This nation will remain a neutral nation.
I've got a pen and I've got a phone.
I have today signed an executive order.
Circumventing Congress and raising many, many, many, many questions.
Presidents have two options when trying to advance their policy agenda.
They can either submit a proposal to Congress and hope that the members
turn bills into laws or they can do it on their own.
Pretty much every president in history has relished having and extending
unilateral powers.
At times even going beyond their authority.
It's a lot easier to make a decision yourself than to have 535 people in
the legislative branch agree with you.
There are always risks that executive power can be misused.
The ability to create policy with the stroke of a pen is a powerful tool.
But that strength has limitations, especially when it comes to affecting
the economy. After all, monetary policy is controlled by the Federal
Reserve and fiscal policy is set by Congress.
People often think that the president has these levers and buttons and
dials can be used to fine tune the economy.
That's not true. The president doesn't have that ability.
There's not endless amounts of money lying around.
To actually make a fiscal difference to rescue the economy, you need
Congress to appropriate.
A president's reputation rises and falls with gross domestic product.
The state of the economy can determine whether a president is re-elected
and how their legacy holds through history.
But how much can a president actually control on his own?
For decades, the field of political science was dominated by the notion
that presidents have very little formal power, and the little that was
there was far too often focused on veto power or the appointment power of
the president. But that has changed.
The appreciation and increased use of unilateral action has developed a
new age of presidency.
Even if you take away the fact that the government has grown substantially
and the types of technologies and ability to project power are much larger
now than they were in the 1790s.
No one could look at a contemporary president and not conclude that that
office has substantially more power and authority than early presidents.
Some of the most memorable executive orders throughout history include
President Roosevelt's order to authorize the detention of Japanese
American citizens.
Harry Truman's attempt to nationalize the steel industry.
And President Kennedy's requirement that government contractors implement
affirmative action policies.
In cases where presidents actions are eventually overturned, either
through congressional action or more commonly through litigation, it can
take years. And so this provides a important and powerful instrument for
the president to change policy.
Then I have an article two where I have the right to do whatever I want as
president, but I don't even talk about that.
From border walls to tariffs to reversing environmental regulations,
President Donald Trump has pushed the boundaries of the presidency by
often acting alone.
I don't think there's any question that Trump really has pushed the
envelope far beyond what any prior president had done.
On August 8, 2020, after weeks of failed negotiation with Democrats,
President Trump sidestepped Congress by taking things into his own hands.
Through these four actions my administration will provide immediate and
vital relief to Americans struggling in this difficult time.
The only one of these executive orders that spends money or reduces taxes
that has any fiscal effect is the one concerning unemployment.
I don't think it is constitutional, but to try to claim that it was
constitutional, he looked around for money that Congress had appropriated,
that he could claim he was using.
And what he came up with was some money at the Federal Emergency
Management Administration, FEMA, which was for disaster relief.
That money was for forty four dollars billion and could last five to six
weeks. The CARES Act that Congress passed in March 2020 included two
hundred fifty billion dollars in unemployment benefits.
That right there shows you how limited executive orders are.
There's not endless amounts of money lying around.
To actually make a fiscal difference to rescue the economy, you need much
more. You need Congress to appropriate much more, which is why you need
legislation. As a shorthand rule, it's easier for a president to screw up
the economy in the short term than it is to make it better.
Trump's famed Muslim bans are arguably an example of that.
After years of litigation and a number of iterations, the Supreme Court
upheld the ban in June 2018.
Foreign policy experts have claimed that the national security concerns
could be significant.
But aside from that, the Council on Foreign Relations estimates that the
ban could mean up to 132,000 lost jobs and sixty six dollars billion in
economic loss per year.
Losing potential scientists, potential mathematicians, potential
engineers, potential technologists from from from majority Muslim
countries, that's a disastrously bad thing to do for for the economy.
That also applies to immigrants.
In other words, the role of immigrants in American economic growth, the
success of immigrants.
That's that's what defines the United States.
And it is an absolute myth that immigration is taking jobs away from from
native born Americans.
While Trump is known to openly push the norms of unilateral action,
President Ronald Reagan was famous for his quiet and strategic use of
them. Reagan was the grand master of executive orders because he
understood what they could and could not do.
President Reagan, as you know, was very hostile to social spending and
wanted to cut social programs back a great deal.
But the other main area where he was active with executive orders was in
deregulation. Only a month into his presidency, President Reagan signed
the iconic executive order twelve two ninety one.
It was designed to reduce the burden that federal regulation places on the
economy. The order was significant in two ways.
It required all agencies to issue a regulation only if the potential
benefits to society outweigh the costs.
Once an agency drafted the proposed rule, it required that it be submitted
to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for review.
OIRA was within the White House and would give the administration
authority or the agency's regulatory activities.
On the face of it that sounds sensible.
Why would one want to do something that costs more than it benefits us?
But with many of the kinds of regulations he most strongly opposed, the
benefits are very hard to measure.
If you have an environmental regulation that makes the air less dirty, we
may not immediately notice that we're breathing better air.
And it may be very hard to guess how many fewer of us will get cancer or
emphysema because of the reduced pollutions.
Reagan's twelve two ninety one was vaguely written, leaving a lot for
interpretation. Some studies claim that it makes it difficult to reach its
original intent.
Still, twelve two ninety one is known as one of the orders that has
changed the course of history.
So much so that even Democratic successors like Presidents Clinton and
Obama didn't repeal it, but instead elaborated on it.
Clinton's asked that equity was taken into account and Obama's human
dignity and fairness, values that opponents say are impossible to
quantify. Conceptually, what one would want to do is look at over time
what agencies did in terms of the cost benefit analysis that were
implemented and see how that affected their their regulatory choices.
What would make this hard is to do the counterfactual, what they would
have done otherwise. And then the second thing is one would have to take a
stance and what the cost benefits were were successfully done.
So nobody was doing mathematically sophisticated cost benefit analysis
gets to answer the question as to what how how to make the tradeoffs in an
ethical sense. President Obama was once a skeptic of executive measures,
but growing frustrated with the differences between him and his colleagues
on Capitol Hill. We are not just going to be waiting for legislation.
He gradually began to embrace the president's power to act unilaterally.
I've got a pen and I've got a phone.
Daniel Gitterman, a professor of public policy at UNC Chapel Hill, calls
the Obama presidency a coming out party for executive power.
He argues that as the chief executive of the largest and most powerful
enterprise in the country, the federal government, Obama achieved
substantial policy goals such as minimum wage, paid sick leave and fair
labor laws for federal workers.
There is a tiny little provision in a 1949 statute on federal procurement
that gives the president some authority for economy and efficiency reasons
to directly affect US procurement policy.
If you're a defense contractor, the government is your major business.
Their hope is to get the camel nose in the door.
So we've done it for federal employees.
We've done it for companies that contract with the government.
Will this then make it a little more likely that Congress will come along
and legislate it.
Good afternoon, everybody. When talking about Obama's legacy on executive
action, the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, is one
often mentioned.
Immigration policy to make it more fair, more efficient and more just.
The policy, which still stands today, instructed the Department of Homeland
Security to stop deporting and provide temporary legal status for
immigrants who illegally came to the U.S.
as young children.
Opponents argue that Obama overstepped his constitutional right and within
months of taking office, the Trump administration vowed to dismantle the
program. Is being rescinded.
But in June 2020, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration's
plan. Immigration is obviously an extraordinarily contentious, difficult
issue where compromise is proven remarkably hard.
It's not a great surprise that became a locus of of executive orders.
A number of studies have highlighted the economic contributions of the
approximately eight hundred thousand DACA recipients.
Libertarian think tank Cato Institute estimates that cutting the program
could shrink the economy by two hundred and eighty billion dollars over
the next decade. That clearly has large macroeconomic consequences.
The other arguments are forgive the jargon they're deontological, which
means that their duty based.
There's stuff you're supposed to do because it's right.
There are multiple goods in evaluating a policy and often doing the trade
offs is very difficult.
The ambiguity of Article two in the Constitution has left presidents with
the ability to take initiative on a number of policy areas that could be
questionable. When the economy is suffering and an election is
approaching, there's an inclination to push those boundaries beyond the
norm. And we're doing that without the Democrats.
Central to that check is public opinion.
When a president succeeds in acting unilaterally, especially in a way that
hasn't been done before, that sets a precedent.
And so you wind up with the potential of kind of a ratchet effects.