President Trump began issuing executive actions after taking the oath of office on Monday, unilaterally shifting federal policies across topics that included immigration enforcement, energy production and much more.
Many of the actions were in the form of executive orders. These are directives issued by a president to subordinates in the executive branch, instructing them to undertake some activity or restricting them from doing so.
Executive orders cannot create new legal powers for a president. Instead, they are a vehicle by which presidents exercise legal authority they already have, either because the Constitution has bestowed it upon the office or because Congress has enacted a law creating that power.
That said, there are often disputes about the proper interpretation of the scope and limits of executive power. It is not uncommon for a president to use an executive order to claim the authority to take some action whose legal legitimacy is contested, leading to a court fight.
For example, near the beginning of Mr. Trump’s first term, he tried to ban travel to the United States by citizens of several predominantly Muslim countries. But courts blocked that travel ban — and a successive version — from taking effect, before the Supreme Court permitted a more carefully written third iteration to go into force.
Several of Mr. Trump’s executive orders at the start of his second term are also expected to lead to litigation.
For example, Mr. Trump wants to end “birthright citizenship” for babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents. He will likely do that by declaring that the executive branch now interprets the Constitution differently on that issue and instructing executive branch agencies not to issue citizenship-affirming documents, like Social Security cards and passports, to such infants. The question of whether he can do so will almost certainly be decided by the Supreme Court.
Executive orders are among the most prominent types of executive actions, and sometimes people use that term as a catchall for other categories of ways that presidents can exercise their control over the executive branch.
Other types include presidential policy memorandums and national security directives, which shape particular bureaucratic processes, and presidential proclamations like the declaration of a national emergency that can unlock certain standby powers that Congress has granted presidents to wield in exigent circumstances.
Mr. Trump declared national emergencies in his first term to spend more on a border wall with Mexico than Congress had appropriated, and later to take certain public health measures during the Covid-19 pandemic — including rejecting asylum claims by migrants without full hearings. He is expected to revive such measures on Monday.
