almost like the desired outcome is driving the permitting improvement. Funny how that works!
Fourth, wind has borne the brunt of the attacks in the war on renewables; solar has avoided most of the restrictions thus far. Fortunately, no solar company tried to build an offshore platform in front of Trump’s golf course in Scotland.
Fifth, Trump is simultaneously trying to restore domestic development of rare earth minerals and stop development of the kind of energy projects that require … rare earth minerals. I guess this is in the category of “If people want something, let’s hoard it.” It’s a technique financiers use to corner markets.
And sixth, Trump got rid of a Biden executive order on climate-related financial risk. Banks had already been backpedaling away from their climate commitments, and the Federal Reserve dropped out of the Network for Greening the Financial System, a coalition of central banks, the Friday before the inauguration. This opens a major financial risk that eventually will catch up with the world, and when that crisis hits, we should remember this moment. –David Dayen
President Trump, as part of sweeping changes to the federal bureaucracy, has imposed unprecedented harsh restrictions on the National Institutes of Health. All travel has been canceled, ruining many important conferences. All agency communications have been banned until further notice, blocking a highly anticipated report on the festering avian flu outbreak that has killed millions of birds, and could cause another pandemic if it mutates to enable human-to-human transmission. Worst of all, all study sections, which are required to disburse NIH’s $40 billion in grants—supporting some 300,000 working scientists at thousands of universities—are also halted indefinitely.
These decisions may be reversed, but damage is already accumulating fast, and the outlook is bleak.
The NIH is arguably the premier institution of medical research in the world. Founded in 1887, its scientists and grant programs have advanced countless groundbreaking discoveries, like the structure of DNA, chemotherapy, and the mRNA vaccine. NIH scientist Barney Graham designed the core of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine over a single weekend. Its scientists and grants have supported work that has won 174 Nobel Prizes and counting; most recently the chemist David Baker in 2024.
In short, NIH is the kind of thing that used to be recognized as central to both American prosperity and geopolitical influence. The social and strategic benefits to owning such an immensely successful research complex are immense. Even Trump in his first term did not meddle that much with the agency.
But in his second term, Trump stands at the head of a rising tide of vengeful, crackbrained irrationalism that might well end American scientific pre-eminence. Witness Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his nominee to run NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services—a delusional, paranoid anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist. It would be hard to imagine a worse person for the job. This nomination by itself could conceivably cause a bird flu pandemic.
It wouldn’t be the first time a country lobotomized itself in a fit of pique. Before 1933, Germany was the clear world leader in academic research and achievement, winning far more Nobel Prizes than any other country. Hitler and the Nazis blew that up in a crusade against liberalism and “Jewish science,” driving most top researchers across Europe (like Albert Einstein) to Britain or the U.S., where many of them worked on the Manhattan Project. German science never recovered fully. –Ryan Cooper
The lawsuits are piling up as much as the executive actions. The latest, released late on Wednesday, came from the American Civil Liberties Union over the Trump administration’s fast-track deportation policy.
Expedited removal allows the government to quickly deport someone without having to bring them before an immigration judge, unless they express a credible fear of being returned to their home county, allowing them to seek asylum. The Biden administration instituted expedited removal in 2022, but it could only be used within 100 miles of the border, or in the event of new arrivals. The new Department of Homeland Security policy removed those limitations, allowing for expedited deportations for undocumented immigrants from anywhere for up to two years after their arrival and continuous stay in the country. These rules are already being followed in the field.
The ACLU argues that this violates the due process clause of the Constitution. As a press announcement notes, Americans contesting a traffic violation get more due process under this rule than immigrants contesting their expulsion from the country. The complaint also alleges widespread errors with the process that have deported people improperly. It cites violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, claiming that someone in the interior of the country doesn’t match the profile of who can be deported without judicial action, and that the quick executive action doesn’t accord with administrative law.
The ACLU also contested expanded expedited removal in the first Trump term, initially getting a preliminary injunction. A D.C. appeals court eventually ruled that Trump did not violate the Administrative Procedure Act, but the rest of the case was not completed in the first term. Now it resumes again in the second.
Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, frustrated with not having a global pandemic to use as a pretense to keep immigrants out, issued an order to deny asylum under “Title 42” public-health policy if the migrant “traveled through a country with communicable disease.” This would include approximately every country; presumably, the common cold would qualify. It shuts off asylum to essentially everyone, in violation of national law and international treaty. I’d assume this is the next thing to draw a lawsuit. –David Dayen
Continuing its campaign against immigrants, the Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded the “sensitive locations” policy that prohibited Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from arresting migrants in or near schools, churches, and hospitals.
The policy, which was implemented in 2011, meant that undocumented people could attend funerals, get medical care, and send their children to school without fear of deportation. Now, that small glimmer of safety is gone.
Reports from cities with large immigrant communities are already confirming that Trump’s threats of mass deportation have increased fear. In Chicago, a usually bustling thoroughfare in the 75 percent Mexican American neighborhood Little Village was silent on Tuesday night. In California, some parents have been keeping their children home from school.
And perhaps that increased fear is the point, pushing immigrants underground and making life in America more and more difficult. Trump and his allies are pushing for what Mitt Romney in 2012 called “self-deportation,” the idea that the government can use policy to drive immigrants out of the country without using physical force.
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has also suggested this strategy: “If you wanna self-deport, you should self-deport because, again, we know who you are, and we’re gonna come and find you,” he said.
The decision to rescind the “sensitive locations” policy came from acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Benjamine Huffman, who was empowered by a number of Trump’s executive orders that allow the administration to “take all appropriate action to repel, repatriate, or remove any alien engaged in the invasion across the southern border.”
A DHS spokesperson said that the policy would ensure that “criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.” Of course, the only people hiding in America’s schools are children who are there to learn, and the administration knows that. The spokesperson also said that ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents will “use common sense” when they conduct raids, putting the decision to raid schools or hospitals into the hands of individual agents and removing an essential safeguard against the repression of immigrant communities. –Emma Janssen