All those executive orders and not a lot to show for them
by digby
Dday has a piece up at the Intercept today about all the Executive Orders Trump trumpets as great accomplishments:
THE CEREMONIAL SIGNING of executive orders has become a trademark of the Trump presidency, with elaborate photo ops and presentations of the president’s bizarre signature happening at a record-breaking rate. But in so doing, he has assigned himself — or, at least, the agencies and departments he ostensibly leads — a record amount of homework.
It’s not getting done.
The vast majority of Trump’s executive orders merely direct federal agencies to issue reviews and reports on a host of issues, from education to immigration to financial services to trade. Though the media often present executive orders as actually accomplishing the elimination of regulations or rollback of statutory law, they’re mostly a form of political theater designed to give the appearance of forward motion. “Let’s just dash off a memo, everyone can say we did something today,” said Jon Michaels, an administrative law professor at UCLA.
According to a review of all executive orders and memoranda, the president has ordered 88 different actions for federal agencies in 2017 alone, most of them direct reports to him. If you include actions that spill into 2018, 2019, and 2020, there are 154 specific actions in all.
This is actually a very conservative estimate, because some orders require every agency in the federal government, of which there are over 400, to submit a report.
Since the inauguration, 27 deadlines have come and gone, including 13 reports to the president, three reports to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), three publications, three memoranda from OMB, and five miscellaneous actions like resumptions of a temporary ban or solicitation of public comment. The Intercept has only been able to determine that 13 of these 27 deadlines have been met, with at least two of those coming in late and another three under court-ordered injunction. The others are either unclear or didn’t yield a response from the federal agency under deadline, including the Departments of Defense, State, Justice, Homeland Security, Commerce, Treasury, and OMB.
Click over to see the excellent interactive graphic that goes with it, which is being updated as new information becomes available.
I guess it is good news that he’s mostly been ineffectual. But he does have some rather efficient people in charge of vital areas, like Sessions, Kelly, Pruitt and Price. They’re carrying out their extremist mandate with ruthless efficiency.
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