
Ben Curtis/AP Photo
President Donald Trump signs an executive order relating to cryptocurrency, in the Oval Office of the White House, January 23, 2025, in Washington.
Welcome back to our liveblog of the early executive actions of the Trump administration. Since Inauguration Day, the Prospect has been contextualizing and explaining, clearly and succinctly, what Donald Trump is doing in office with his early executive actions, and who really benefits. We have now compiled coverage of over 30 executive actions over the past three days (here are the links: Day One, Day Two, Day Three).
We continue that work today. Keep checking back for updates throughout the day.

Deportation orders have begun, though whether they constitute “mass” deportation is in question. Reports have been pouring in from around the country, some in out-of-the-way places like Kentucky and Iowa. Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, publicly announced an ICE raid in his city (it was at a local fish market, I’m told) that was conducted without a warrant and detained several people, including an American citizen and former veteran whose show of papers was initially questioned. (He was eventually let go.) A Chicago elementary school was visited by ICE agents today, also without a warrant, and they were denied entry to the school, as per local protocols.
White House officials have backpedaled in recent weeks from their earlier boasts of widespread deportation actions; one much-discussed raid expected right after the inauguration was put on hold. The trickle rather than firehose is perhaps out of recognition that the government simply doesn’t have the manpower to carry out mass raids. The change in policy to deputize state and local law enforcement as ICE agents perhaps springs from this labor shortage.
This is not to say that Trump’s deportation agenda is merely a whimper. He’s been planning to remove new arrivals who were protected under humanitarian parole (about 1.4 million people), and expanding the ability to remove people from the interior of the country. Those hard-liners fretting that Trump’s not being tough enough (they’re out there) shouldn’t worry.
But at some level, even the sporadic raids have the desired impact. Nobody, either workers or shoppers, is likely to come back to that fish market in Newark again. And as word spreads even about small raids, regardless of their legality or proper process, immigrants begin to fear leaving the house, cease being able to work or pray, and maybe start thinking about packing up and leaving. That chilling effect is the desired effect, to march people back to whatever misery they escaped seeking a better life. The goal is for migrants to do ICE’s work for them. And it will work, to some degree. –David Dayen
Perhaps the weirdest priority in President Trump’s spree of executive orders is his crusade against efficient appliances. He would “safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads,” according to one order, and will “eliminate counterproductive requirements that raise the costs of home appliances,” per another.
Trump claims, without evidence, that “unprecedented regulatory oppression from the Biden Administration is estimated to have imposed almost $50,000 in costs on the average American household.”
This number is preposterous—indeed, the opposite of true. A core intention of the (quite modest) regulations on appliance efficiency going back decades has been to nudge the market toward devices that use fewer resources, and therefore cut Americans’ bills. As Rachel Cohen covered at Washington Monthly years ago, for instance, light bulb regulations under the Bush and Obama administrations successfully advanced the deployment of LED bulbs, which are now as cheap and good as incandescents, use about 90 percent less power, and last much longer.
Another Biden administration priority has been to advance dryer efficiency, aiming to eventually make heat pump technology the industry standard. Not only do these use about 70 percent less electricity than traditional dryers, they also don’t vent your conditioned air to the outside, saving even more in hot or cold months. They also do not require a 240-volt circuit, saving yet more in construction costs. Though they cost more up front (for now), they can easily pay for themselves in a few years.
It’s hard to know how Trump acquired this fixation. He has been claiming for years that toilets don’t flush properly anymore, requiring 10 to 15 flushes to dispose of his waste, and that showers don’t get his hair wet enough at a mere 2.5 gallons per minute. I’m not sure what he’s eating, or whether he’s washing his pet musk ox in the shower, but suffice to say that is not remotely my experience with a brand-new bathroom.
But it’s not clear whether these moves will have much effect. Trump attempted a similar rollback in his first term. “No manufacturers, to our knowledge, took advantage of those loopholes,” Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told the Associated Press. –Ryan Cooper
The 90-day federal hiring freeze that Donald Trump instituted on day one is not a new idea. Several presidents in the past have done it. And when auditors have studied those previous instances, they found that they didn’t really work, actually increasing total operating costs while decreasing government efficiency. (Someone tell DOGE!)
If anything, the current iteration of the hiring freeze is going even worse. Numerous job offers that had already been made were rescinded, including for an untold number of doctors, pharmacists, and other health care professionals who accepted jobs at the Veterans Health Administration, even as the nominee for VA secretary, Doug Collins, insisted that veteran patients would not be affected by the hiring freeze. It may be the point to cause a fake shortage in VA providers to push patients into the private system, but that is more expensive, worse care for people with specialized needs.
There’s an exemption, of course, if your job in the federal government is rounding up immigrants or serving in the military, but the VA snafu shows that this is not foolproof. The Wall Street Journal, in fact, describes the government as “grinding to a halt” amid the confusion over the hiring freeze and other orders. National Park Service seasonal employees cannot be onboarded, disrupting a perfunctory process. The IRS hires seasonal employees to deal with tax season (which starts Monday), but that agency’s hiring freeze is actually indefinite.
And it doesn’t stop at the hiring freeze. The Department of Transportation temporarily closed a computer program that assists states with highway funding. Messages to farmers about bird flu have stopped. Procurement of supplies for basic research is stalled. This too is probably also the point; when you put people who want to end the government in charge of the government, this is what it looks like. –David Dayen
Trump’s war on the deep state continues with an executive order prohibiting any agency from issuing any rule or regulation, pending a comprehensive review. Rules that have already been issued are suspended for 60 days. Trump also rescinded the Biden administration’s directive to modernize regulatory review.
There’s an interesting backstory here that the Prospect has covered in detail. Ever since the Reagan administration, a division of the Office of Management and Budget has been used as a final filter to weaken regulations issued by other government agencies. The division, known as the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), mandated rigid cost-benefit tests that were rigged to show that proposed pro-consumer rules had more costs than benefits.
OIRA was as bad under Democratic administrations as under Republican ones. The use of OIRA to gut regulations reached its apotheosis not under Reagan but under Barack Obama, when it was headed by Obama’s friend Cass Sunstein, a liberal in some respects who is hostile to the use of consumer and environmental rules, prefering voluntary “nudges.”
One of Joe Biden’s great unsung accomplishments was to reverse the role of OIRA, turning it into a pro-regulation review agency to make sure that other government regulators did their jobs. To head OIRA, Biden appointed its leading and best-informed critic, New York University Law professor Richard Revesz.
Now, under Trump, OIRA will likely revert to its role of wrecking pro-consumer regulation, and then some. One paradoxical benefit of Trump’s excesses is that the public will get an education in how the deep state was intended to protect workers and consumers. One hopes it’s not too late to reverse the damage. –Robert Kuttner
During the election, the crypto industry effectively bought the U.S. government. On Thursday, they got their prize: an executive order on “digital financial technology,” which replaces the Biden administration’s order on crypto from 2022.
This was likely written by the crypto advocates who have infiltrated the government, including new “crypto czar” and VC bro David Sacks. It lauds digital assets as a “crucial” innovation and seeks to “provide regulatory clarity” for them (that should read, “no regulation”). There’s a swipe at “debanking,” which Trump brought up directly to big-bank CEOs in his speech to Davos, and a promotion of stablecoins, and a formal prohibition on a central bank digital currency, a would-be competitor to private crypto.
A “working group” on digital asset markets is established with the directive to rewrite the crypto laws, and it’s almost surprising that they let the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission on it. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission head is also there; that’s the more business-friendly agency crypto moguls want regulating their products. And the commerce secretary is part of the working group, despite having no direct connection to crypto regulation. When he’s confirmed, the commerce secretary would be Howard Lutnick, whose Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald is a huge backer of Tether, the stablecoin that skeptics say is an elaborate fraud. This is a way to get Lutnick in on the burying of crypto regulation.
The crypto world was actually a bit disappointed with this order, because it only has the working group evaluate a federal digital asset stockpile instead of just creating one. A strategic Bitcoin reserve, as Ryan Cooper has explained, this would turn the U.S. into an accessory to an enormous rug pull, and since the president himself is a coin scammer, why not let everyone else get in on the party, I guess. –David Dayen
Just as bird flu is becoming a major concern, Donald Trump issued an order withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization. This comes just a few days after the Biden administration, in one of his last official actions, awarded a $590 million grant to Moderna for an urgent effort to develop a bird flu vaccine.
The World Health Organization provides the worldwide exchange of information on diseases and other potential threats to public health that don’t respect national boundaries. Yet Trump’s order specifies, “While withdrawal is in progress, the Secretary of State will cease negotiations on the WHO Pandemic Agreement and the amendments to the International Health Regulations.”
Trump tried to withdraw the U.S. from the WHO late in his first term, but the effort was quickly reversed by President Biden. Among Trump’s other grudges was criticism in some circles that senior Chinese officials at the WHO had toned down WTO criticism of China’s actions early in the pandemic. Trump’s order explicitly cites “the organization’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China,” pandering to conspiratorial views of where the pandemic originated.
Combined with Trump’s appalling orders to the Centers for Disease Control and NIH, suspending all communications by those agencies, Trump seems determined to loose epidemics upon the land. Trump tangled with the CDC during the early stages of the pandemic. His order is described as a temporary pause, while these agencies are reviewed. But surely it would be more sensible to let them do their urgent jobs, while the reviews go forward.
It’s one thing to go after the deep state, another to sabotage basic public health. These actions are nihilist.
We were worried about RFK Jr., who has lately sought to reverse his long-standing crackpot views of vaccines in his effort to win confirmation. Trump is far worse. –Robert Kuttner
On his first day as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Republican Andrew Ferguson took some bold actions to help working people … such as scrubbing the agency’s website of “woke” language about inclusivity, and handing out paperwork to deputies to audit staff for any woke behavior.
Those actions were taken primarily to fulfill President Trump’s wishes to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion from the federal government, as laid out in three executive orders. However, Ferguson’s day one agenda was actually more than meets the eye.
In a dissenting opinion to these “emergency” motions, Democratic commissioner Alvaro Bedoya noted that Ferguson ended public comments on five separate actions the FTC had taken under chair Lina Khan, on which the agency was in the process of requesting information. One of those entailed public comment for the agency to gather information about surveillance pricing tactics, where companies use technology and data collection to engage in price discrimination against consumers. Reports from those information requests had already been sent out by the agency, and a preliminary staff report revealed widespread exploitative pricing techniques by companies across sectors. (The surveillance pricing inquiry was launched based on Prospect reporting.)
Another aborted public comment period covered predatory pricing tactics used by large companies to artificially lower prices temporarily to kill off competitors. Others included ones on “protecting workers from Illegal Business Practices,” ensuring small businesses are not being preyed upon, and evaluating mergers and acquisitions.
Ferguson hasn’t offered an explanation for why the agency doesn’t deem it necessary to receive public feedback on these still-ongoing actions. –Luke Goldstein
Federal troops, including some armed troops, are arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. It’s not the first time that troops have been deployed to the border, but this time could prove to be different if President Trump invokes the 1807 Insurrection Act, which would allow these troops to serve as civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil.
In an executive order signed on Inauguration Day, Trump directed the secretary of defense to assign the United States Northern Command to “seal the borders” by stopping criminal activities, like illegal crossings or drug trafficking, along the border.
On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that it had started troop deployment, sending 1,500 active-duty troops to the southern border. Officials with the Department of Defense said it is prepared to send up to 2,000 more Marines to the border if asked. Out of the 1,500 troops being sent, 500 are Marines who were on standby to assist with the Los Angeles wildfires, which continue to break out. Now, they will be armed at the border, ready to do the bidding of the trigger-happy Trump administration.
Defense officials also confirmed that, for now, the troops will not be engaging in any forms of law enforcement, which would be a major escalation of their duties. In one executive order, Trump directed the secretary of defense and the secretary of homeland security to submit a report about the conditions at the border within 90 days. In that report, the senior officials will suggest whether to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would give the military permission to serve in a law enforcement role in the U.S. The last time the Insurrection Act was invoked was in 1992 during the civil unrest in Los Angeles after the beating of Rodney King.
Invoking the act now would be a dangerous step, increasing the military’s power and infringing on civil liberties. –Emma Janssen