What are Executive Orders?

Civics 101

NHPR

Society & Culture, Government, History

4.6 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Every president (with the exception of William Henry Harrison) has issued executive orders. Most recently, Donald Trump issued several on his first day in office. Some have been published in the Federal Register, others are facing legal challenges. So what IS an executive order? How do they differ from other executive actions, like proclamations or memoranda? Who writes them? Who reviews them? All that and more with our guest Andy Rudalevidge, professor of Government at Bowdoin and author of By Executive Order: Bureaucratic Management and the Limits of Presidential Power. Click here for our episode on the Federal Register. Here is a link to every single proclamation issued by a president. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone. We are in a new administration, which means we at Civics 101 are not getting a whole heck of a lot of sleep.
0:07.1	So I'll make this quick. It is our winter fundraiser. We have one item on offer this year. And it's my favorite so far.
0:14.7	It is a large, robust, beautiful black Civics 101 coffee mug that says,
0:22.2	Democracy is my cup of tea.
0:24.8	Because it sure is mine, even if this cup will probably only hold coffee.
0:29.4	The mug will be yours for a one-time $60 gift or $5 a month.
0:35.0	Click the link in the show notes to check it out.
0:37.1	We are so grateful for your support.
0:40.1	Like, really, really.
0:43.3	I want to do like a long-order intro to this with like the done done and all that.
0:47.3	The episode you're about to hear.
0:49.7	But really, folks, the episode you're about to hear contains information on executive orders.
0:55.6	The guest was interviewed before President Trump's inauguration in January, and since then,
1:01.0	every single day has brought new executive actions and legal challenges to those actions.
1:08.4	For example, on January 28th, a two-page memorandum from the Office of Management
1:14.6	and Budget ordered a freeze on all federal assistance programs, including all grants and loans.
1:22.6	Among other things, this memo resulted in Medicaid portals being down in all 50 states.
1:28.2	Now, a district judge in Washington, D.C., blocked the freeze later that afternoon,
1:33.0	so it is temporarily halted until a hearing on Monday the day before this episode comes out.
1:39.4	So what this preamble here is trying to say is that regardless of whether a branch of government complies
1:46.4	with the rule of law or not, we at Civics 101 talk about the law and about the Supreme
1:52.7	Law of the Land, the Constitution. Yes, we make a lot of airbud jokes, but in the end, we refuse to
	...

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