No. of Recommendations: 8
What fun you guys can have starting Thursday. Every last thing that Trump said he would do on Day 1, if not done by Thursday, is now a lie.
What I find strange is that he doesn't appear to have learned from (or care about) one of the biggest lessons from his first term. In the federal government, if you try to go fast, you end up damaging your own policies.
Trump seems to really enjoy issuing executive orders, because they are instantaneous and unrestrained exercises of the Presidential power. The problem, though, is that you can't really change federal policy by Executive Order. Under the Administrative Procedure Act, Congress has prohibited changing federal policy without formal rule-making. That involves the government assessing the pros and cons of those changes, and undergoing a period of notice and comment, so that the federal government is fully informed about what the public thinks of potential changes before doing them. A lot of Trump's first term actions ended up getting overturned on APA grounds because he didn't want to bother with this step.
Executive Orders are not themselves subject to the APA - the President is allowed to say anything to the agencies that he wants. But the agencies won't be able to do any of these things unless and until they go through APA review. And because the EO's are out there, they damage the agencies efforts to actually follow the APA - since the policy has already been set without complying with the APA, it makes whatever they do afterwards vulnerable to legal challenge.
