Washington Wednesday: President Trump fast-tracks his agenda

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 22nd of January.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown..

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

President Trump got to work right away after his second Inauguration signing 115 personnel appointments and 42 executive orders on Monday. Those orders address significant issues for American energy, immigration policy, and government bureaucracy.

MAST: Washington Bureau Reporter Leo Briceno now on how the executive orders work and what they aim to accomplish.

LEO BRICENO: While President Trump is waiting on Congress to send bills to his desk to sign into law, he’s not waiting to take action on his agenda.

DODDS: The American people have become attuned to the power of executive orders. And with Trump, the promise of doing so much so early unilaterally has become a thing, a prominent thing in the way that I think it has not been for most other recent presidents.

That’s Graham Dodds, professor of political science at Concordia University, who has studied the use of executive actions in past administrations. He believes that power is the path of least resistance to enacting changes for incoming presidents.

DODDS: It is legally binding, you don't need Congress, and it can be an attractive means to many different ends. Having said that though, most presidents would rather have a law, because laws tend to last longer than executive orders. Executive orders can be overturned by courts, they can be reversed by Congress, and they can be reversed by future presidents.

In 2017, President Trump reversed many of President Barack Obama’s executive actions, and implemented his own. When President Joe Biden took office, he undid many of Trump’s orders. And now, Trump’s Day One executive actions continue the trend.

DODDS: So there are a number of these sort of policy areas that flip-flop depending on which party takes over.

Trump’s first batch of executive orders replaced policies from the Biden Administration, particularly policies on energy.

STERN: I know people in the mining industry who will tell you about mining projects that have quite literally been in the process for 35 years.

Richard Stern is Director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation. He says the Biden administration’s skeptical stance on leasing federal land for drilling compounded an existing problem: the government is not required to respond to permit applications in a certain amount of time.

STERN: For a project where they should actually give you the permit, they could wait fifty years if they wanted.

Trump’s orders aim to expedite energy production by removing restrictions on drilling for liquified natural gas in Alaska and declaring a national energy emergency. At the same time, Trump canceled leasing permits for wind turbine developments on the outer continental shelf, and ended the electric vehicle mandate.

STERN: Part of what Trump's put out as well is to expedite the process, to direct agencies to do their best full faith effort to actually clear these applications, to review them for all manner of potential issues, whether it be environmental, public safety, that they're following other standards and laws, but then clear these, clear them quickly, resolve issues…and then we can have companies that start building.”

Trump is also taking steps to shift U.S. foreign policy away from commitments that he says hurt American interests, including the Paris Climate Agreement, United Nations refugee resettlement, and membership in the World Health Organization.

Council of Foreign Relations senior fellow Charles Kupchan says this isn’t surprising.

KUPCHAN: Trump's brand, the America first brand, is kind of predicated upon this assumption that for many Americans, there's too much world and there's not enough America. Why are we spending all this time spending problems abroad in Ukraine, in Gaza, in Africa, when we got real problems right here at home?

The biggest problems Trump sought to address on day one were border security and a broken immigration system. He reimplemented his 2019 Remain in Mexico policy and declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump also designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist entities.

FULKS: If someone has been a member of a terrorist organization, then many of the benefits under the immigration law will not be applicable to them.

That’s Scott Andrew Fulks, an immigration and asylum attorney with Deckert Law firm in Pennsylvania. He says many, though not all of Trump’s orders simply add urgency to enforcing laws already on the books.

FULKS: There is an intent to enforce our immigration laws in ways that over the last several years there hasn't been great attempts to enforce them. On the other hand, I would also say that by these executive orders, they have overreached in ways that are unthinkable legally…

One of Trump’s executive actions would withhold citizenship upon birth if the child’s parents are either in the U.S. temporarily or illegally.

FULKS: The reasoning is what they call anchor babies. They don't want people coming into the United States in order to have a child here who, by the immigration laws, that child, when they turn 21 years of age, can in turn then file a petition, a family-based petition on behalf of their immediate relative parent.

Citizenship by birth is enshrined in the constitution’s 14th amendment—something that requires an act of Congress to change. More than a dozen states have already filed challenges to the order.

FULKS: I'm not sure that the reason for the executive action is to see how far they could push the limits. I just think that they have made political promises to their constituency, which are not able to be fulfilled without the political process of actually having Congress change the law.

Many of Trump’s legislative priorities are expected to be rolled into one or two budget reconciliation bills in the coming weeks. In the meantime, Congress is working to pass the Laken Riley Act, a bill that makes deporting illegal immigrants who commit crimes easier. That bill could hit the President’s desk before the end of the week and be the first law Trump signs in his second term.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leo Briceno.

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