Tag Archive for: executive order

Analysis: Biden Unaware of Executive Orders ‘Signed’ by Autopen

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President Joe Biden issued 162 executive orders over the course of his Oval Office tenure, but according to a new report, most of them were signed by “autopen,” giving rise to concerns that unelected White House staffers may have had more say in shaping policy than the president. The report is furthering those concerns and suggesting that Biden may not have even been aware of the existence of the orders being signed in his name.

The American energy advocacy group Power the Future published the report Wednesday, examining eight Biden-era executive orders on climate change and U.S. energy policy, and found “no evidence” that Biden ever spoke about or acknowledged the existence of any of these orders. “Not in a press conference. Not in a speech. Not even a video statement,” Power the Future’s report stated. Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner said in a statement, “Americans deserve to know which unelected staffers or radical unnamed activists implemented sweeping change through an autopen. The Biden energy agenda destroyed the livelihoods of energy workers and fueled the record-high inflation that broke the budgets of millions of Americans.” He asked, “The question is simple, and deserves an immediate answer: what did Joe Biden know, and when did he know it?”

According to the Oversight Project, dedicated to government accountability, practically every order signed by Biden was signed via autopen, with the exception of his announcement withdrawing from the 2024 presidential election. The Oversight Project cited House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who questioned Biden on an executive order affecting liquefied natural gas (LNG) and reported that the president didn’t remember signing the order. “He looks at me, stunned, and he said, ‘I didn’t do that,’” Johnson recounted. He continued, “And I said to him, ‘Mr. President, yes you did, it was an executive order, like, you know, three weeks ago.’ And he goes, ‘No, I didn’t do that.’ … It occurred to me … he was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed.”

“For investigators to determine whether then-President Biden actually ordered the signature of relevant legal documents, or if he even had the mental capacity to, they must first determine who controlled the autopen and what checks there were in place,” the Oversight Project wrote in a social media post. The accountability organization continued, “Given President Biden’s decision to revoke Executive Privilege for individuals advising Trump during his first Presidency, this is a knowable fact that can be determined with the correct legal process…”

The “autopen” has been the subject of significant controversy in recent years due to Biden’s excessive use of the technology. Devices have been around for centuries, allowing individuals to replicate their signature or sign multiple documents at once. Thomas Jefferson, for example, kept an early prototype, then called a “polygraph,” in the White House and another in his residence at Monticello. The device allowed a user to sign multiple documents at once but did require the signer to be present and to actively use the machine.

In the late 1930s, an automated version of the machine was developed, called the “autopen,” which would store a template of a signature that could be reproduced without the presence of the actual signer. The autopen became commercially available in the early 1940s and was quickly purchased by politicians, government officials, celebrities, and others. The first U.S. president to use an autopen was reportedly Harry Truman, although he only used the device to sign checks and answer mail. Likewise, most other presidents — such as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford — who used an autopen relegated their use of the instrument to signing checks, correspondence, and autographs.

George W. Bush considered using the autopen to sign executive orders and legislation and even got the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) approval to do so, but still insisted on signing such documents himself, flying to Washington, D.C. to sign emergency legislation in 2005, for example. Barack Obama was the first president to use the autopen to sign legislation, giving his approval to sign Patriot Act extensions via autopen while he was visiting France in 2011, the National Defense Authorization Act while vacationing in Hawaii in 2012, and fiscal legislation in 2013.

President Donald Trump has openly refused to use autopen signatures for executive orders and other legal documents. “We may use it, as an example, to send some young person a letter because it’s nice,” Trump told reporters in March. Contrasting his limited use of the autopen against Biden’s much broader use, Trump added, “But to sign pardons and all of the things that he signed with an autopen is disgraceful.” Trump has also suggested that pardons — and, potentially, executive orders — signed by the Biden administration via autopen may be legally “void” if the president didn’t know what he was signing or didn’t authorize its signature.

The Washington Stand asked the DOJ about potential investigations and, if applicable, prosecutions of the Biden administration’s autopen use and was told, “No comment here.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump’s First 100 Days: Executive Sprint, Legislative Snooze

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President Donald Trump has begun his second term with “a barnstorm of a first 100 days,” as FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter put it on “Washington Watch.” The president himself has issued 143 executive orders, while his administration has moved in so many directions “at such an incredible pace that it’s almost hard to keep up with,” marveled Rep. Addison McDowell (R-N.C.). “He’s got his eye on the history books,” Carpenter declared. The real test will be whether the Trump administration can match its historically quick opening with long-term staying power.

“Historically, a president’s first 100 days in office … acts as a marker,” explained guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice, “to determine how successful, how effective that president has been.” Presidents usually begin with a sort of “honeymoon period,” in which Congress remembers their recent electoral triumph, and voters still give them the benefit of the doubt. The 100-day mark serves as a sort of artificial milestone for analyzing how much a presidential administration achieved over this period.

“Really out of the gate, the president took initiative to address the major concerns of the American people, the issues that were center to the electorate at large — things like immigration, securing the border … addressing the cost of living crisis,” Carpenter reflected.

In addition, he added, Trump has “not neglected some of the commitments he’s made to the more socially conservative elements of the Republican Party. He’s reinstated the Mexico City policy, he’s overturned the Department of Defense’s policy to reimburse for travel related to performing abortions … and then [he is] also enforcing the Hyde Amendment.”

In a mere 100 days, the Trump administration has deported 100,000 illegal immigrants, shut down the border, defined male and female correctly, banished DEI from the federal government, shut down or restructured ineffective agencies like USAID or the Department of Education, audited executive departments for waste, fraud, and abuse, and taken the world on a tariff roller coaster.

“The simple, four-word phrase that I think describes this perfectly is ‘promises made, promises kept,’” McDowell declared. “It’s a crazy concept in Washington to do what you say you’re going to do. That’s exactly what the president is doing.” According to an FRC Action tracker of 52 specific policy promises Trump made during the campaign, the president has completed 32 items, four are in progress, and only 16 are still pending.

The Trump administration’s personnel reforms are proceeding nearly as rapidly as its policy agenda. “There are thousands of political appointees [who] are made by each successive administration, Republican or Democrat. And the speed of getting good people into those seats is important, but so is the quality,” explained Quena Gonzalez, FRC’s senior director of Government Affairs, on “Outstanding.” “Judging by the personnel that I have seen so far, vacuumed up by the administration, I’m greatly encouraged.”

Gonzalez noted the Trump administration’s labors to purge the federal bureaucracy of left-wing ideologues and functionaries who were simply poor workers. He noted that even sympathetic reporting in The Washington Post “let slip … that many of these people” fired from the federal workforce “did not share Trump’s worldview and the worldview of the people that elected him.”

The moment they heard the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) showed up to investigate USAID, for example, many employees “pulled down all the trans and pride flags on their desk … all the left-wing paraphernalia.”

Gonzalez argued that Trump’s rapid and radical reforms were necessary because “this is really a battle of worldviews.” For 23 years, he has watched Republican presidents begin to make “incremental changes,” which then fizzle out when the media finds or manufactures scandals. When a Democratic administration succeeds the Republican, the media then pretends that “everything’s back to normal,” when it most certainly is not.

“The Overton window” — the range of what positions are considered acceptable — “is shifting way to the left,” he said. “If the Right is unwilling to push back, then you lose ultimately.” So, he concluded, “for a correction to be successful, it has to be pretty drastic.”

Based on his previous experience with bureaucratic insubordination, Trump entered office with greater awareness of the bureaucratic war he would have to wage. “Trump’s been here before. He was stymied in some ways by the entrenched interests here in Washington, and he came back wanting results.” Whereas last time Trump campaigned on the slogan, “Drain the Swamp,” suggested Gonzalez, “this time he came and blew up whatever dam it was that held that swamp together.”

On issues like the border, Trump’s swift and successful actions demonstrate that solving the problem “didn’t take new laws, it just took a new president,” McDowell mused. But therein lies the glaring weakness amid his whirlwind of reform: what one administration ushers in, the next can drive out. “I don’t think speed is the issue. I’m really pleased with the speed and vigor of the administration,” said Gonzalez, but an executive order only lasts “as long as the executive.”

What happens after Trump leaves office, the next time a Democratic candidate wins a presidential election?

This is where Congress must step up to the plate. In all the time that Trump has issued 143 executive orders, Congress has passed a grand total of five laws. Only one of those laws (the Laken Riley Act) represented a significant policy change; one was a stopgap funding measure that simply punted a government shutdown into the near future, and the other three were resolutions that disapproved agency rules that the Biden administration tried to slip under the radar on its way out the door.

Congress is “having to play the most catch-up right now … because they’ve ceded so much authority” to the executive branch, Gonzalez explained. “Congress has been happy, for upwards of 50 years, to cede more and more control to what we call the administrative state.” Their task is made more difficult in the current Congress by “the very slim majorities of Republicans in the House and the Senate.”

“Trump had the initiative coming in, as the new president, to act unilaterally in some ways. … And he’s even tested the boundaries of what it’s possible for a president to do,” granted Gonzalez. “But really, the hard work of making those changes permanent … will be up to Congress.”

“We can focus on the first 100 days of the president. But Congress has a huge role to play. And, increasingly after the first 100 days, their role is going to become very important,” he continued.

Unfortunately, after 100 days, passing legislation through Congress also becomes more difficult because members of Congress will already begin thinking about the next election. “The first 100 days is kind of like this nice incubator period where you get your cabinet, you get your political appointees done, and then after that, it’s like, ‘Okay, who’s running for Congress?’” said Gonzalez.

Midterm elections are “typically when you see the party in power lose seats, so I think from here on out there’s going to be some volatility in the political environment in D.C.,” he explained. For “members in the House who are vulnerable … if it’s advantageous for them to throw an elbow at the Trump administration, they might do that.”

If Congress could not pass any more legislation during Trump’s first 100 days, how can they hope to achieve more for the rest of the term? As swing-district members begin to contemplate their electoral vulnerabilities, enacting conservative legislation will become harder, not easier.

Historically, presidents have expended considerable political capital negotiating with Congress to win legislative victories. This time around, President Trump has been so preoccupied with unilateral executive action that he has hardly bothered to herd Congress along. If he wants to make his agenda permanent, Trump will eventually have to turn his attention to Congress. But it remains uncertain whether he has waited too long, or whether he will even try.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Most Significant Accomplishments of Trump’s First 100 Days

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Since Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in the New Deal in 1933 in just three months, historians have measured a president’s success or failure by its first 100 days. As we reach President Trump’s 100th day in office, the 47th president’s second administration has taken a whirlwind of decisive actions to protect life, end artificial support for extreme transgender ideology, uphold religious liberty, secure America’s southern border, restore national sovereignty, and return to a traditional America First foreign policy fostering peace and prosperity.

President Trump’s second first-100-days in office have been “all about one thing: promises made and promises kept. And we have pages and pages and pages of those promises being kept already in just 100 days,” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) told “This Week on Capitol Hill” host Tony Perkins ahead of this week’s milestone.

Here are some of the president’s most significant accomplishments since his recent return to the Oval Office.

Abortion: Protecting Pro-Life Rights

President Trump began protecting pro-life advocates’ unalienable right to freedom of speech, reversing his predecessor’s weaponization of government against pro-life Christians, and stopping pro-life taxpayers from financing abortion on day one. By the afternoon of January 20 — inauguration day — a Biden-era government website promoting abortion, ReproductiveRights.gov, had gone offline.

On January 23, Trump kept a campaign promise he had made at the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit by signing the pardon of 23 pro-life advocates jailed by the Biden-Harris administration. “This is a great honor to sign this,” said the president as he held the pardon aloft in the Oval Office.

The Biden-Harris Justice Department imprisoned many of those nearly two dozen pro-life advocates under a novel legal theory that accused them of violating both the Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. From this time forward, the Justice Department will only press charges under the FACE Act if the allegation results in “death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage,” announced the Trump administration in a January 24 memo. “Cases not presenting significant aggravating factors can adequately be addressed under state or local law.”

Trump also protected U.S. taxpayers from funding foreign abortions and many abortions in the United States. A January 24 presidential memorandum reinstated his 2017 Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA), which assures U.S. taxpayers shall not be forced to pay any foreign organization that commits, refers, or advocates for abortion. The action also aims “to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund organizations or programs that support or participate in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”

The same day, Trump signed an executive order “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment,” which assures the nearly five-decade-old policy embraced by President Jimmy Carter will be respected for the next four years. Although a younger Joe Biden voted for the Hyde Amendment — which safeguards taxpayer funds from footing the bill for most abortions through Medicaid — the White House detailed how the Biden-Harris administration subsequently undermined this longstanding norm by compelling taxpayers to underwrite “abortion-related travel expenses,” while “the Department of Veterans Affairs allowed hospitals to provide abortions, and the Department of Health and Human Services paid for abortions for illegal immigrants.”

Additionally, in March the Trump administration held up tens of millions of dollars in Planned Parenthood funding over allegations the nation’s largest abortion business adopted so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies that violated federal civil rights laws. Leakers have said this may presage a larger administration initiative to defund Planned Parenthood, which received $699.3 million in taxpayer funding and carried out 392,712 abortions in its 2022-2023 fiscal year.

The Trump administration’s pro-life actions should prove popular. Three out of four Americans (73%) oppose taxpayer-funded abortions overseas, and nearly six out of 10 of Americans (57%) oppose using federal funds for abortions at home, according to a Marist poll released in January.

Symbolically, Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a speech in person at the 2025 March for Life, and Trump sent a recorded message to the annual pro-life gathering. In his first administration, Trump became the first sitting president to speak to the March for Life in the flesh.

Extreme Transgender Ideology

President Trump has opposed extreme gender ideology from day one, protecting children from transgender hormone injections or surgeries, sheltering battered women and female prisoners from men who say they identify as female, and maintaining fairness in women’s sports.

On his first day in office, Trump signed the executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which said the federal government recognizes only two sexes, based in observable biological reality, from the moment of fertilization. “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” says the order. “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

Eight days later, the president’s executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” ended taxpayer funding for transgender procedures involving minors, allows those subjected to such experimental medical interventions to sue, and may lead to the prosecution of those who carry out transgender surgeries. The predatory transgender industry’s “maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex … will be a stain on our [n]ation’s history, and it must end,” the order declared.

Trump underscored this in a March 4 address to a joint session of Congress, when he told American youth directly, “Our message to every child in America is that you are perfect exactly the way God made you.”

Trump made it official policy that the military’s emphasis on winning wars and lethality is “inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex” in his January 27 executive order “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” on January 27. The order reverses President Biden’s order opening the military to those who openly identify as transgender but grandfathers in those who have been “stable” for at least 36 months. The executive order stated that identifying as transgender prevents people from living an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

On February 5, Trump announced his administration would prosecute Title IX violations by schools or universities that force female students or athletes “to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.” Allowing males to compete in women’s sports is “demeaning, unfair, and dangerous to women and girls,” stated the executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” He also cut off student loan forgiveness for LGBTQ activists in a March 7 executive order, “Restoring Public Service Loan Forgiveness.”

The Trump administration has steadfastly implemented these orders against intransigent blue states such as Maine, led by Governor Janet Mills (D). On April 7, the Trump administration notified Maine officials that it would withhold all non-essential funding from the state Department of Corrections after it placed a 6’1” man who confessed to murdering both his parents (and his dog) in a women’s correctional facility. The Biden administration, by contrast, forced women to share prison cells with trans-identified male offenders and filed lawsuits against states that refused to go along with his orders. By January, 15% of all inmates in female correctional facilities were men.

On April 11, the Education Department announced it was moving to cut off all K-12 funding to the state of Maine for flouting federal law, cutting off prison funding. Similarly, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins held up USDA funding for “administrative and technological functions” in Maine schools that forced girls to change in front of, or compete against, boys.

Th White House released a theologically rich and inspiring statement celebrating Holy Week. One year earlier, then-President Joe Biden placed the weight of his bully pulpit behind a campaign needling Americans to celebrate the “Transgender Day of Visibility,” which also fell on Easter Sunday. Biden’s transgender proclamation ran nearly seven times as long as his Easter statement.

Trump press aides have said they do not respond to questions from reporters who put their personal pronouns in their biographies or social media profiles.

Restoring Religious Liberty

President Trump has established religious liberty departments within Cabinet agencies and recently hosted a conference on the violation of Christians’ rights. The administration has pointedly denounced violations of religious liberty and free speech rights by U.S. allies in Europe. Vice President J.D. Vance told the Munich Security Conference in February that the continent’s “backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious [believers], in particular, in the crosshairs.” Days later, police handcuffed a 74-year-old grandmother for silently offering to talk to mothers outside an abortion facility. They charged her with violating Scotland’s Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) Act, which carries a potential fine ranging from £10,000 ($12,600 U.S.) to an unlimited amount.

Securing the Border

On the president’s signature issue, Trump swiftly returned order to the U.S. border by reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy, ending the policy of catch-and-release, designating criminal syndicates such as Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations or criminal enterprises, and using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport illegal immigrants. He also signed the Laken Riley Act into law and turned the CBP One app from importing to exporting illegal immigrants. He has deported 135,000 illegal immigrants to date.

His policies have proven effective. “Illegal border crossings dropped precipitously. In March, U.S. Customs and Border Enforcement said 7,181 people were apprehended nationwide between border crossings — a 14% decrease from February and a 95% drop from March 2024,” reported the Associated Press. As Trump told Congress, “The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation. ‘We must have legislation to secure the border.’ But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”

National Sovereignty

President Trump has restored national sovereignty by withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO), effectively scuttling any chance the global body had of seeing significant progress on the WHO Pandemic Agreement. “WHO proved itself to be a corrupt organization run by the Chinese Communist Party and global leftists,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told “Washington Watch” earlier this month. “President Trump is acting boldly, swiftly, and decisively.” WHO reported a $2.5 billion budget shortfall shortly after Trump’s announcement.

The 47th president also promptly withheld U.S. taxpayer funds from the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

The February 4 directive also ordered the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations to “conduct a review of [Ameria’s] membership in UNESCO,” the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. President Ronald Reagan exited the organization in 1984, but George W. Bush rejoined in 2003. Trump then withdrew again in 2018, but the Biden administration reversed that decision in 2023.

On February 6, Trump issued an executive order titled “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court,” rebuffing the ICC for investigating U.S. personnel “without a legitimate basis” and for “issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant” for committing war crimes in Israel’s response to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas.

Moving to Abolish the Department of Education and Hold the Federal Bureaucracy Accountable

In what may prove to be President Trump’s most consequential action, he has taken the first steps to abolish the Department of Education. On March 11, the Trump administration fired half of the Department of Education’s staffers. Although the DOE has spent more than $3 trillion since its formation by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, U.S. reading scores in 2023 were “not significantly different from the average score in 1971,” according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The action fulfills a campaign promise made in a July 2023 online video and repeated at the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit to “move everything back to the states.”

The same order directs the secretary of Education to assure all public schools abide by the “requirement that any program or activity receiving Federal assistance terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”

Trump’s executive orders and actions have also rooted out racially discriminatory policies branded under the label “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — which often include LGBTQ indoctrination — from federal agencies and sought to thwart bureaucrats who simply maintained DEI policies and offices under different names. Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has exposed federal waste, fraud, and abuse, and sought to make the vast federal workforce responsive to the will of the American people.

In less than 100 days, President Donald J. Trump has “accomplished more than most politicians and presidents accomplish in an entire lifetime,” Speaker Johnson told Perkins.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Guess How Many Democratic Party State AGs Are Now Fighting Trump’s Executive Order To Stop Voter Fraud

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Nineteen Democrat-led states filed a lawsuit Thursday against President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring proof of citizenship to vote.

In the lawsuit, attorneys general from 19 states called to block provisions of Trump’s executive order, alleging the president is attempting to “seize control of elections” in an unconstitutional manner. The lawsuit was filed by Arizona, California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.

“The Elections EO violates the Constitution. It interferes with States’ inherent sovereignty and their constitutional power to regulate the time, place, and manner of federal elections,” the lawsuit states.

“It also usurps Congress’s powers to legislate (under the Elections Clause) and to appropriate (under the Spending Clause) because Congress has not chosen to implement the changes the President seeks to impose by decree,” the lawsuit said. “The critical funds at issue have in large measure already been appropriated by Congress.”

On March 25, Trump signed an executive order to “protect the integrity” of U.S. elections, mandating voter “citizenship verification [in every state]” and banning foreign nationals from interfering in U.S. elections. The order also directed attorneys general to collaborate with state election officials to ensure compliance, placing conditions on federal funding to whether states require voter ID.

“Free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion are fundamental to maintaining our constitutional Republic. The right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated, without illegal dilution, is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election,” Trump wrote.

Over the years, states like California, Oregon, New Mexico, Minnesota, Illinois, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Hawaii and Maryland have enacted laws that no longer require documentation to vote.

According to the lawsuit, the attorneys general argue that the order “sows confusion and sets the stage for chaos,” as states will need to allocate staff and resources for new training, testing, voter education and coordination, or risk losing federal funding.

“Donald Trump’s Executive Order to seize control of our elections, intimidate voters, and attack Americans’ right to vote is unconstitutional and undemocratic. I’m suing to stop the President’s authoritarian power grab and protect people’s right to vote and our democracy,” New York Attorney General Letitia James wrote on X.

AUTHOR

Hailey Gomez

Geeneral assignment reporter.

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New Bill Gives Trump the Legal Power to ‘Reform Our Government and Drain the Swamp’

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Two congressional conservatives have introduced a bill that would give legal authorization for President Donald Trump to slash the federal workforce, stop harmful government programs, and even close entire executive departments without fear an activist judge will stop his money-saving reforms by judicial fiat.

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) introduced the Reorganizing Government Act of 2025 in the House of Representatives (H.R. 1295), while Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the companion bill in the Senate (S.583). The bill would give the president a freer hand to shuffle, pare back, or eliminate tasks inside the federal bureaucracy until December 31, 2026.

“Americans elected [President Trump] to reform our government and drain the Swamp,” announced Lee Wednesday afternoon on X, retweeting a video of Comer’s appearance on “Washington Watch” originally posted by host Tony Perkins. “Our bill gives him even more tools to do so.”

The measure — which passed the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s markup hearing on March 25 by a 23-20 party-line vote — further gives the president the authority to order “the elimination of operations determined to be unnecessary for the execution of constitutional duties.” The president may also act “to reduce the number of federal employees”; eliminate unnecessary and burdensome rules, regulations, and other requirements”; or close “executive departments” as necessary “to eliminate government operations that do not serve the public interest.”

“President Trump campaigned on reorganizing the federal government. We want to get rid of some agencies that have become obsolete. We want to return power and decision-making back to the states and local governments, especially with respect to education. And what my bill does will codify the law,” Comer told “Washington Watch” the day before the bill cleared committee. “It’s very important that this gets passed into law so that some judge doesn’t try to kick [President Trump’s plans] out — or the next administration, whoever that might be, doesn’t try to end the executive orders. We want this to be the law of the land. We believe that we have the votes in Congress to do that.”

The Trump administration’s foes have targeted the administration by filing lawsuits in liberal jurisdictions and then extracting national injunctions against the administration’s policies. The controversial tactic has led constitutionalists to call for the prudent use of judicial impeachments.

“We know that any member of Congress [who] would oppose this reorganization is opposing the mandate that President Trump received,” Comer assessed.

Presidents have a long history of receiving, or requesting, legislation to remake the federal workforce. “This type of presidential reorganization has been employed 16 different times between 1932 and 1981 and has been granted to nine presidents, including John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon,” according to Deseret News, based in Lee’s home state of Utah. “Reagan was the last president granted the Congress-approved reorganization authority” in 1984, “and he used it to dismantle the Community Services Administration and change the U.S.”

Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama requested authorization to reorganize the government without success.

“Between 1932 and 1984, presidents submitted more than 100 plans under this authority,” reported GovExec.com.

If the bill passes, President Trump would have to submit his plan for government reorganization for congressional approval within 90 days. However, the Senate would not be able to filibuster the plan, allowing its cost-saving efficiencies to clear the closely divided chamber with a majority vote, rather than the 60 votes necessary for cloture.

However, Senate Democrats can filibuster the Reorganizing Government Act itself, preventing it from reaching the Oval Office for President Trump’s signature.

“This legislation allows the president to use his constitutional authority as chief executive to reorganize federal agencies, eliminate weaponization, and right-size the government to better serve the American people. Congress cannot afford to sit on its hands in this fight,” insisted Senator Lee. “Reauthorizing presidential reorganization authority is the most comprehensive tool that the president can use to restore good governance to Washington.”

“With a federal budget that has grown from $3.6 billion to $7.3 trillion and over 400 executive agencies, streamlining government operations is essential for cost savings and improved service delivery,” announced the House Oversight Committee.

Despite the passing of the COVID lockdowns, Congress has continued record-breaking COVID-era levels of federal spending. The national debt now tops $36 trillion, and the government paid an unprecedented $1.2 trillion in interest on the debt alone.

“I don’t think anyone with any common sense would think that we can continue to spend $2 trillion a year more than we take in. We have to reduce unnecessary and wasteful spending,” said Comer. “We can do that by reducing the unneeded bureaucracies in America. And I think that that that’s what [The Reorganizing Government Act] will do. And hopefully, this bill has the blessing of President Trump and his entire Cabinet. It’s something that needs to happen.”

His colleague, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), has proposed one of the most ambitious proposals: cutting $2.5 trillion from the federal budget over 10 years. Comer lamented, “The Democrats think that you solve every problem in America by creating another government agency.”

Comer predicted, in the end, every competent member of the federal workforce would line up behind his legislative initiative. “If I were a federal employee who actually went to work every day and worked hard on the front lines, I would be applauding these changes,” said Comer. “We’re going to restore some common sense into some of the federal government decision-making that happens on the front lines in America every day.”

“I hope in the next two or three weeks it will be on the House floor,” Comer anticipated.

“You’ll see: There won’t be a single Democrat vote for it,” he said.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump Eyes Sanctions on Immigration Lawyers as Deportation ‘Due Process’ Conflict Escalates

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President Donald Trump and his administration are continuing their crackdown against illegal immigration, despite the hurdles presented by left-wing activists and restrictive court rulings. Over the weekend, the president ordered U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem to impose various sanctions against attorneys and law firms which use unethical means to manipulate immigration courts.

In his memo to Bondi and Noem, the president wrote, “Lawyers and law firms that engage in actions that violate the laws of the United States or rules governing attorney conduct must be efficiently and effectively held accountable. Accountability is especially important when misconduct by lawyers and law firms threatens our national security, homeland security, public safety, or election integrity.” Pointing to the pervasive corruption plaguing immigration courts, he continued:

“The immigration system — where rampant fraud and meritless claims have supplanted the constitutional and lawful bases upon which the President exercises core powers under Article II of the United States Constitution — is likewise replete with examples of unscrupulous behavior by attorneys and law firms. For instance, the immigration bar, and powerful Big Law pro bono practices, frequently coach clients to conceal their past or lie about their circumstances when asserting their asylum claims, all in an attempt to circumvent immigration policies enacted to protect our national security and deceive the immigration authorities and courts into granting them undeserved relief. Gathering the necessary information to refute these fraudulent claims imposes an enormous burden on the Federal Government. And this fraud in turn undermines the integrity of our immigration laws and the legal profession more broadly — to say nothing of the undeniable, tragic consequences of the resulting mass illegal immigration, whether in terms of heinous crimes against innocent victims like Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, or Rachel Morin, or the enormous drain on taxpayer resources intended for Americans.”

The president wrote, “To address these concerns, I hereby direct the Attorney General to seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States or in matters before executive departments and agencies of the United States.” He also demanded that Bondi and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ):

“take all appropriate action to refer for disciplinary action any attorney whose conduct in Federal court or before any component of the Federal Government appears to violate professional conduct rules, including rules governing meritorious claims and contentions, and particularly in cases that implicate national security, homeland security, public safety, or election integrity. In complying with this directive, the Attorney General shall consider the ethical duties that law partners have when supervising junior attorneys, including imputing the ethical misconduct of junior attorneys to partners or the law firm when appropriate.”

Examples of punitive measures the president named include revoking security clearances held by attorneys or cancelling government contracts with individual attorneys or law firms. The president also instructed Bondi to review litigation against the federal government over the last eight years and identify instances of “misconduct that may warrant additional action, such as filing frivolous litigation or engaging in fraudulent practices…” He concluded, “Law firms and individual attorneys have a great power, and obligation, to serve the rule of law, justice, and order. The Attorney General, alongside the Counsel to the President, shall report to the President periodically on improvements by firms to capture this hopeful vision.”

The president’s order to the attorney general and Homeland Security secretary comes as numerous federal courts have restricted the Trump administration’s executive actions, including efforts to deport known criminals and members of foreign terrorist organizations. In a recent controversial move, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg demanded that the Trump administration halt the deportation of members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, which has been formally classified as a foreign terrorist organization, and ordered that planes deporting at least 250 TdA members be returned to the U.S. Boasberg’s court order prompted calls for impeachment from the president and even a rare public comment from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Notably, Boasberg’s court order blocked the president from invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law which allows the president to forcibly remove noncitizens from enemy countries during times of war or invasion. While some have claimed that use of the over-200-year-old law violates the due process of illegal immigrants, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration advisor, has vocally defended the president’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, as have other administration officials.

In an interview Sunday, border czar and former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Tom Homan rejected claims that the Trump administration is violating the law and insisted that use of the Alien Enemies Act is just “using the laws on the books. We’re not making this up.” When questioned about the “due process” afforded to deported TDA members, Homan angrily pointed to the violence committed by TdA and other illegal immigrants. “Where is Laken Riley’s due process? Where are all these young women killed and raped by members of the TdA? Where was their due process? The young woman on the subway, where is her due process?” he asked. He continued, “The bottom line is, that plane was full of people designated as terrorists, number one. Number two, every Venezuelan migrant on that flight was a TdA member based on numerous criminal investigations, on intelligence reports, and a lot of work by ICE officers.” The border czar added, “They were given due process according to the laws on the books.”

National Security Adviser Mike Waltz also defended the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act on Sunday. “President Trump has determined that this group is acting as a terrorist organization. It is terrorizing our communities through attacks, torture, rape and the most awful of situations for those communities, number one,” Waltz stated.

He continued, “Number two, the Alien [Enemies] Act fully applies because we have also determined that this group is acting as a proxy of the [Venezuelan president Nicolas] Maduro regime. TDA is acting as a proxy of the Maduro regime. This is how the Alien [Enemies] Act applies. And we cannot have district judges interfering with the commander in chief’s actions to take care of — in the way he deems necessary — a terrorist organization.”

The president’s National Security Adviser accused Maduro, whom the first Trump administration labelled a dictator, of “deliberately emptying his prisons in a proxy manner to influence and attack the United States,” adding, “President Trump is taking decisive action to rid our communities of these gangs that are operating in a paramilitary fashion…”

Some, however, have anticipated that courts may require the use of due process even in cases involving TdA and other foreign terrorist organizations. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday explained, “There are some big legal questions here. On the one hand, The Bill of Rights applies to everyone, to persons. The Bill of Rights doesn’t specifically designate citizens. It’s anyone in the United States, The Bill of Rights applies to.” He continued, “On the other end, The Alien and Enemies act says you don’t get much process. The president can declare that you are somehow a problem for foreign policy and opposed to our foreign policy you can be deported.”

“Ultimately, this goes to the court,” the senator admitted, adding, “I think the courts will rule there has to be [due] process.” He continued, “I think there’s going to be a process afforded by the courts for representation before you are deported in most cases. I don’t know about the ones under the Alien Enemies Act. I’m not sure anybody knows that.” Paul predicted, “I think it goes to the Supreme Court and there are arguments to be made on both sides.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Analysis: Trump Admin Besieged by Record Number of Injunctions from Partisan Courts

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump Cuts Off Student Loan Forgiveness to LGBTQ Activists, Open Borders Groups, and Terrorists

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As part of his ongoing efforts to root out federal programs that underwrite left-wing programs at taxpayer expense, President Donald Trump has curbed a program that forgives student loans for those who work for groups that promote illegal immigration, terrorism, anti-American policies, or facilitate “child mutilation” through transgender surgeries.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), created by the 2007 College Cos tReduction and Access Act signed by President George W. Bush, allows college graduates to write-off their loans if they worked as public servants in the government or a nonprofit organization and made at least 10 years (120 months) of repayments. It also caps those payments at 10% of income above 150% of the poverty line.

But “instead of alleviating worker shortages in necessary occupations, the PSLF Program has misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest, but actually harm our national security and American values” through its “subsidization of illegal activities, including illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property, and disruption of the public order, which threaten the security and stability of the United States,” says the executive order, which was released on March 7.

The order, entitled “Restoring Public Service Loan Forgiveness,” bars student loan forgiveness to employees of 501(c)3 organizations “whose activities have a substantial illegal purpose.” That list includes those who take part in “child abuse, including the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children or the trafficking of children to so-called transgender sanctuary States for purposes of emancipation from their lawful parents.”

The order also bars “supporting terrorism,” violating federal immigration laws, and “engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” often under the banner of advancing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

Organizations that regularly engage in “trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism and obstruction of highways” — such as protests illegally blocking highways and intersections — also lose PSLF eligibility.

“The Biden Administration was accused of using the student loan forgiveness program to pay pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activists and criminals with taxpayer dollars,” added a White House fact sheet accompanying the order.

Much of the focus will go toward defunding organizations that actively assist illegal immigrants en route to, or residing in, the United States. Scholars at the Center for Immigration Studies discovered that “the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have been mainlining taxpayer funds” to more than 30 faith-based NGOs that offered “cash debit cards, food, clothing, medical treatment, shelter, and even ‘humanitarian transportation’ during 2024 to millions of U.S.-bound immigrants in 17 Latin American nations and Mexico.” Last April alone, the Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Homeland Security doled out $300 million to nonprofits that shelter illegal immigrants through the government’s Shelter and Services Program (SSP), administered by FEMA. “Of those recently awarded grants, 35 are NGOs,” revealed the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) at the time. Illegal immigrants often stayed at four-star hotels at taxpayer expense, even as the Democratic administration claimed FEMA lacked the funds to care for hurricane-struck U.S. citizens.

Republicans have sought to change the tax-exempt status of NGOs that facilitate the illegal flow of drugs and human traffickers across the border. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) recently introduced the Fixing Exemptions for Networks Choosing to Enable Illegal Migration (FENCE) Act (S. 497), which would revoke the tax-exempt status of NGOs that consistently aid illegal immigrants.

“It’s absurd that our federal government has been giving tax exemptions and federal funding to NGOs that have helped facilitate record illegal immigration and carry out the far-left’s agenda, while cloaked as charities,” said Hagerty last month. “President Trump’s executive order requiring a review of federal funding to NGOs will expose this malpractice that has occurred for too long. I’m pleased to introduce this legislation that will augment the President’s work to hold these NGOs accountable by revoking their tax-exempt statuses.”

Conservative Christians cheered the reforms. “In fact, 25 percent of the U.S. workforce are employed in ‘public service’ occupations as currently defined, which can include everything from NPR employees to Planned Parenthood,” noted Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), a pastor who chairs the Education and Workforce Committee. “President Trump is stepping up by preventing these activists from receiving windfalls in forgiveness benefits footed by taxpayers.”

But teachers unions and liberals charged the president with violating the First Amendment by refusing to underwrite left-wing political activism, even if it skirts, or transgresses, the law. “The president claims to be committed to ‘free speech,’ but we’ve quickly discovered that pledge doesn’t apply to higher education and now, PSLF,” griped Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), who helped craft the Biden administration’s public school lockdown policy. “He wants to impose an ideological litmus test antithetical to American values.” Mike Pierce, executive director of the liberal Student Borrower Protection Center, decried the order as “an attack on working families everywhere,” although the evidence suggests the program benefits graduate students and doctors.

“Estimates show that the top one-fifth of households owe $3 in student loan debt for every $1 held by the bottom fifth,” found the Heritage Foundation, which called for the abolition of PSLF. Critics say student loan “forgiveness” is immoral, because it creates perverse incentives and forces those who never went to college to pay for the bad behavior of those who did.

PSLF has had a troubled history since its formation under the second Bush administration. Users said the program had vague criteria, offered bad advice, and ultimately denied 99% of applications to have their remaining student loan debt expunged. The Biden-Harris administration significantly expanded the number of borrowers whose debt was assumed by taxpayers through the controversial program, from 7,000 when he took office to 1,069,000 borrowers representing $78.5 billion in debt when he left.

Members of the Obama-Biden administration publicly declared they had used the PSLF program to have taxpayers foot the bill as they enacted far-left social policies. “I was lucky enough to land my dream job working in President Obama’s White House on the Domestic Policy Council. For nearly the entire second term, I helped push for policies that aimed to bend the arc of the moral universe a little more toward justice — from women’s equality to foster care to LGBTQ rights to criminal justice reform,” boasted Molly Dillon in 2017. “[T]he Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program made it possible for me [to] use my education for a career in public service without the fear of a lifetime of debt.”

By no longer writing off student loan debt, the Trump administration may discourage students from working for left-wing activist groups whose activities further social lawlessness. “If Trump does prohibit some workers from getting student loan forgiveness, there could be larger implications for the impacted nonprofits, with potentially fewer job applicants for open roles at those organizations in the future,” reports Newsweek.

Whatever changes will come, they will not take place immediately. The Federal Student Aid office announced Monday that it was “reviewing” the executive order. “The PSLF Program is not changing today, and borrowers do not need to take any action,” it said.

Some urge caution in changing the criteria of federal programs, because a future left-wing president could deny loan forgiveness to conservative nonprofits, much as the Obama-Biden administration targeted Tea Party groups for heightened IRS scrutiny. “To avoid this corrosive legal ping pong, all student loan borrowers should be treated the same,” wrote Andrew Gillen at the Cato Institute. “Rather than debate about which organizations are eligible for PSLF, we should get rid of PSLF entirely.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Whoopi Goldberg: ‘God Doesn’t Make Mistakes’ … Except on Transgenderism?

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump EO Lassoes Federal Regulatory Leviathan

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Last week, President Trump issued an executive order “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department Of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative.” “This is one of those executive orders that we may not have ever thought of, but it’s the one we’ve all been waiting on,” gushed Family Research Council Action President Jody Hice while guest hosting on “Washington Watch.”

The order aims “to focus the executive branch’s limited enforcement resources on regulations squarely authorized by constitutional Federal statutes, and to commence the deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.”

It assigns all executive agencies the task of cataloguing, within 60 days, all their regulations that:

  • “raise serious constitutional difficulties, such as exceeding the scope of the power vested in the Federal Government by the Constitution;”
  • “are based on unlawful delegations of legislative power;”
  • “are based on anything other than the best reading of the underlying statutory authority or prohibition;”
  • “implicate matters of social, political, or economic significance that are not authorized by clear statutory authority;”
  • “impose significant costs upon private parties that are not outweighed by public benefits;”
  • “harm the national interest by significantly and unjustifiably impeding technological innovation, infrastructure development, disaster response, inflation reduction, research and development, economic development, energy production, land use, and foreign policy objectives;” and
  • “impose undue burdens on small business and impede private enterprise and entrepreneurship.”

“Subject to their paramount obligation to discharge their legal obligations, protect public safety, and advance the national interest,” the order continues, “agencies shall preserve their limited enforcement resources by generally de-prioritizing actions to enforce regulations that are based on anything other than the best reading of a statute and … go beyond the powers vested in the Federal Government by the Constitution.”

The order also directs Trump-appointed agency heads, “on a case-by-case basis and as appropriate and consistent with applicable law,” to “direct the termination of all such enforcement proceedings that do not comply with the Constitution, laws, or Administration policy.”

“What it really means is that every agency is required to do a review of the constitutionality and the consistency with statutory authority of all of their regulations and basically check under the hood and figure out whether or not [they’ve] been driving a lawful agency or not, or whether or not there’s a lot of junk in there that needs to be removed,” said Donald Kochan, law professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law.

“I think we’re going to find a lot of regulations that simply do not comply with both their statutory and constitutional limits,” Kochan predicted. “Because we’ve been operating under a regime in the administrative state for a long time … which allowed for high deference to agency interpretations of their own authority.” This was called “Chevron deference” after the 1984 Supreme Court decision which established this permissive standard, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

However, the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron precedent in a June 2024 decision, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, Kochan explained. “That decision … says that now judges have … a judicial duty to interpret what the statutes mean … rather than asking, ‘Hey, agency, are you authorized to act?’” he explained. “Because the incentives for the agency are to, of course, justify their own authority. So, for decades, we’ve been operating under this self-perpetuating set of precedents that allow agencies to justify their own interpretation of their underlying statutes.”

This long-needed court corrective was brought to you by President Trump’s previous term in office, during which he appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who participated in the 6-2 majority in Loper Bright.

The same goes for the 6-3 decision in Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, which also curtailed executive agency power in the 2024 term, Kochan continued. According to Corner Post, “if you’re aggrieved by an agency action, you get to sue the agency and make a facial challenge to the agency’s rules, even years after that rulemaking occurred,” he explained. “Why? Because you didn’t know that it was going to affect you until you’re actually aggrieved. So, the U.S. Supreme Court reinterpreted what it means to have a statute of limitations … which opens up a lot of agency regulations to … challenge.”

Another relevant ruling is the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), which “clarified what’s called the Major Questions Doctrine,” added Kochan. “This one says that, if agencies want to do things that touch on significant issues that impact the economy or society, then the courts are going to presume that Congress would have needed to legislate in a very clear manner to give the agency that authority. If there’s not clear authority, [they’re] not going to let the agency go and grab it.”

According to George Washington University’s Regulatory Studies Center, the number of economically significant or otherwise significant rules published by executive agencies each year has approximately tripled since the Reagan administration, with the Biden administration issuing nearly 75 such rules each year.

These major Supreme Court decisions, issued largely in response to the Biden administration’s executive overreach, had obvious implications for the discretion and power of federal agencies. But, rather than wait for states or private actors to explore those implications by challenging individual regulations here or there, President Trump’s executive order instructs federal agencies to pull their hulls into drydock and perform a thorough overhaul.

“Every agency has to determine whether or not their every existing regulation is within their statutory authority, according to how the statutory authority would be interpreted by courts,” Kochan summarized. “The executive order says ‘the best interpretation’ of your statutory authority, which requires that the agencies look at, ‘Well, what would the courts say?’” No longer may executive agencies play the role of their own judge and jury.

Naturally, tussling with D.C.’s largest swamp monster will only succeed after a loud, laborious struggle. Various species in Washington that — unlike the American taxpayer — enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the administrative state have already begun to cry bloody murder.

On Thursday, a Politico article complained that Trump’s “sweeping” and “broadly written” order “stands to dramatically curb” agency power. This, the article alleges, is part of the president’s “quest to expand his authority over the federal government, which he believes has grown too expansive.” How scary!

Demanding that unelected bureaucrats follow the law might raise Washington’s blood pressure, but executive orders like this one are a major reason why a record number of Americans believe the country is on the right track.

“Like with everything else that’s happening right now, we’re in in rapid action mode,” concluded Kochan. “This is an executive order which really is at the heart of what executive orders are intended to be, and that is … instructing agencies to get their house in order.”

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: How Trump’s Actions Melted Biden’s ‘Winter of Our Discontent’

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

10 Bills That Would Codify Trump’s Executive Orders into Law

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President Donald Trump wasted no time enacting the agenda that won him the White House in the 2024 election, signing a series of executive orders and regulatory actions nearly every day of his second administration. Yet executive orders last only as long as a friendly president holds office. There is now a movement afoot to codify President Trump’s executive orders into statutory law. Here are 10 bills members of Congress have introduced to make the 47th president’s executive actions permanent.

1. Jamie Reed Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) re-introduced his Jamie Reed Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act. The legislation would cut off federal funding to any medical institution or university affiliated with an institution that carries out transgender procedures on minors. It would also create a private right of action, allowing those who underwent such procedures to sue medical practitioners who administered them, as well as pediatric gender clinics and the hospitals/universities associated with them.

“Our children should no longer suffer from irreversible and dangerous child mutilation procedures, which the Biden administration enabled and promoted,” said Hawley. “I welcome President Trump’s strong action to reverse this child abuse and look forward to working with his administration to advance legislation that protects our kids.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”

2. No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2025

Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2025 (H.R. 7). The bill would bar the U.S. government from funding abortion directly, underwriting abortion through federally funded health care insurance plans (including Obamacare) and carrying out abortions at VA hospitals.

“Abortion violence must be replaced with compassion and empathy for women and for defenseless unborn baby girls and boys,” Smith, co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, told The Washington Stand.

“No matter which party holds power in Washington, Americans should never be forced to fund the violence of abortion with their tax dollars,” Marilyn Musgrave, vice president of Government Affairs at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told TWS. “Despite Americans’ strong support of this policy, pro-abortion members of Congress attack the Hyde Amendment in every spending bill. The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act would finally apply Hyde principles permanently across the whole federal government, including stopping abortion subsidies in Obamacare.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment”

3. FACE Act Repeal Act

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) reintroduced the FACE Act Repeal Act (H.R.5577) last month. The Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that activist justices wrongly invented a “constitutional right” to abortion in Roe v. Wade, yet the Biden-Harris administration continued Democratic presidents’ decades-long practices of weaponizing the 1994 Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act against pro-life advocates until the day he left office. Roy’s bill would purge this now-irrelevant bill from the federal register for good.

“We should make this a permanent change so that no future president has to pardon, as President Trump did … individuals who were unfairly politically targeted and charged under the Department of Justice,” Roy told his former colleague, Jody Hice, the regular Friday host of “Washington Watch,” on the day of the 2025 March for Life.

“Americans just spent the last four years being targeted by a weaponized justice system. The FACE Act was one of the primary weapons of abuse — being used to politically target, arrest, and jail pro-life Americans for speaking out and standing up for life” he said in a statement emailed to TWS upon reintroducing the bill.

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Ending The Weaponization Of The Federal Government,” “Enforcing the Hyde Amendment,” and “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias”

4. No Taxpayer Funding for the United Nations Population Fund Act

Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas) reintroduced the No Taxpayer Funding for the United Nations Population Fund Act (H.R.436) last month.

“The United Nations Population Fund is a globalist, Orwellian, propaganda machine that shills for the Chinese Communist Party its brutal mandatory abortion practices. President Trump was absolutely right to end taxpayer funding to this corrupt and anti-life organization during his first term and I look forward to him doing so again,” Roy told TWS. “At the same time, Congress has a duty under our constitutionally vested powers to ensure that U.S. tax dollars — regardless of which administration is in the White House — can never flow to this dystopian propaganda machine under any future administration. That’s why we need to put this bill on the president’s desk right away.”

For years, UNFPA worked closely with the Chinese Communist Party’s population police, which brutally enforced the nation’s One Child policy.

“The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has worked hand-in-glove with the abortion industry to promote unlimited abortion in other countries,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “Taxpayer dollars should never be going toward the Left’s anti-life, anti-family agenda,” agreed Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project. “We encourage all Republicans to support this effort and do whatever it takes to make it law.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: When President Trump signed three pro-life executive orders on January 25, the White House noted Trump “[c]ut all funding to the United Nations Population Fund, which supports coercive abortion and forced sterilization” in his first administration. This bill would help return global abortion policy to the pre-Biden status quo.

5. WHO is Accountable Act

Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) has introduced the WHO is Accountable Act (H.R. 600). The bill would prohibit the use of funds to seek membership in the World Health Organization or to provide assessed or voluntary contributions to the World Health Organization unless the administration certifies:

  • WHO no longer covers up the Chinese Communist Party’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic and does not persist under the CCP’s control.
  • WHO increases transparency and accountability to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.
  • WHO adopts meaningful reforms to end the politicization of humanitarian assistance.
  • WHO grants observer status to Taiwan.
  • No funds are diverted to such human rights abusers as North Korea and Iran.

“President Trump was right to pull the United States out of the CCP-controlled World Health Organization,” said Arrington. “Now, Congress must take action to ensure future presidents can’t foolishly rejoin this corrupt organization without major reforms. I have long said that I will fight against any attempt to surrender our sovereignty and cede regulatory power over the United States through a treaty, agreement, or arrangement. The World Health Organization aided and abetted China in covering up their incompetence with COVID-19, all while spending American tax dollars promulgating woke and radical ideology. This is why I’m proud to lead my colleagues in ensuring President Trump’s America First agenda endures.”

“The WHO is a globalist, CCP run entity that disproportionally charges the U.S. compared to other countries and pushes their CCP and progressive ideology on the American people and the world,” said Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), who co-sponsored the legislation. “This ends now.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Withdrawing The United States From The World Health Organization”

6. No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act (H.R.401). The bill states that “The United States may not provide any assessed or voluntary contributions to the World Health Organization.”

“The World Health Organization (WHO) doesn’t serve our interests and doesn’t deserve our money. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic this body ran interference for the Chinese Communist Party — arguably helping that regime make the entire outbreak worse,” Roy told TWS.

President Trump withdrew from WHO in 2018, only to see Joe Biden rejoin the global governance body on his first day in office. Last month, President Trump withdrew again.

WHO, which regularly repeated CCP propaganda about COVID-19 at face value, attempted to foist a WHO Pandemic Agreement on the world which would limit national sovereignty, claim ownership of 20% of all U.S. vaccines and medications, implement a “One Health” philosophy equating human well-being with animal and plant life, and embolden social media companies to suppress alleged “misinformation.” Family Research Council warned the controversial accord creates “a web of freedom-strangling entities, legal regulatory mandates, and relationships” that could be “switched on to function as a ‘turnkey totalitarian state.’”

“Taking money from hardworking families struggling with the aftermath of Biden’s inflation crisis to send it to a bunch of leftist ‘health experts’ and bureaucrats in Geneva is unacceptable. I have full confidence that President Trump will cut the WHO’s funding off — as he did last time — but this legislation will ensure that no future administration can restart it,” Roy told TWS. “Let’s get this done.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Withdrawing The United States From The World Health Organization”

7. R.1123: “To abolish the United States Agency for International Development, and for other purposes”

Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced a bill “To abolish the United States Agency for International Development, and for other purposes” (H.R.1123). Investigators at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered billions of dollars in wasteful and often-offensive grants made by USAID, a body intended to supply foreign aid to the world’s most vulnerable populations, including funding of transgender propaganda around the world.

“As chairwoman of the DOGE Subcommittee,” which held its first hearing on Wednesday, “I’ve launched the War on Waste, and USAID is a major culprit lighting over $40 billion on fire each year. It’s time to do what DOGE does best: cut the waste,” said Greene.

“I am pleased that the rot and corruption is finally getting the attention and action it deserves from the Trump administration, but Congress needs to back this effort up and end this problem permanently,” said Roy. “With $36 trillion in debt, we have to get our fiscal House in order; but we can start right now with getting rid of USAID.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Reevaluating And Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” as well as numerous executive actions, such as a mass firing reducing USAID from more than 10,000 employees to just 294.

8. Dismantle DEI Act

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) and Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) introduced the Dismantle DEI Act. The bill terminates all DEI-based programs, offices, trainings, and grants — including identity-based quotas and anything rooted in critical race theory (CRT) — and does not allow the government to rename or repurpose them. Significantly, the legislation extends beyond government entities themselves to include federal contractors and accreditation bodies. It also creates a private right of action for individuals to sue offenders.

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs have plagued our federal government, academic institutions, and other aspects of our society, cheapening standards while disregarding merit,” said Schmitt in a written statement emailed to TWS. “Moreover, taxpayer dollars should not be wasted on this poisonous, divisive ideology.”

“The DEI agenda has no place in our federal government,” agreed Peter Holland of the Foundation for Government Accountability.

“DEI was never about fairness or opportunity — it was a Trojan horse for left-wing political social engineering that fosters division, not unity,” noted Cloud. “Hiring and promotion should be because of someone’s merit, excellence, and hard work, regardless of race, religion, or creed.”

“I’m grateful to President Trump for reversing these harmful policies on day one of his administration,” Cloud told TWS. “His leadership put an end to these divisive, un-American programs, and it’s now Congress’s job to follow through and codify the permanent elimination of DEI from our government.”

Should it reach the president’s desk, it should face little opposition. The Dismantle DEI Act’s Senate sponsor in the last Congress was then-Senator J.D. Vance.

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferences,” “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” as well as a memo from the Office of Personnel Management firing DEI officials and closing DEI programs.

9. R.899: “To terminate the Department of Education”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) reintroduced a bill “To terminate the Department of Education” (H.R.899).

Conservatives have proposed eliminating the U.S. Department of Education since its founding under President Jimmy Carter, which was widely seen as a kickback to teachers unions for dependably supporting Democratic candidates. President Ronald Reagan campaigned on eliminating the agency and repeated his desire to shutter the Education and Energy departments during a televised address on September 24, 1981. “Education is the principal responsibility of local school systems, teachers, parents, citizen boards, and State governments. By eliminating the Department of Education less than two years after it was created, we can not only reduce the budget but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children,” said President Reagan.

“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” agreed Massie, who supports a strict constructionist reading of the U.S. Constitution. “Parents have the right to choose the most appropriate educational opportunity for their children, including home school, public school, or private school.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: As of this writing, President Trump has not yet signed a much-anticipated executive order closing the Department of Education. (Experts question whether a Cabinet-level position established by legislation can be abolished by executive order.) However, he has repeatedly stated his hopes of closing the department.

10. H. Res. 9: “Resolution reaffirming that the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court”

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) reintroduced his “resolution reaffirming that the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute and does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court” (H. Res. 9). President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute, creating the ICC, shortly before leaving office on New Year’s Eve 2000 but never submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification, as required by the Constitution. Article 125 of the Rome Statute states that it is “subject to ratification, acceptance, or approval by signatory” nations. In 2002, President George W. Bush said the U.S. had no intention to join the body.

The ICC created international controversy last November when it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for committing war crimes against Palestinians, including starvation and the intentional targeting of civilians. On February 6, President Trump sanctioned the ICC via executive order.

The latest resolution, which does not have legally binding authority, expresses the sense of Congress that the U.S. “does not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.” It also formally condemns the ICC’s arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, and it proclaims America’s “unwavering support for the State of Israel and its right to defend itself and its leaders from unwarranted international legal actions.”

Executive order(s) it builds on: “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump Signs Executive Order Preserving ‘Indispensable’ Second Amendment

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The Trump administration bolstered Americans’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms, vowing to overturn any and all encroachments on the Second Amendment enacted under the Biden-Harris administration.

“The Second Amendment is an indispensable safeguard of security and liberty,” declared President Donald Trump’s executive order on “Protecting Second Amendment Rights,” which he signed last Friday, February 7. “It has preserved the right of the American people to protect ourselves, our families, and our freedoms since the founding of our great Nation. Because it is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans, the right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed.” The order requires the attorney general to review all the Biden administration’s executive orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, or agency actions that infringe on the Second Amendment and present an action plan within 30 days.

The gun rights order from President Trump — whose sons Donald Jr. and Eric are competitive shooters — targets Joe Biden’s “enhanced regulatory enforcement policy” pertaining to firearms and/or federal firearms licensees (FFLs), which results in automatic loss of license for relatively minor infractions. That led to 338 license revocations between Biden’s inauguration and June 2024, according to Master FFL, which helps gun dealers comply with the federal regulatory burden. License revocations prevent Mom-and-Pop firearms dealers from earning their livelihood.

The Trump White House also noted, in his first term, “President Trump removed the United States from the United Nations (UN) misguided Arms Trade Treaty to protect Americans from the threat of global regulations of conventional firearms.”

The firearms industry as a whole came under hostile fire from his two Democratic predecessors, said Trump administration officials. “Firearms manufacturers have been de-banked or denied services simply because they make guns — which allow Americans to exercise a constitutional right,” adds a White House fact sheet.

Operation Choke Point 1 and 2

Upon taking office, Barack Obama launched Operation Choke Point, which discouraged bankers from offering their services to disfavored industries, including legal firearms dealers. “The original Operation Choke Point began in 2013, when the Obama DOJ, working with the FDIC, bullied banks to stop serving the firearms industry. This had the intended impact of choking out deposit and lending services to the firearms industry, which Old Glory Bank has been working hard to solve since we launched in April of 2023,” testified Mike Ring, who founded Old Glory Bank with country music star John Rich and talk show host Larry Elder, before the Senate last week.

While the effort officially ended in January 2015, critics said the Obama administration cranked up pressure against the same industries throughout its time in office. After his departure from office, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) harangued bank executives to stop serving the fossil fuel industry, as well as partnering on the Fossil Free Finance Act to enact their views into law.

“Under the Biden administration, we’ve seen the rise of what many are calling Operation Choke Point 2.0, where federal regulators exploited their power, pressuring banks to cut off services to individuals and businesses with conservative disposition, or folks aligned with industries they just didn’t like,” explained Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) during his opening statement at the hearing of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. “[D]ebanking someone over their political ideology is un-American and goes against the core values that our nation was founded on.”

Last week, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) revealed that a page from the Federal Reserve’s Internal Implementation Handbook warns banks to be cautious about offering their services to “controversial” industries.

Bipartisan Opposition

Opposition to debanking created a rare moment of bipartisan agreement between Scott and one of the chamber’s most outspoken “progressives.”

“For me, this is straightforward. It doesn’t matter who you voted for, what you believe, or the origin of your last name — people shouldn’t be arbitrarily denied access to their banks, locked out of their accounts, or stripped of their banking privileges,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“Donald Trump was onto a real problem when he criticized Bank of America for its debanking practices,” continued Warren, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination to unseat him in 2020. The Bank of America debanked Indigenous Advance, a U.S. charity dedicated to serving Uganda’s poor, and a church in Memphis. “[U]pon review of your account(s), we have determined you’re operating in a business type we have chosen not to service at Bank of America,” said the bank in an April 2023 letter. The bank later explained allowing the charity to use its services “no longer aligns with the bank’s risk tolerance.”

“Nonprofits and charities operating internationally have been de-banked through no fault of their own,” said Warren. The Massachusetts senator went on to cite 11,955 complaints over closed accounts lodged with the controversial Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Senator Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who reintroduced the Fair Access to Banking Act, revealed that “some of the bank presidents, who have never dared say it out loud, tell me they support” the bill, because they want the “burden” of “this political pressure from their 30-year-old staff, or the regulator they fear, or the political movement of the day, or the activist investors trying to impose their values … removed from them.”

“I commend the new FDIC leadership for its commitment to transparency, but it is a shame that it took an election — an election — for the agency to begin following the laws of our country,” said Scott.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Transgender Surgeries for Kids Is ‘a Stain on Our Nation’: Trump Executive Order

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President Donald Trump has protected U.S. taxpayers from funding “the chemical and surgical mutilation of children” by declaring the federal government will “not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support” cross-sex hormone injections or transgender surgeries.

President Trump’s executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” signed Tuesday, cuts off federal funding for the transgender industry, allows families harmed to sue, could institute new religious and conscience protections, and may open the door to criminal prosecution of any individual involved in certain transgender surgeries.

“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our [n]ation’s history, and it must end,” states the order. “Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”

The executive order requires that all medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals receiving federal “research or education grants end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children” at once. The order also bars the funding of such procedures by the U.S. military’s health insurance policy, Tricare, as well as all other federal benefits providers. And it previews potential regulations, including placing conditions on Medicare and Medicaid funding.

The order foresees the prosecution of so-called “gender-affirming care” providers in civil or criminal courts. The order requires the attorney general to “prioritize enforcement of protections against female genital mutilation,” enacting criminal penalties for phalloplasty and vaginoplasty. The Biden-Harris administration decried the Islamic practice of FGM as “child abuse” at the same time it sued states for protecting residents from “bottom surgery.”

The Justice Department can also sue anyone “misleading the public about long-term side effects of chemical and surgical mutilation.” The DOJ will also “draft, propose, and promote legislation to enact a private right of action for children and the parents of children whose healthy body parts have been damaged” by transgender procedures, including “a lengthy statute of limitations.” Detransitioners including Chloe Cole, Camille Kiefel, Clementine Breen, Kayla Lovdahl, and others have held their doctors accountable for advising and carrying out transgender procedures that caused them lifelong, irreversible damage.

Significantly, Trump orders the government to consider prosecuting blue states that facilitate the “transition” of children without parental consent for kidnapping. The Trump-Vance administration will “take appropriate action to end child-abusive practices by so-called sanctuary [s]tates” such as Governor Tim Walz’s (D) Minnesota [and] Governor Gavin Newsom’s (D) California “that facilitate stripping custody from parents who support the healthy development of their own children, including by considering the application of the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act and recognized constitutional rights.” The EO also repeals a 2022 guidance that states federal law “does not require covered entities and business associates to disclose” information about “an individual’s” health care to others without the patient’s consent. (Emphasis in original.)

The order defines “child or children” as “an individual or individuals under 19 years of age.” Although above the legal age of majority, the definition more closely comports with a recent paper from researchers at the Mayo Clinic showing that the human brain does not finish developing until nearly the age of 30.

The order could expand the religious liberty and conscience rights recognized by the U.S. government, by modifying section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, conventionally known as Obamacare. The Biden-Harris administration amended the provision last year to treat it as though it forbade medical providers of conscience from refusing to carry out transgender procedures.

It also orders the secretary of Health and Human Services “to end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children” and issue a report within 90 days on scientifically based best practices for minors suffering from gender dysphoria. President Trump’s HHS nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., began Senate nomination hearings on Wednesday.

The January 28 order notes the politicization and poor quality of existing, pro-transgender studies. It points out the world’s largest “expert” body on transgenderism propounds advocacy-masquerading-as-science and notes that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) “lacks scientific integrity.” All federal agencies will delete any policies based on WPATH’s Standards of Care Version 8. Biden’s HHS assistant secretary for health, who was born Richard Levine and now uses the name Rachel, lobbied WPATH to remove minimum age limits for transgender surgeries to serve political ends. President Trump’s new executive order requires the HHS secretary to “increase the quality of data” on these matters. Most studies supporting so-called “gender-affirming care” can be classified as “low quality/low certainty,” according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.

All federal agency heads will submit a report detailing their progress within 60 days.

‘A Refreshing Return to Sanity’

The measures should prove popular with the broader public: A majority (59%) of Americans believe no one should be able to carry out chemical or surgical transgender procedures on minors — a position supported by every demographic except registered Democrats.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) called the order “hugely important.” “President Trump [is] sounding the death knell for the gender mutilation industry that has been targeting our children.” Hawley took action to enshrine the executive order’s provisions into law, re-introducing the Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act, which would grant victims and their families a private right of action to sue the predatory transgender industry and defund facilities carrying out these procedures.

State Rep. Fred Deutsch (R-S.D.), who introduced one of the earliest bills to protect children from transgender procedures statewide, said it was “about time these crimes against humanity were banned.”

“We applaud President Trump for fulfilling his promise to America’s families and taking these critical steps to protect children from harmful, experimental, and often irreversible medical procedures,” Matt Sharp, director of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Center for Public Policy, told The Washington Stand. Sharp called the order “a refreshing return to sanity.” Now, “instead of being a global outlier, America will now ‘follow the science,’ like the U.K. and other European countries have done, to ensure that we are identifying safe and effective ways to help kids who experience distress over their biological sex.”

Dr. Jill Simons, the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) called the executive order a “bold defense of vulnerable children from mutilating procedures in the name of gender ideology,” while ACPeds President Dr. Michael Artigues deemed the order “a major step toward ending harmful medical interventions on minors.”

“It reaffirms a commitment to healthy, ethical, and evidence-based pediatric care,” said Artigues. “It is essential to emphasize the importance of protecting youth and providing comprehensive, quality psychological support to all children struggling with gender dysphoria.”

“Thank you President Trump for protecting children!” said Simons. “Children are beautiful just the way they are. No child is born in the wrong body.”

Katy Faust of Them Before Us described the executive action as “a win for children’s rights.”

Trump Transgender Executive Orders Already Taking Effect

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Acting Chair Andrea Lucas announced she had implemented President Trump’s Executive Order 14166, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” when she:

  • Announced that one of her priorities — for compliance, investigations, and litigation — is to defend the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work.
  • Removed the agency’s “pronoun app,” a feature in employees’ Microsoft 365 profiles, which allowed an employee to opt to identify pronouns, content which then appeared alongside the employee’s display name across all Microsoft 365 platforms, including Outlook and Teams. This content was displayed both to internal and external parties with whom EEOC employees communicated.
  • Ended the use of the “X” gender marker during the intake process for filing a charge of discrimination.
  • Directed the modification of the charge of discrimination and related forms to remove “Mx.” from the list of prefix options.
  • Commenced review of the content of EEOC’s “Know Your Rights” poster, which all covered employers are required by law to post in their workplaces.
  • Removed materials promoting gender ideology on the Commission’s internal and external websites and documents, including webpages, statements, social media platforms, forms, trainings, and others. The agency’s review and removal of such materials remains ongoing. Where a publicly accessible item cannot be immediately removed or revised, a banner has been added to explain why the item has not yet been brought into compliance.

“Biology is not bigotry. Biological sex is real, and it matters,” said Lucas. “It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests. And the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County does not demand otherwise: the Court explicitly stated that it did ‘not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.’”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Transgenderism Not ‘Honorable, Truthful’ or Compatible with Military Service: Trump EO

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President Donald Trump has signed two executive orders reorienting the U.S. military away from liberal indoctrination by banning extreme gender ideology —including transgender pronouns — and DEI policies aimed at advancing critical race theory. The actions brand transgender ideology a “falsehood” that prevents its adherents from living an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

President Trump’s new policy will “end invented and identification-based pronoun usage” and stop members of one sex from using the opposite sex’s “sleeping, changing, or bathing facilities” except under “extraordinary operational necessity,” such as in war zones. It classifies “gender ideology” and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) as “radical, extremist, and irrational theories” and will set about “abolishing the DEI bureaucracy.”

Transgender Identity Shows Dishonor ‘Even in One’s Personal Life’

President Trump signed an executive order “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” on Monday night.

“It is the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity,” the transgender executive order states. “This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.”

Anyone “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” states the executive order. “Beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved, adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life. A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”

The order cites existing military policy (DoD Instruction (DoDI) 6130.03) that enlistees must be “[f]ree of medical conditions or physical defects that may reasonably be expected to require excessive time lost from duty for necessary treatment or hospitalization.” It notes this would apply to “conditions that require substantial medication or medical treatment to bipolar and related disorders, eating disorders, suicidality, and prior psychiatric hospitalization” — comorbidities which tend to occur in greater preponderance among people who identify as transgender.

Transgender procedures took trans-identifying soldiers out of readiness about half the year, according to a comprehensive report authorized in the first Trump administration. The memorandum found the nation’s 994 active duty servicemembers who identify as transgender accounted for more than 30,000 mental health visits. In all, “transitioning Service members in the Army and Air Force have averaged 167 and 159 days of limited duty, respectively, over a one-year period,” constituting a “readiness risk.”

The new policy builds on a previous executive order which rescinded 78 Biden executive orders — including his transgender military service order: Executive Order 14004 of January 25, 2021 (“Enabling All Qualified Americans To Serve Their Country in Uniform”) — on day one.

Executive Order 2: Abolishing DEI in the Military

President Trump’s second executive order, “Restoring America’s Fighting Force,” refocuses the military on excellence, lethality, and deterrence rather than DEI.

“Unfortunately, in recent years civilian and uniformed leadership alike have implemented Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and their attendant race and sex preferences within the Armed Forces. These actions undermine leadership, merit, and unit cohesion, thereby eroding lethality and force readiness,” says the order. With his latest action, Trump will wipe out “any vestiges of DEI offices, such as sub-offices, programs, elements, or initiatives established to promote a race-based preferences system that subverts meritocracy, perpetuates unconstitutional discrimination, and promotes divisive concepts or gender ideology.”

The move furthers his policy of rooting out “race-based and sex-based discrimination” throughout the government, including within the U.S. military. “No individual or group within our Armed Forces should be preferred or disadvantaged on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, color, or creed,” states the order. With this action, the federal government will no longer “violate Americans’ consciences by engaging in invidious race and sex discrimination.” The secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security will issue guidance for implementing this order within 30 days, then document their progress in carrying it out within six months. DEI programs cost the military $114.7 million in 2024 alone.

Trump Actions ‘Return the Military to Lethality’: Congressman

Conservatives and veterans praised the president’s decision to bleed social experimentation out of the military. “This is absolutely necessary. It was perfect tone by the president. We will return the military to lethality, to deterring our adversaries across the world,” said Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas), a retired Army lieutenant colonel who sits on the Veterans Affairs Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee, on “Washington Watch” Tuesday. “This will help with recruiting. This will help with training. This will help with morale. This is the way it’s done.”

“Leadership makes a difference in the military. And our commander in chief demonstrated that leadership yesterday with these executive orders,” Self added.

“I was thrilled to see that he went back to the same policy that he enacted” in his first term, “one that we worked with him to get done, and that was to return our military to focusing on its mission to fight and win our wars, not modeling the latest cross-dressing camouflage,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a Marine veteran.

“Wokeism, which comes in many forms, takes progressivism to extremes and imposes it with coercion, even if it hurts the institution,” Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, told The Washington Stand.

The move should prove popular with others who have served, as well. A YouGov poll found an overwhelming 94% of veterans oppose racial and gender preferences in military promotions.

But some decried the policy, which reverses secular progressive political grains. Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), who chairs a congressional caucus dedicated to advancing LGBTQ radicalism, called the Trump policy “beyond shameful.”

Undoing Nine Years of Democratic Social Tinkering

Former President Barack Obama paved the way for the military crisis by allowing individuals with active gender dysphoria to join the military. He added “gender identity” as a protected class in the military’s non-discrimination policies. President Donald Trump authorized a report on the issue in August 2017. The 45th president ultimately adopted the February 2018 memorandum declaring gender dysphoria incompatible with military service, but grandfathering in those who began receiving transgender injections since Obama’s order or who had been “stable” for 36 months and could be deployed.

The National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders Law (which sometimes brands itself “Glad Law”) filed a lawsuit, Jane Doe 2 v. Trump, but lost the judgment from Judge Stephen F. Williams, a Reagan appointee to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. “[T]here is no constitutional right for, say, biological males who identify as female to live, sleep, shower, and train with biological females. Whether allowing such flexibility in military service is a good idea or not is of no concern to the courts; that is a question for the people acting through their elected representatives,” ruled the late judge. The case never came before the Supreme Court before the Biden-Harris administration restored and expanded the Obama-Biden administration’s policies.

NCLR and Glad Law filed a new lawsuit on Tuesday asserting the military readiness policy is not “based on any legitimate governmental purpose.” Instead, “the ban reflects animosity toward transgender people.”

Additional Executive Orders Reinstate Soldiers Who Refused the COVID-19 Shot, Establish Missile Defense

Trump also signed an executive order reinstating all soldiers whom Joe Biden dismissed or left the U.S. armed services for refusing to take the COVID-19 shot. The more than 8,000 soldiers will “revert to their former rank and receive full back pay, benefits, bonus payments, or compensation.” The president’s action includes not only those forcibly removed from service but also those who voluntarily left the military rather than obey Biden’s order to take the controversial shot, which has been tied to heart problems, strokes, neurological disorders, and an as-yet-unnamed condition that mimics the symptoms of long COVID.

An inspector general’s report found Biden-Harris administration bureaucrats denied religious exemptions en masse to all but those already scheduled to retire or leave the services, spending just 12 minutes analyzing requests. Some 70% of the early servicemembers removed from service over the shot received the lower “general discharge,” rather than an “honorable discharge.”

President Trump’s new order gives the Defense and DHS secretaries 60 days to show they have followed through.

Trump also signed an executive order Tuesday authorizing the establishment of “The Iron Dome for America,” a missile defense system. “The United States will provide for the common defense of its citizens and the [n]ation by deploying and maintaining a next-generation missile defense shield,” states the order.

The executive order states the U.S. military will try to provide or enhance missile defense capabilities for U.S. allies. The executive order calls into question the Trump administration’s commitment to a non-interventionist foreign policy, stating it will “[i]mprove theater missile defenses of forward-deployed United States troops and allied [foreign] territories, troops, and populations.”

The policy captured public imagination thanks to Ronald Reagan’s televised address on Strategic Defense Initiative on March 23, 1983. Over stiff Democratic opposition and diplomatic pressure from the Soviet Union, the U.S. developed a limited missile-defense system in fits and starts over the next four decades. President Bill Clinton slow-walked the advancement of national missile defense, deferring it altogether late in his administration. In December 2001, President George W. Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and enhanced missile defense research.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

All the Executive Orders Trump Signed on Day One

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In his second inaugural speech Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump promised that a series of forthcoming executive orders would implement the 2024 election’s “revolution of common sense.” He immediately proceeded to sign an avalanche of executive orders repealing the Biden-Harris administration’s promotion of transgender ideology, ending the weaponization of government against pro-life advocates, safeguarding freedom of speech, securing the southern border, emphasizing American energy independence, and ending imperious government decrees by the federal bureaucracy.

President Trump wasted no time signing executive orders on all these subjects, and many more, after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. Trump began signing the first several executive orders in front of cheering MAGA supporters inside the Capital One Arena, throwing the pens he used to sign the orders — a cherished and sought-after collectible — into the audience.

Trump noted on Sunday that he would not wait, as he did in his first administration, to begin implementing the policies the American people voted for — and erasing the legacy of outgoing President Joe Biden. “Somebody said, ‘Sir, don’t sign so many in one day. Let’s do it over a matter of weeks.’ I said, ‘Like hell we’re gonna do it over weeks,’” said then-President-elect Trump on Sunday.

Executive Orders President Trump Signed on Day One

Flags fly full-staff on inauguration day: The first order the president signed impacted his own inauguration: President Biden had signed an executive order that all flags be flown at half-mast for 30 days following the death of former President Jimmy Carter. That would make it appear that the nation greeted the changing of the presidency in a state of mourning. President Trump issued a proclamation that, “on this and all future Inauguration Days, the flag of the United States shall be flown at full-staff” on all public buildings and grounds.

Undoing the Biden legacy: The first executive order President Trump signed publicly repealed 78 Biden executive orders. Among other things, this order:

  • Eliminated the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, the White House Gender Policy Council, the Interagency Task Force on the Reunification of Families, the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, the Climate Change Support Office, and the United States Council on Transnational Organized Crime;
  • Ended policies forbidding oil drilling on the continental shelf;
  • Ended the electric vehicle mandate; and
  • Placed Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Repealing Gender Ideology, Wokeness, Censorship, and Weaponization of Government

President Trump’s executive order “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” repeals Biden-Harris administration policies to place men in women’s intimate spaces, on the sports field, and even in women’s prisons. It begins by skewering the intellectual basis of gender ideology by officially defining a man and a woman in strictly biological terms:

“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

“‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

It defines “gender ideology” as a worldview that “replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true. Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex. Gender ideology is internally inconsistent, in that it diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.”

From a legal standpoint, it reverses the Biden administration’s citation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) that the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies to “gender identity,” eradicating sex-specific spaces in private accommodations, public facilities, and sports competitions.

It also specifies that all intimate spaces shall be designated “by sex and not identity” and that “no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” Title IX rules and federal publications promoting transgenderism will be repealed. The EO says the federal government “shall ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers,” where women have frequently been beaten, abused, raped, or impregnated by male prisoners who identify as women.

Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, told The Washington Stand she was “delighted that he kept his promise to the American people to put an end to this madness and look forward to the Department of Education putting in place policies and procedures that provide clarity to schools and families alike.”

Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” demands “the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

President Trump’s executive order “Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service” seeks to repeal affirmative action programs that give preferential hiring treatment to less-qualified members of racial, sexual, or “gender identity” minorities. “Federal hiring should not be based on impermissible factors, such as one’s commitment to illegal racial discrimination under the guise of ‘equity,’ or one’s commitment to the invented concept of ‘gender identity’ over sex,” says the order. The federal government will instead prioritize merit and the “recruitment of individuals committed to improving the efficiency of the Federal government, passionate about the ideals of our American republic, and committed to upholding the rule of law and the United States Constitution.”

Trump’s executive order on “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” notes, “Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve,” under “the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’” The order states that the government will attempt to “identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct.”

“Under the Biden administration, federal officials established a censorship regime that aimed to shut down so-called ‘misinformation’ and any other speech that is unacceptable to the government. It also weaponized the law against American citizens, including colluding with Big Banks to surveil Americans’ private financial data and target them as ‘threats’ based solely on their speech. President Trump’s call to dismantle these tools of repression is something every American — and every other freedom-loving person — should celebrate,” Alliance Defending Freedom CEO, President, and General Counsel Kristen Waggoner told The Washington Stand.

Trump’s executive order “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government” states, “The prior administration and allies throughout the country engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process,” including “investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions, and other related actions.” Late last December, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government produced a 17,019-page report stating that the Biden-Harris administration singled out “pro-life, pro-family” advocates for legal harassment, among other outrages. The attorney general will review the actions of federal agencies — specifically including the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission — over the last four years and take “appropriate remedial actions.” The director of national intelligence will review the actions of the intelligence community and prepare a report.

The executive order “Holding Former Government Officials Accountable for Election Interference and Improper Disclosure of Sensitive Governmental Information” removes the security clearance of dozens of former intelligence officials who issued an erroneous document branding the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation. Also stripped of security clearance, by name, is John Bolton, a former Bush-41 administration official who briefly served as national security adviser to Trump; Bolton, a neoconservative keen on intervening in foreign wars, soon clashed with Trump’s America First foreign policy and refused to endorse Trump in 2024.

Ending Crime and Securing the Southern Border

President Trump’s “Securing Our Borders” executive order reinstates the Migrant Protection Protocols, conventionally known as the Remain in Mexico policy, requiring alleged asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their trial. The majority of asylum cases never reach a hearing (and the majority that reach a judge are denied). Meanwhile, the Biden administration released illegal immigrants into the American heartland.

His order “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” would end birthright citizenship, the notion that if illegal immigrants give birth to an anchor baby on U.S. soil, that child is an American citizen. Legal scholars wrangle over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment clause “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. government — a term some of the amendment’s authors explicitly limited to U.S. citizens. A legal challenge to this EO is inevitable.

Trump’s executive order “Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States” takes steps to secure the border, noting the harm caused to Americans by “cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics.” The emergency declaration allows the president to deploy the National Guard and other military units to the border, build the border wall, and patrol the border with aerial drones.

A related executive order “Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists” notes that drug cartels “functionally control, through a campaign of assassination, terror, rape, and brute force nearly all illegal traffic across the southern border of the United States” and threaten “the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.” The government may designate transnational criminal organizations such as Tren de Aragua (TdA) and La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) as foreign terrorist organizations within 14 days. When a reporter asked if President Trump might consider sending Special Forces troops into Mexico to target these duly designated terrorist organizations, he answered in a coy fashion, “I might.”

Trump’s executive order “Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting the Territorial Integrity of the United States” notes, “Unchecked unlawful mass migration and the unimpeded flow of opiates across our borders continue to endanger the safety and security of the American people and encourage further lawlessness.” The Secretary of Defense has 10 days to draw up a plan for the Unified Command Plan that assigns United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) “to seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States.”

The executive order “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program” notes that Biden-Harris administration refugee policies streamed thousands upon thousands of “refugees” into cities such as Charleroi, Pennsylvania; Springfield, Ohio; and Whitewater, Wisconsin. The EO pauses all mass refugee programs beginning January 27, although the government may admit refugees on a case-by-case basis.

His executive order “Protecting the American People against Invasion” rescinds numerous Biden administration executive orders, ends catch-and-release, presses criminal charges against illegal immigrants, and makes it federal policy to “faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens, particularly those aliens who threaten the safety or security of the American people.”

Trump’s executive order “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats” requires “stringent” vetting of all would-be refugees, requires the government to identify nations whose public records are so deficient that vetting applicants is impossible, and (if necessary) removing aliens who have entered the U.S. from such nations. Federal leaders must also “protect the American people from the actions of foreign nationals who have undermined or seek to undermine the fundamental constitutional rights of the American people, including, but not limited to, our Citizens’ rights to freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment, who preach or call for sectarian violence, the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands, or who provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists.”

Trump’s executive order “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety” promotes capital punishment as a deterrent, especially since “on December 23, 2024, President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 most vile and sadistic rapists, child molesters, and murderers on Federal death row: remorseless criminals who brutalized young children, strangled and drowned their victims, and hunted strangers for sport.” He encourages federal and state prosecutors to seek the death penalty “for all crimes of a severity demanding its use” (such as killing police officers or a capital crime committed by an illegal immigrant) and “to ensure that each state that allows capital punishment has a sufficient supply of drugs needed to carry out lethal injection.”

Restoring American Sovereignty and Withdrawing from Global Governance Bodies/Agreements

Trump’s executive order “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements” orders America’s U.N. Ambassador to notify the world body America will withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. “We’re going to save over $1 trillion by withdrawing from that treaty,” said President Trump at the signing ceremony.

His executive order “Withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization” indicates the United States will end its membership in the global health body and “pause the future transfer of any United States Government funds, support, or resources to the WHO” with “all practicable speed.”

Trump’s memo “The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Tax Deal (Global Tax Deal)” states that the Biden administration’s plan to adopt a “Global Minimum Tax” of approximately 15% “have no force or effect within the United States absent an act by the Congress.”

Trump’s executive order “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid” pauses foreign aid for 90 days. “The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values. They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” says the order in an apparent nod to the Biden-Harris administration’s bountiful aid to Ukraine in its military struggle against Russia.

Trump’s executive order “America First Policy Directive to the Secretary of State” states curtly, “From this day forward, the foreign policy of the United States shall champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first.”

The memo “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California” orders the secretaries of the interior and commerce “to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply. … The recent deadly and historically destructive wildfires in Southern California underscore why the State of California needs a reliable water supply.”

Reigning in the Regulatory State

Trump’s executive order “Regulatory Freeze Pending Review” orders government agencies to suspend issuing any further regulations until approved by the Trump administration and to withdraw any regulations that have been submitted but not yet published in the Federal Register. Trump also required federal workers to return to in-person work.

Trump also signed an executive order “Establishing and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’” or DOGE.

Trump’s executive order “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions within the Federal Workforce” reinstates the designation of “Schedule F” to exempted federal employees, making it easier to fire them. The order — which President Trump implemented in late 2020 but which the Biden-Harris administration reversed upon taking office — could apply to as many as 50,000 federal bureaucrats. A recent poll from the Napolitan Institute found 64% of federal workers who voted for Kamala Harris would “ignore” the lawful orders and policies of President Trump and “do what they thought was best” instead. The executive order aims to assure the federal bureaucracy responds to the policies supported by the American people. A related memo “Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives” empowers greater oversight and rigorous evaluations of career Senior Executive Service (SES) officials.

The president’s “Memorandum to Resolve the Backlog of Security Clearances for Executive Office of the President Personnel” immediately grants a six-month, temporary Top Secret clearance to officials caught in the Biden administration’s clearance backlog.

Lowering Prices and Supercharging U.S. Energy Independence

Trump’s outline on “Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis” orders a whole-of-government response to address the cost of living crisis. The Assistant to the President for Economic Policy will report to President Trump every 30 days on what the Cabinet has done to “lower the cost of housing and expand housing supply; eliminate unnecessary administrative expenses and rent-seeking practices that increase healthcare costs; eliminate counterproductive requirements that raise the costs of home appliances; create employment opportunities for American workers, including drawing discouraged workers into the labor force; and eliminate harmful, coercive ‘climate’ policies that increase the costs of food and fuel.”

The executive order “Declaring a National Energy Emergency” asks all department heads to “facilitate the identification, leasing, siting, production, transportation, refining, and generation of domestic energy resources” nationwide. It would expedite the completion of infrastructure, facilitate oil pipelines across the country, and allow the sale of E-15 gasoline year-round.

Trump’s executive order “Unleashing American Energy” states the Biden administration’s “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations” have “limited the generation of reliable and affordable electricity, reduced job creation, and inflicted high energy costs upon our citizens.” The order encourages the exploration of abundant energy sources, including drilling on the U.S. continental shelf; eliminates the Biden administration’s electric vehicle mandate that half of all new U.S. vehicles must be EV by 2030 and urges them to consider rescinding EV subsidies; and safeguard Americans’ ability to purchase such goods as gas stoves, incandescent lightbulbs, and gasoline vehicles. Within 30 days, federal agencies will begin to “suspend, revise, or rescind all agency actions identified as unduly burdensome” under the EO.

An executive order “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential” encourages energy exploration on Alaskan state and federal lands, allows the building of a pipeline to transport energy, and aims to “prioritize the development of Alaska’s liquified natural gas (LNG) potential, including the sale and transportation of Alaskan LNG to other regions of the United States and allied nations within the Pacific region.”

A related memo on the “Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects” bans additional windmills from the continental shelf.

Trump’s “Application of Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act to TikTok” paused the ban on TikTok for 75 days. Trump has floated the possibility of a “joint venture,” for an American company to own at least 50% of the company. “There’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date,” noted Senators Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) in a joint statement.

President Trump’s memo on his vision for an “America First Trade Policy” asks the Secretary of the Treasury to consider establishing an External Revenue Service (ERS) “to collect tariffs, duties, and other foreign trade-related revenues.” Federal officials will also seek to identify unfair trade practices, currency manipulation, and the adverse impact foreign trade policies impose on American workers and farmers.

Additional Day One Executive Orders

President Trump’s executive order “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” would restore the name of Mount McKinley and change the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”

In a nod to President Trump’s background in construction, his EO “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” seeks to restore beauty in place of brutalist architecture when designing federal buildings.

Trump’s order “Granting Pardons and Commutation of Sentences for Certain Offenses Relating to the Events at Or Near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021” pardoned some 1,500 January 6 protesters and commuted the sentences of 14.

As of this writing, he has not yet pardoned peaceful pro-life advocates prosecuted by a weaponized Justice Department during the Biden-Harris administration. Pro-life advocates expect the pardon to be forthcoming soon.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washigton Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

FLORIDA: DeSantis Prohibits Florida Agencies From Assisting Biden Admin In Transporting Migrants

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Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order Tuesday barring state agencies from providing assistance to President Joe Biden’s administration in transporting illegal migrants.

Executive Order 21-223 makes it unlawful for Florida’s executive agencies to “provide support or resources to, or in any way assist, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or any other federal department or agency” in their attempt to move illegal migrants apprehended at the Southern Border across the nation.

“This executive order makes it clear that Florida resources will not be used to prop up the failed open border agenda enacted by this administration,” DeSantis said. He also noted that nearly 250,000 illegal migrants have been released in the U.S. in less than a year of Biden’s presidency, according to a press release.

Additionally, the governor announced a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its “catch and release” policy.

He also appointed former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Florida Larry Keefe as the state’s Public Safety Czar on Monday. Keefe is responsible for protecting Floridian taxpayers from “reckless immigration policies,” according to the press release.

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a similar executive order in late July, which outlawed non-government entities from providing transportation to migrants.

The Biden administration sued Texas over Abbott’s order and a federal judge issued a temporary halt on the governor’s ban in early August.

COLUMN BY

Shakhzod Yuldoshboev

Contributor.

RELATED VIDEO: Psaki’s Pathetic Explanations About Illegals and Covid.

RELATED ARTICLE: Migrants Revolt Against Bus Driver, Try To Escape Border Patrol In Texas

EDITORS NOTE: This The Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Trump’s ban on Critical Race Theory, explained

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Does Critical Race Theory promote racial harmony or does it “sow division” as the Trump administration claims? And what is its relation, if any, to Marxism?

With the November election just around the corner, it’s only to be expected that President Trump would seek to rally conservative voters and drive his supporters to the polls. So, when his administration, on September 4, instructed the federal government to eliminate all training in “Critical Race Theory,” some thought it was just a red-meat stunt to excite the Republican base. Others saw it as an act of right-wing censorship and an obstruction of racial progress.

In truth, there’s much more to this development than mere politicization and censorship.

Here’s a breakdown of what the administration is doing and why it’s a welcome move.

The executive memo

“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought wrote in the executive memorandum.

“Employees across the Executive Branch have been required to attend trainings where they are told that ‘virtually all White people contribute to racism’ or where they are required to say that they ‘benefit from racism,’” Vought explained. “According to press reports, in some cases these training [sic] have further claimed that there is racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.”

The order instructed federal agencies to identify and eliminate any contracts or spending that train employees in “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” “or any other training or propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.”

The exposé

How did it “come to the President’s attention,” and what press reports is Vought referring to?

Well, President Trump is known to watch Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. And days before the memo was issued, Carlson had on journalist Christopher Rufo to discuss his multiple reports uncovering the extent to which Critical Race Theory (CRT) was being used in federal training programs.

“For example, Rufo claimed, the Treasury Department recently hired a diversity trainer who said the U.S. was a fundamentally White supremacist country,” wrote Sam Dorman for the Fox News web site, “and that White people upheld the system of racism in the nation. In another case, which Rufo discussed with Carlson last month, Sandia National Laboratories, which designs nuclear weapons, sent its white male executives to a mandatory training in which they, according to Rufo, wrote letters apologizing to women and people of color.”

Rufo challenged President Trump to use his executive authority to extirpate CRT from the federal government.

The debate

CNN’s Brian Stelter (as well as Rufo himself) traced Trump’s decision directly to the independent investigative journalist’s self-proclaimed “one-man war” on CRT, of which the recent Carlson appearance was only the latest salvo.

Selter characterized Trump’s move as a reactionary attack on the current national “reckoning” on race. He cited the Washington Post’s claim that, “racial and diversity awareness trainings are essential steps in helping rectify the pervasive racial inequities in American society, including those perpetuated by the federal government.”

So which is it? Is CRT “divisive” and “toxic” or is it “rectifying” and “anti-racist”?

Intellectual ancestry

To answer that, it would help to trace CRT to its roots. Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began as an academic movement in the 1930s. Critical Theory emphasizes the “critique of society and culture in order to reveal and challenge power structures,” as Wikipedia states. Critical Race Theory does the same, with a focus on racial power structures, especially white supremacy and the oppression of people of color.

The “power structure” prism stems largely from Critical Theory’s own roots in Marxism—Critical Theory was developed by members of the Marxist “Frankfurt School.” Traditional Marxism emphasized economic power structures, especially the supremacy of capital over labor under capitalism. Marxism interpreted most of human history as a zero-sum class war for economic power.

“According to the Marxian view,” wrote the economist Ludwig von Mises, “human society is organized into classes whose interests stand in irreconcilable opposition.”

Mises called this view a “conflict doctrine,” which opposed the “harmony doctrine” of classical liberalism. According to the classical liberals, in a free market economy, capitalists and workers were natural allies, not enemies. Indeed, in a free society all rights-respecting individuals were natural allies.

A bitter inheritance

Critical Race Theory arose as a distinct movement in law schools in the late 1980s. CRT inherited many of its premises and perspectives from its Marxist ancestry.

The pre-CRT Civil Rights Movement had emphasized equal rights and treating people as individuals, as opposed to as members of a racial collective. “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Martin Luther King famously said.

In contrast, CRT dwells on inequalities of outcome, which it generally attributes to racial power structures. And, as we’ve seen from the government training curricula, modern CRT forthrightly judges white people by the color of their skin, prejudging them as racist by virtue of their race. This race-based “pre-trial guilty verdict” of racism is itself, by definition, racist.

The classical liberal “harmony doctrine” was deeply influential in the movements to abolish all forms of inequality under the law: from feudal serfdom, to race-based slavery, to Jim Crow.

But, with the rise of Critical Race Theory, the cause of racial justice became more influenced by the fixations on conflict, discord, and domination that CRT inherited from Marxism.

Social life was predominantly cast as a zero-sum struggle between collectives: capital vs. labor for Marxism, whites vs. people of color for CRT.

A huge portion of society’s ills were attributed to one particular collective’s diabolical domination: capitalist hegemony for Marxism, white supremacy for CRT.

Just as Marxism demonized capitalists, CRT vilifies white people. Both try to foment resentment, envy, and a victimhood complex among the oppressed class it claims to champion.

Traditional Marxists claimed that all capitalists benefit from the zero-sum exploitation of workers. Similarly, CRT “diversity trainers” require white trainees to admit that they “benefit from racism.”

Traditional Marxists insisted that bourgeois thoughts were inescapably conditioned by “class interest.” In the same way, CRT trainers push the notion that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” as a result of their whiteness.

Given the above, it should be no wonder that CRT has been criticized as “racist” and “divisive.”

Reckoning or retrogression?

Supporters of CRT cast it as a force for good in today’s “rectifying reckoning” over race.

But CRT’s neo-Marxist orientation only damages race relations and harms the interests of those it claims to serve.

In practice, the class war rhetoric of Marxism was divisive and toxic for economic relations. And, far from advancing the interests of the working classes, it led to mass poverty and devastating famines, not to mention staggering inequality between the elites and the masses.

Today, the CRT-informed philosophy, rhetoric, and strategy of the Black Lives Matter organization (whose leadership professed to be “trained Marxists”) is leading to mass riots, looting, vandalism, and assault. The divisive violence has arrested progress for the cause of police reform, destroyed countless black-owned small businesses, and economically devastated many black communities.

Those who truly wish to see racial harmony should dump the neo-Marxists and learn more about classical liberalism. (FEE.org is the perfect place to start.)

So much for CRT being a force for good. Of course, even horrible ideas are protected by the First Amendment. The government should never use force to suppress people from expressing ideas, speech, or theories it dislikes.

Critics insist that President Trump is engaged in this kind of censorship by targeting CRT.

Not so.

No one is banning White Fragility, the blockbuster CRT manifesto. No one is locking up those who preach CRT or ordering mentions of it stripped from the internet.

The memo simply says that taxpayer dollars will no longer be spent promulgating this theory to federal government employees. As heads of the executive branch, presidents have wide latitude to make the rules for federal agencies under their control. Deciding how money is spent certainly falls under their proper discretion—and it is always done with political preferences in mind, one way or the other.

It is not censorship for Trump to eliminate funding for CRT, anymore than it was “censorship” for the Obama administration to choose to tie federal contracts to a business’s embrace of LGBT rights.

Elections have consequences, one of the most obvious being that the president gets to run the executive branch. If we don’t want the president’s political preferences to be so significant in training programs, then we should simply reduce the size of government and the number of bureaucrats.

In the meantime, stripping the federal government of the divisive, toxic, and neo-Marxist ideology of Critical Race Theory is a positive development for the sake of racial justice and harmony.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

COLUMN BY

Dan Sanchez

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in-chief of FEE.org. He co-hosts the weekly web show FEEcast, serving as the resident “explainer.” … 

Tyler Brandt

Tyler Brandt is a Senior Associate Editor at FEE. He is a graduate of UW-Madison with a B.A. in Political Science. In college, Tyler was a FEE Campus Ambassador, President of his campus YAL chapter, and… 

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and the Eugene S. Thorpe Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education. He was previously a Media and Journalism Fellow at… 

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