Since early 2025, President Donald Trump has been issuing a series of executive orders with the intention of reshaping several policies and federal frameworks. Some of these include a reduction of the federal workforce by initiating mass layoffs with the aims of eliminating “waste and inefficiencies,” elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, redefining gender recognition and protection policies regarding gender identity, and the regulatory freezing (halting of operations during review and evaluation) and even elimination of certain agencies.
Executive orders in their essence are meant to assist the president in managing the executive branch and enforcing already-existing laws and policies. These recent sets of executive orders represent a recent shift in federal policies toward conservative-leaning tendencies, causing some controversy and debate over whether Trump’s actions constitute a presidential overreach. However, it is important to note that while Trump’s new executive orders may seem radical, presidents of both parties have historically resorted to passing executive orders to bypass the legislative process.
The main question is whether Trump’s actions represent a true tipping point in politics. The root of the problem at hand is not in regards to the legality of the orders themselves, but the actual precedents they set. Every order represents another action that the president wants to make without the legislative branch. Granted, some executive orders, such as Trump’s order to remove birthright citizenship, are null and void as they legally need congress’s approval. However, the mere fact that the president is declaring and decreeing so many things is troublesome. Each time any president enacts radical policy changes and utilizes executive orders to achieve their personal goals, the role of Congress seems to dwindle. Trump, however, isn’t the only president who has risked this possibility; Bush, Obama, and Biden are all guilty of this. Trump’s actions only prove that this issue of presidential power has been present for at least a decade, and reflects the broader problems of U.S. politics. Executive orders should be reserved for real emergencies, not general policy making.
The cycle of breached executive orders also fuels instability in the office. Trump has revoked dozens of Biden’s own executive orders as soon as he was inaugurated; in an endless cycle of takebacks, the country cannot expect any stable long-term policies if everything is rewritten every other year. The original purpose of the executive orders and the foundations on which the U.S. government was originally founded were not based on quick and thoughtless actions. The founders of America intended for politics to be rooted deeply in debate, deliberation, and compromise. Using executive orders to bypass and undermine the system is not a solution to the problem. Soon, we might reach a point where Congress is considered irrelevant.
If executive orders continue to expand in scope and frequency, we must consider their long-term impact in the future on the balance of power in U.S. politics and what American governance will look like in the next few decades.
