Trump planning flurry of executive orders for first day, top aide says

Donald Trump will mark the first day of his return to the White House by signing a spate of executive orders to reinstate signature policies from his first presidency that were revoked by Joe Biden, according to his incoming chief of staff.

Susie Wiles’s disclosure came in a closed-door meeting in Las Vegas of the Rockbridge Network, a group of conservative donors co-founded by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, the New York Times reported.

She did not specify which policies were likely to be reintroduced in the flurry of signing that is expected on Trump’s first day back in the Oval Office.

But several of Trump’s higher-profile executive orders that Biden revoked include leaving the Paris climate agreement, withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) and banning entry to citizens from a list of predominantly Muslim countries.

All three policies were reversed by executive orders signed by Biden after he took office in January 2021.

Also cancelled by Biden but expected to be revived immediately is the Schedule F initiative, which would remove job security from about 50,000 civil servants and enable them to be fired and replaced with rightwing loyalists. Such a move would be in line with the Heritage Foundation thinktank’s controversial Project 2025 agenda, which envisions a radical overhaul of American government.

Schedule F was introduced late in Trump’s first term, after he railed against a “deep state” dedicated to stymying his agenda. It was cancelled immediately by Biden when he entered the White House.

The time frame for Trump’s goal of radically transforming government would be two years rather four, Wiles said, in comments that appeared to anticipate more political resistance in the second half of the president-elect’s four-year term should the Democrats do well in the 2026 congressional midterm elections.

Biden signed 24 executive orders in the first four months of his presidency that specifically cancelled actions previously taken by Trump.

Among them was an order revoking Trump’s 2020 “Preventing Online Censorship” order, which Trump issued after Twitter – now rebranded X and owned by the incoming president’s wealthiest backer, Elon Musk – called two of his tweets potentially misleading.

Trump has already stated that rolling back media “censorship”, a word he and his supporters often use to describe rules intended to filter out factually incorrect misinformation, as an early goal of his presidency.

Biden also issued an order cancelling funding for Trump’s border wall on the US southern frontier with Mexico, and cancelled Trump’s ban on federal funds for diversity and inclusion training programmes for government employees.

Several of Trump’s probable executive orders are likely to face legal challenge.

He vowed on the campaign trail to introduce several new executive orders, including one revoking birthright citizenship, which is currently guaranteed in the 14th amendment of the US constitution.

He also said he would take executive action to ban schools from “promoting critical race theory or transgender insanity”.

In addition to executive orders, Trump has also vowed to fire Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who was appointed to investigate his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his illegal retention of classified documents.

And Trump has pledged to pardon the rioters who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 “if they are innocent”, a promise he could meet on his first day in office.