Incoming President Donald Trump has been promising a flurry of executive action on Day 1, and there are executive orders already prepared for his signature. Those orders will end diversity, equity and inclusion funding, crack down on border crossings and ease regulations on oil and natural gas production. The Republican has promised dozens of actions, though it’s unclear whether he’ll make good on his pledge to do them all on his first day.
Executive Orders are signed statements about how the president wants the federal government to be managed. They can be instructions to federal agencies or requests for reports. Many orders can be unobjectionable, such as giving federal employees the day after Christmas off. They can also lay out major policies. But executive orders also are used by presidents to pursue agendas they can’t get through Congress. New presidents can – and often do – issue orders to cancel the orders of their predecessors.
This is what Trump has said he would do in his inauguration speech:
On immigration
The US president will set to work almost immediately with a series of presidential decrees intended to drastically reduce the number of migrants entering the country. “First, I will declare a national emergency at our southern border,” Trump said minutes after his inauguration.
“All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. “I will send troops to the southern border to repel the disastrous invasion of our country,” he said.
Trump, who campaigned on a platform of clamping down on migration and whose policies are popular with people who fret over changing demographics, also intends to put an end to the centuries-old practice of granting citizenship automatically to anyone born in the United States.
The notion of birthright citizenship is enshrined in the US Constitution, which grants anyone born on US soil the right to an American passport. Kelly said the actions Trump takes would “clarify” the 14th Amendment – the clause that addresses birthright citizenship. “Federal government will not recognize automatic birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens born in the United States,” White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly told reporters.
On the environment
Trump also intends to declare a national energy emergency in hopes of jumpstarting more electricity production in the competition with China to build out technologies such as artificial intelligence that rely on data centers using massive amounts of energy.
“The inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices, and that is why today I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will ‘Drill, baby, drill!’” he said during his inauguration speech.
His administration also announced the United States’s intention to withdraw from the Paris climate accords for a second time. “President Trump will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord,” the White House said in a statement shortly after the Republican was sworn into office, without providing a specific timeline.
It would take a year to leave the agreement after submitting a formal notice to the United Nations framework that underpins global climate negotiations.
On the economy
Trump promised tariffs and taxes on other countries. “I will immediately begin the overhaul of our trade system to protect American workers and families,” he said at the US Capitol. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” Trump added.
On diversity and transgender rights
Trump will also sign executive orders rolling back protections for transgender people and terminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs within the federal government in what he described in his inauguration speech as a move to end efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”
One order would declare that the federal government would recognize only two immutable sexes: male and female. The definition will be based on whether people are born with eggs or sperm, rather than on their chromosomes. The change is being pitched as a way to protect women from “gender extremism.”
Under the order, federal prisons and shelters for migrants and rape victims would be segregated by sex as defined by the order. And federal taxpayer money could not be used to fund “transition services.” A small number of federal prison inmates have had gender-affirming surgery and more have had treatments such as hormone therapy paid for with federal funds.
