Trump’s Executive Orders: What to Expect

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to issue dozens of executive orders over the next several days and weeks, setting the direction and tone for his administration’s return to power. Executive orders and other presidential directives offer the incumbent a potent way to shape government policy from “day one” without having to wait for Congress. Trump is likely to take swift executive actions across a range of policy issues, including immigration, trade, energy, health, and others he focused on during his campaign and prior presidency.  

What are executive orders?

Executive orders (EOs) are perhaps the most well-known type of presidential directive, a category that also includes proclamations and other executive actions. Presidents issue EOs, which carry the force of law, to direct federal agencies to take specific actions, providing them top-level guidance on how to fulfill their duties within the confines of the law. Only Congress can write laws or draw new funds from the Treasury, but the president has broad power in the execution and enforcement of those laws. Many executive orders deal with matters that rarely generate news headlines, whereas others can have long-lasting societal effects, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

While EOs offer presidents an expedient policy tool, they can face stiff legal and administrative challenges, and can often be easily reversed by a subsequent administration. President Joe Biden, like many others before him, revoked many of President Trump’s orders, and Trump is set to respond in kind. Congress can also pass legislation to nullify an executive order.

What issues will Trump likely address with his early executive orders?

As he did in 2017, Trump enters the White House in 2025 with Republican majorities—although narrower—in Congress. Republican congressional leaders have indicated that they will prioritize legislation dealing with several pillars of Trump’s agenda, including border security and tax cuts, but it’s unclear what they can pass given their slim legislative majorities.

Trump signed nearly sixty EOs in the first year of his prior presidency, more than half during his first one hundred days, and he’s expected to take a bevy of swift executive actions again. A great deal of uncertainty remains over the exact steps his new administration will take, but here are some of the issues his actions are likely to focus on.

Immigration. Trump will likely take broad aim at border security and immigration policy, reimplementing many of the same measures he did during his first term. This includes ordering the completion of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, restoring “Remain in Mexico”—a policy that required migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases are heard in U.S. courts—and ordering the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reinstate Title 42, a public health statute Trump invoked in 2020 to rapidly expel migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

He is also expected to reinstitute controversial travel bans (such as his 2017 “Muslim ban”), suspend refugee admissions, end birthright citizenship—which would require changing the Constitution—and take aggressive enforcement actions to crack down on illegal immigration, including by implementing “the largest domestic deportation operation” in U.S. history. However, experts say many of his actions will face legal challenges.

Energy and Climate. Trump is expected to issue orders repealing many of his predecessor’s policies, including new automobile fuel efficiency standards, which he has characterized as a de facto electric vehicle mandate. He has also said he will lift a Biden moratorium on new liquefied natural gas export licenses, as well as greatly expand oil and gas drilling on federal lands and waters—in line with his plans to make the country fully energy independent. One of Trump’s first climate-related EOs could also be to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, an international treaty adopted in 2015 that aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Trump did so during his first term; Biden rejoined the agreement on his first day as president. Trump has also reportedly considered removing the United States from the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the founding treaty of UN climate talks.

Trade and the Economy. Tariffs are expected to be Trump’s primary trade policy lever, as they were in his first term, although there is wide speculation on how his administration will use them. Analysts say that Trump could be the first president to invoke an emergency executive power [PDF] to impose some of his tariffs. (Constitutionally, Congress regulates foreign commerce, but it has granted recent presidents tariff powers under certain conditions.) He could issue an EO to unravel U.S. involvement in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, a major Biden trade initiative. Some Republican advocacy groups have pushed for the incoming administration to withdraw from the International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and World Bank, although many analysts say this seems unlikely. Trump withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his first day in office in 2017, a trade agreement negotiated by the Barack Obama administration. That first year, he also put out EOs dealing with critical minerals, antidumping enforcement, trade deficit reporting, and the defense industrial base.

On the broader economy, Trump has pledged to issue an early EO instructing federal agencies to do everything they can “to defeat inflation and to bring consumer prices rapidly down.” U.S. inflation has fallen to nearly 3 percent in recent years but remains a top concern for Americans.  

Sanctions. Trump has said he would like to use sanctions sparingly this coming term, but many international law analysts say that’s unlikely given his extraordinary use of them during his first administration—reportedly setting a record. U.S. presidents use executive orders (or cite existing ones) to impose sanctions on offending foreign governments or entities. (Congress may also do so.) In particular, a number of foreign policy experts expect Trump to return to his “maximum pressure” policy vis-à-vis Iran and to ratchet up sanctions against Cuba, but there’s much more uncertainty over how he might alter the extensive U.S. sanctions regimes on China, North Korea, Russia, and other states. 

Global Health. Trump will likely undo many of Biden’s EOs relating to funding of family planning programs abroad, to include abortion. Trump has said he will rejoin the Geneva Consensus Declaration, which his administration introduced, to “reject the globalist claim of an international right to abortion.” (Biden withdrew from the agreement, which seeks to enshrine certain values pertaining to women’s health, in 2021.) Similarly, Trump is expected to reinstate the so-called Mexico City policy—also known as the “global gag rule”—which requires foreign nongovernmental organizations to agree not to “perform or actively promote abortion” as a condition to receiving U.S. funding. President Ronald Reagan created the policy in 1984 and it has been subjected to partisan division since. Trump reinstated and expanded the program’s scope in 2017, but Biden rescinded it in 2021. 

Trump has also previously said he wants to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO), saying it was “controlled by China.” He froze funding and initiated a process to terminate U.S. membership to the WHO in 2020, accusing the body of “severely mismanaging” the COVID-19 pandemic, though Biden reversed that decision. Many experts are also wary of Trump’s controversial pick for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and his influence on U.S. public health and science.