Based on his campaign trail statements, President-elect Donald Trump is poised to sign a flurry of executive orders as soon as he regains power on Jan. 20, 2025.
He will become only the second former U.S. president to return to office after losing a reelection bid. President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, served as the 22nd and 24th president in the late 1800s.
Trump, a Republican who served as the 45th president, will become the 47th president after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the Nov. 5 election. She became a replacement candidate for the Democratic Party after President Joe Biden, the 46th president, dropped out of the race on July 21.
Throughout Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, which he began in late 2022, Trump has stated that he plans to begin tackling numerous issues on “day one,” ranging from border security to the economy.
He has repeatedly made pledges that would make for a busy first day in office in 2025.
In late 2023, Trump joked with a Fort Dodge, Iowa, audience about his eagerness to begin signing documents on Inauguration Day.
“I may even have a very tiny little desk put on the 20th stair” of the U.S. Capitol, where he could begin signing documents immediately after taking the Oath of Office, Trump said.
It’s anyone’s guess how many executive orders Trump might sign during his new administration’s first day—which is a short one. His second presidential term begins when the day is half over.
Under the 20th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, executive power transfers to the newly elected president every four years at noon on Jan. 20.
New presidents are also likely to sign other documents, such as Trump’s proclamation designating his first day in office, Jan. 20, 2017, as a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion.” The proclamation’s intent was “to strengthen our bonds to each other and to our country—and to renew the duties of Government to the people.”
But executive orders are among the most important documents a new president can sign.
These orders, which have been used by almost every U.S. president, carry about the same weight as federal law. And they remain in effect unless Congress overrules them, a court overturns them, or a future president revokes them. These orders also signal what the new president’s priorities will be.
When Biden took office in 2021, he signed nine executive orders on his first day. One of them reversed an immigration and border security executive order that Trump signed on Jan. 25, 2017, the fifth day of his first term in office.
In contrast, Trump penned just one executive order on Inauguration Day 2017; that order focused on reducing the financial burdens of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.
Here are a few of the many executive orders and initiatives that Trump has pledged for his upcoming term.
Top Priority: Border Security and Immigration
In the spring of 2024, Trump said border security and immigration would be foremost on his second term agenda.
“Day one, my act one will be to close that border,” he said at the time.
Since then, Trump has made immigration-related pledges numerous times.
An order closing the border would be “done in the first hour of the first day” under his new administration, Trump said during an October campaign stop.
“On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program … in the history of our country,” he said at one of his final campaign events in Pittsburgh on Nov. 4, a day before the election. “I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded … and we will put the vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail.”
Trump’s 2017 executive order on border security, signed on Jan. 25, 2017, directed the Department of Homeland Security to close the border and to take several other immediate steps, including building more sections of the U.S.–Mexico border wall and adding 5,000 Border Patrol agents.
That initial order also called for revamping the way that the government handled illegal immigrants’ asylum claims, detentions, and deportations.
Economy and Energy
When it comes to the economy, Trump says reducing the cost of energy is key to lowering the prices that people pay for essentials such as gasoline and groceries.
He has pledged to implement policies that encourage the production of fossil fuels. “We will frack, frack, frack, and drill, baby, drill,” Trump said during an Oct. 29 speech in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He said he would encourage those processes beginning on “day one,” but it was unclear whether an executive order would be used for that purpose.
However, Trump did say he would sign an executive order “directing every federal agency to immediately remove every single burdensome regulation driving up the cost of goods.” He made that pledge on Oct. 31 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, promising “emergency price relief” for all Americans.
Trump also said he would create a new cabinet position focused on “doing everything in the federal government’s power to reduce the cost of living.”
Taxes, Credit Card Rates
Trump told a crowd in Mint Hill, North Carolina: “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.”
He continued in that Sept. 25 speech: “We will have no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security. … And while working Americans catch up, we are going to put a temporary cap on credit card interest rates at 10 percent.”
A few members of Congress have been working on no-tax-on-tips proposals for some time; Trump likely would need to work with Congress on these initiatives.
Funds Halted for ‘Inappropriate’ Curricula
More than a year ago at the Pray Vote Stand Summit in Washington, on Sept. 15, 2023, Trump said, “On day one, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding for any school pushing Critical Race Theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
He has reiterated that stance many times since.
Order to End ‘Mutilation’ of Youths
In a policy video posted to social media on Jan. 31, 2023, Trump outlined a wide-ranging plan to halt “chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation of our youth.”
“On day one, I will revoke Joe Biden’s cruel policies on so-called ‘gender-affirming care’—ridiculous—a process that includes giving kids puberty blockers, mutating their physical appearance, and ultimately performing surgery on minor children,” Trump said.
“I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.”
Trump also said he would ask Congress “to permanently stop federal taxpayer dollars from being used to promote or pay for these procedures and pass a law prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states.”
The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering the constitutionality of Tennessee’s ban on such procedures for minors; many other states also passed similar laws that have faced court challenges.
Trump also said, “I will support the creation of a private right of action for victims to sue doctors who have unforgivably performed these procedures on minor children.”
“The Department of Justice will investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients,” he said. The investigation would also probe whether pharmaceutical companies or others “have illegally marketed hormones and puberty blockers which are no way licensed or approved for this use.”
In addition, his education department would warn school districts: “If any teacher or school official suggests to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body, they will be faced with severe consequences, including potential civil rights violations for sex discrimination and the elimination of federal funding.” Parents will no longer be “forced to allow their minor child to assume” a different gender, he said.
Trump said he plans to “promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers, and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different and unique.”
The president-elect also would plan to ask Congress to declare that “the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”
“No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender … under my leadership, this madness will end,” he said.
Trump’s statement followed the United Kingdom’s decision to close its only child gender clinic. That decision was made in mid-2022, after an independent review raised safety concerns about the treatment of children suffering from “gender dysphoria,” a disconnect between a person’s sex and perception of gender. The clinic closed earlier this year.
Reversing the Electric Vehicle Mandate
The Biden administration has pursued policies intended to reduce Americans’ reliance on fossil fuels such as gasoline. Those policies included an executive order that “sets an ambitious new target to make half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 zero-emissions vehicles, including battery electric, plug-in hybrid electric, or fuel cell electric vehicles,” the White House said in August 2021.
That order was intended to “save consumers money, cut pollution, boost public health, advance environmental justice, and tackle the climate crisis.”
Critics, such as Sen. Steve Hinebauch (R-Mont.), see the policy as detrimental to farmers, ranchers, and citizens, “especially with the lack of reliability and affordability of these vehicles,” he wrote in an opinion article.
Trump has repeatedly pledged to immediately terminate Biden’s mandate on electric vehicles.
“Not everybody should have an electric car,” Trump said at a Sept. 27 town hall in Warren, Michigan, adding that consumers should be able to choose whether they want to buy all-electric, hybrids, or all-gasoline-powered vehicles.
Protection of Free Speech
Shortly after Trump announced his candidacy in 2022, he unveiled his plan for protecting free speech.
“Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens,” he said.
“I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as mis- or dis-information.”
Trump also said he would identify and fire “every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship.”
Dismantling Bureaucracy
In March 2023, Trump released a 10-point plan “to dismantle the ‘deep state’ and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption.”
The first point of the plan calls for reissuing his 2020 executive order that restores the president’s authority to “remove rogue bureaucrats,” he said in a video.
The 2020 order would have created a “Schedule F,” to make it easier to get rid of certain government employees. The new category would encompass positions that are “of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character and that are not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition.”
However, Trump left the White House before provisions of that order could take effect. “This would have been a revolutionary change, a complete remake of Washington and all politics as usual,” Jeffrey A. Tucker, founder of a nonprofit group that examines public policy, wrote in a 2022 column.
Trump, in his 2023 video, vowed to revive that 2020 order and “clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus.”
“The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled,” Trump said. “So that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies, which they’re doing now at a level that nobody can believe even possible.”
It was unclear whether additional aspects of the 10-point plan could or would be handled in an executive order.
Among other things, the plan includes establishing “a Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” which would declassify and publish documents about “spying, censorship, and corruption.”
More recently, Trump also said he would form a Department of Government Efficiency, which would aim to streamline government operations and save taxpayers’ money. High-tech entrepreneur and free-speech proponent Elon Musk, who supported Trump’s candidacy, would be at the helm.