Is Biden really signing more executive orders than a president should?

Practically all presidents have used executive orders, and some have signed well over a thousand

Joe Biden has wasted no time acting on his promise to start undoing Donald Trump’s agenda, and he’s done so using one of the most powerful tools in the presidential toolbox: the executive order.

At the time of writing, the new president has signed 24 executive orders into law – a rate of nearly two a day. Many of them specifically repeal unilateral moves by Mr Trump: order 14004 overturns two memorandums from the ex-president barring transgender people from serving in the military, while order 13992 revokes six of Mr Trump’s executive orders in one stroke to undo some of the most aggressive deregulation moves in years.

This has obviously irritated and even enraged Mr Biden’s adversaries on the right, some of whom claim he is brazenly ruling by fiat. Particularly grating, they say, is that he signed many of these orders – along with various other directives, a total of 17 – on the very same afternoon he was inaugurated.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell claimed at one point that many of Mr Biden’s orders are ushering in a “far left” green agenda, and complained that “In one week, he’s signed more than 30 unilateral actions. And working Americans are getting short shrift.”

He also claimed that Mr Biden said that a president who routinely governed by executive order is a “dictator” – a claim that takes one of the president’s remarks out of context.

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That aside, is Mr Biden so unusual in passing so many executive orders, and doing so right at the start of his presidency?

For a start, all his predecessors used executive orders, but to wildly different extents. According to the American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the only president not to have issued a single one was William Henry Harrison, who died in office after 30 days.

Many of the first presidents kept their number of orders very low indeed. Nobody broke into triple figures until Ulysses S Grant, who signed 217 – and after that, the seal was broken. Starting with Grover Cleveland, no president has issued fewer than 100.

At the very top, four of them signed more than 1,000: Teddy Roosevelt (1,081), Woodrow Wilson (1,803), Calvin Coolidge (1,203) and Franklin D Roosevelt (a towering 3,721). FDR’s number isn’t just inflated by the fact he served more than 12 in years in office; at 307, his average per year outpaces his nearest rival, one-termer Herbert Hoover, who signed 968 orders in just four years.

Having signed 24 orders in 13 days, Mr Biden is on track for around 647 orders a year. Trump signed 220 over four years and Barack Obama 276 over eight. But contra his critics, his out-of-the-gate sprint can tell us little about the presidency to come. Mr Trump’s executive orders hacked away at crucial environmental protections, shut people out of the US based on their religion, and removed protections for young immigrants; they did damage that Mr Biden had long pledged to undo, and undo it he did in his very first days. That should surprise nobody – and for Mr Biden to reverse executive orders with ones of his own, as he pledged to do, makes sense both symbolically and legally.

Equally, White House officials are telegraphing to the media that the orders are mainly “previews” of the agenda Mr Biden and his party will be advancing through Congress.

In any case, executive orders aren’t the only actions a president can take on his or her own – and they aren’t even the most controversial. Less well-known are “signing statements”, which presidents can issue when signing legislation to object to or challenge provisions of the law as written.

They became particularly controversial under George W Bush, who used them to challenge more than 1,000 provisions of bills he signed, raising the question of whether a president who formally objects to part of a bill when signing it is legally allowed to ignore the sections they dislike.

This came to the fore in 2006 when Mr Bush signed a bill banning torture and issued a signing statement saying he would interpret and enforce the law “in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president” – implying that he might ignore the law altogether to authorise torture of terror suspects in particular situations.