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.
