Brilliant, tactician right up to the point he put Musk in charge of the federal workforce.
The WSJ is FOS. They're missing the big picture.
‘All Gas’ Executive Orders Put Trump’s Opponents on Back Foot
Most of president’s efforts remain standing, after advisers rewrote 2017 playbook
By Josh Dawsey and Brent Kendall, WSJ
Updated March 2, 2025 12:01 am ET
President Trump has signed more than 75 executive orders to start his second term, spurring about 100 lawsuits so far. For now, most of the orders have survived.
The flood has overwhelmed opponents and forced courts to work overtime to try to keep up. That was by design.
Trump’s closest advisers, including deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, spent years crafting a playbook to avoid a repeat of the infighting and disorganization that defined the early months of Trump’s first term.
The new directives from the second-term blitzkrieg have claimed greater White House control of previously independent agencies, steered the ousting of swaths of the federal government’s workforce, ended foreign aid across many parts of the globe, and reversed decades of diversity programs, among other conservative priorities. Others have been less serious, including ending the procurement and forced use of paper straws.
Miller led plans for the barrage, rewriting many of the orders during the final weeks of the transition, according to people familiar with the effort. They were vetted by David Warrington, a transition attorney who is now White House counsel, and other lawyers, one administration official said. New orders are vetted by both the White House staff secretary’s office and the White House Counsel’s Office, the official said.
Republicans for years criticized Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for using executive orders to advance policies that wouldn’t make it through Congress, arguing that the assertion of unchecked power violated the separation of powers. Now, Trump is leaning into the practice much more than his predecessors did and much more than even he did in his first term, when he issued just 12 executive orders in his first month.
Number of executive orders signed in first month of each presidential term
Miller and other Trump advisers were prepared for more lawsuits than have been filed, and have been surprised at the lack of litigation on some of the orders, advisers say.
“The problem for the Democrats is he’s throwing so much out there so fast they can’t figure out who they want to be or what they want to go after,” said Brian Kemp, the governor of Georgia.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, described the effort this way: “All gas, no brakes.”
“If you look at the massive number of orders the president has signed versus the minimal number of weak lawsuits we’ve faced,” Leavitt said, “we are confident they will be upheld in court.”
Judicial scrutiny
The early ride through the courts has in some cases been bumpy for the administration.
Several judges have blocked Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship for children of immigrants if neither parent is a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident.
“Citizenship by birth is an unequivocal Constitutional right. It is one of the precious principles that makes the United States the great nation that it is,” U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle wrote in his decision. “The President cannot change, limit, or qualify this Constitutional right via an executive order.”
Judges also have paused White House efforts to freeze some federal spending, eliminate some diversity programs and penalize hospitals that provide transgender healthcare.
But in an array of other circumstances, litigants have fallen short. A judge in Boston said federal employee unions didn’t have proper standing to challenge Trump’s buyout program for federal workers. Another in Washington said employees can’t go to court now to challenge widespread reductions in the workforce.
Judges have allowed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to access data from the Labor and Education departments. One judge initially paused the administration’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, but later gave the administration the green light to proceed.
One key challenge for litigants suing the administration: There is a high legal bar for judges to block executive-branch actions at the outset of a case. In some circumstances, judges have expressed concerns about Trump initiatives but said plaintiffs haven’t shown they are facing irreparable harm that couldn’t be addressed later if they win.
Courts have a long list of hearings scheduled over the next couple of months that could provide a clearer picture on the durability of Trump’s orders.
“Some he may know aren’t going to work, but he’s on an incredible high-octane steamroller over the federal government and institutions he doesn’t trust,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University.
‘This took years’
When Texas donor Doug Deason visited Mar-a-Lago last November, he saw a pile of executive orders being prepared for Trump to sign. “Every morning is like Christmas morning. It’s like Christmas morning three times a day,” Deason said.
Some of Trump’s aides in 2017 joked they could barely find the light switches in the White House, and Trump was unaware of how some agencies functioned and what many of his aides did all day. One longtime Trump adviser recalled sitting in a meeting in the White House and listening to aides ask questions about how the Supreme Court worked.
“We had nothing and a few weeks to get ready,” said Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s first counselor. The second-term push “took years in the making,” he said.
This time, the work was carried out by a constellation of groups and advisers to Trump from his first term, who outlined what he wanted in broad strokes but left the details to others. It was fueled by tens of millions of dollars in contributions from Republican donors who gave to groups previously run by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and Miller, among others.
Miller had focused on the orders for years. On the final day of Trump’s first term, Miller sent a note to colleagues urging them to prepare for the next one. “This is not goodbye. Far from it,” he wrote. “I have no doubt very soon we will be fighting side-by-side together once more.”
Trump’s speechwriter, Vince Haley, who is now head of the domestic policy council, kept a list of Trump’s promises and public comments in the months leading up to the election, according to people familiar with the list. If Trump would promise something new, Haley would add it. Orders sometimes flowed from the list. Industry lobbyists, including from oil and gas, proposed ideas for others.
Miller in particular focused on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and immigration, people who spoke to him said. Some of the orders—such as one to shut the Education Department—Miller wanted Trump to sign immediately, only to see them delayed. Aides said Trump continues to plan new signings.
Trump wasn’t involved in the early planning, believing it was superstitious to talk about the transition during the campaign. While he was occasionally briefed by the outside groups working on policy, he sometimes expressed little interest, people at the meetings said.
Susie Wiles, the president’s chief of staff, suggested spreading the orders out over a greater number of weeks, but Trump wanted to sign as many as he could immediately, White House advisers said.
Many of the orders mirror plans in Project 2025, the conservative second-term blueprint written by the Heritage Foundation and hundreds of Trump advisers from the first term, which came under fierce criticism from Democrats.
The group stopped its work in 2024 after the Trump campaign disavowed it and threatened to blacklist any staffers who contributed, but many of those staffers are now working for Trump.
Paul Dans, who led the project, resigned from the group amid the criticism. He lives in Charleston, S.C., and has no formal role in the Trump administration but is ebullient over the administration’s beginning days and said the administration had gone even further than he and Project 2025 hoped. “What’s happening now is more than many conservatives dared to dream,” he said.
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