Tag: executive orders

An Attempt To Reset Science

An executive order on science slipped through last week with almost no comment from the media. Its central concern is to set science on a better path after so many years of egregious abuses in which the core principles of science have been set aside in favor of political messaging.

The title is “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” It is an ambitious attempt to reframe what science is and does, not to politicize it but exactly the opposite. Only better science with the highest standards, the order says, is capable of restoring trust.

You have surely heard that the Trump administration is waging war on science. Read this order: the opposite is true.

“Over the last 5 years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly. A majority of researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics believe science is facing a reproducibility crisis. The falsification of data by leading researchers has led to high-profile retractions of federally funded research.”

To solve the problem, the order seeks to “restore the American people’s faith in the scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply scientific knowledge in service of the public good. Reproducibility, rigor, and unbiased peer review must be maintained. This order restores the scientific integrity policies of my first Administration and ensures that agencies practice data transparency, acknowledge relevant scientific uncertainties, are transparent about the assumptions and likelihood of scenarios used, approach scientific findings objectively, and communicate scientific data accurately.”

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Trump’s Latest Order Could Keep You Out Of Prison For Crimes You Didn’t Even Know You Committed

On May 9, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Fighting Overcriminalization in Federal Regulations,” addressing one of the most insidious threats to American liberty: the unchecked expansion of criminal penalties through regulatory sprawl. For decades, this trend has eroded the separation of powers, undermined due process, and transformed the federal legal system into a maze where ordinary Americans risk criminal liability for unknowable infractions.

While largely ignored by the corporate press, civil liberties advocates should see this order as a long-overdue corrective. It tackles the explosion of hidden criminal penalties, reaffirms the necessity of criminal intent, and forces long-overdue accountability onto the administrative state.

The order accomplishes two key reforms. First, it limits criminal enforcement to cases in which a person knowingly violates a regulation, discouraging the use of “strict liability,” which bypasses the traditional requirement of criminal intent. Second, it compels federal agencies to publicly identify every regulation they enforce with criminal penalties, along with the statutory authority and mental state required for conviction. That such basic transparency has never been required is an indictment of how far the system has drifted from constitutional norms.

To appreciate how far we’ve strayed, consider the founding era. Originally, Congress held exclusive authority to define federal crimes, and those crimes were few in number, targeting only existential threats to the republic, such as treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. These laws were clear, deliberate, and rooted in the principle that punishment required both wrongful conduct and a guilty mind.

Today, by contrast, legal scholars cannot even agree on how many federal crimes exist. The Code of Federal Regulations spans more than 175,000 pages, burying countless criminal provisions deep within bureaucratic text. A 2022 algorithmic study estimated that the U.S. Code alone contains more than 5,000 federal crimes, and when regulatory offenses are included, the number may reach into the hundreds of thousands. As law professor Jonathan Turley recently testified before Congress, we may now need artificial intelligence just to identify all the crimes on the books. That is not hyperbole — it is a measure of how disconnected federal criminal law has become from the rule of law.

The result is a dystopia in which nearly every American adult is a potential felon. “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime,” retired law professor John Baker once observed. “That is not an exaggeration.” If everything is a crime, everyone becomes a criminal, empowering prosecutors to target individuals first and search for crimes later. This selective enforcement invites abuse, especially when legal ambiguities intersect with political incentives.

The longstanding legal principle that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” only makes sense if the law is reasonably knowable. Everyone understands murder is wrong. But when it comes to regulatory offenses buried in obscure agency publications, fair notice disappears. As Justice Neil Gorsuch and legal scholar Janie Nitze recently wrote, the Roman emperor Caligula would post laws in tiny print and in inaccessible locations so no one could read them. “The whole point was to ensure that people lived in fear — the most powerful of a tyrant’s weapons.” America’s current regulatory state, with its thousands of hidden crimes, mirrors this tyranny of uncertainty.

Many of these crimes defy common sense. The A Crime a Day account on X and its companion book, How to Become a Federal Criminal, document the absurdities: It’s a federal crime to mail a mongoose or to leave the country with more than $5 in nickels or pennies. These aren’t just punchlines; real Americans have been prosecuted under similarly obscure statutes, often for conduct no reasonable person would recognize as criminal. Mislabeling imported goods, disturbing protected wildlife by accident, or violating esoteric shipping rules has led to life-altering penalties.

In principle, the criminal justice system is supposed to require mens rea, meaning “a guilty mind.” Strict liability, where no proof of intent is needed, might be defensible for minor infractions like parking tickets. But where liberty is at stake, intent matters. Prosecuting someone for conduct they didn’t know was illegal, and that no reasonable person would assume was criminal, violates our most basic notions of justice.

Trump’s executive order strikes a blow to this Kafkaesque regime. It mandates that federal agencies publish clear, accessible lists of all criminally enforceable regulations, identify the legal authority for each, and define the mental state required for conviction. This reasserts a fundamental truth: Criminal punishment should apply only to knowing wrongdoing, not bureaucratic mistakes or obscure technicalities.

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Legal Coalition Challenges Trump’s Use of Executive Orders Against More Law Firms

A broad coalition of legal and civil liberties organizations is once again challenging President Trump’s use of executive orders to retaliate against law firms that he perceives as political opponents, suppress opposition and chill lawful First Amendment activity.

The coalition, which includes the ACLU, ACLU of DC, CATO, Electronic Frontier Foundation, FIRE, the Institute for Justice, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the Society for the Rule of Law, and The Rutherford Institute, filed two more amicus briefs (Jenner & Block and WilmerHale) asking a federal court to strike down as illegal and unconstitutional the president’s executive orders targeting the law firms of Jenner & Block and WilmerHale. The coalition filed a similar amicus brief in Perkins Coie LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice challenging the president’s executive order as a violation of the separation of powers and an unconstitutional infringement on the rights to free speech, advocacy and due process.

“That President Trump is weaponizing the government in order to wage a war against dissent, against due process, and against the very foundations of our constitutional republic should be a warning to all Americans,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. These threats against the legal community are just the beginning.”

In an effort to punish a number of major law firms and discourage others from challenging the Trump Administration’s ongoing efforts to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump issued Executive Orders directing the federal government to suspend the firms’ security clearances, cease providing all goods and services, terminate any contracts with the firms and those who do business with them, limit the firms’ access to federal buildings and employees, and refrain from hiring employees of the firms. The intent behind the president’s actions, per former advisor Steve Bannon, is to “put those law firms out of business” in response to the firms using the system of checks and balances to prevent the Administration from violating the Constitution.

Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale each challenged Trump’s Orders on grounds that they violate the separation of powers and the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Warning that Trump’s actions constitute a brazen attack on the independence of the legal profession and the judicial branch, the legal coalition’s amicus briefs in support of the law firms argue that Trump’s Executive Orders not only infringe the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and petitioning the government, but also essentially give the government an unfettered veto over a person’s right to choice of counsel due to the government pushing for a cancel culture and creating a blacklist of firms, similar to what the NRA previously claimed was done to it by a New York state official. Moreover, if the executive orders are allowed to stand, they could set a precedent for future Administrations of either political party to suppress challenges to a president’s unconstitutional policies and actions and to deter lawyers from representing the president’s political opponents or any clients adverse to the Administration.

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Executive Orders Are Not a Panacea for America

Many conservatives are exuberant that Donald Trump has won another term in the White House. And from a conservative perspective, there are undoubtedly reasons to celebrate Trump’s return to power, especially when compared with the Kamala Harris alternative: the abrupt termination of the US government’s profoundly discriminatory “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programmes; a commitment to end government-sponsored censorship of Americans’ speech; a promise to cut government spending; the much-needed shake-up of the US’s pharmaceutical, health, and food regulatory establishment; and withdrawal from a WHO compromised by glaring conflicts of interest such as support from Pharma investors like Bill Gates.

You do not need to be a front-row MAGA fan to be happy about these sorts of changes or see that they are far more sensible than what Kamala Harris was offering to the American people. However, I have the sense that some people are so caught up in the excitement of the moment that they are losing sight of the bigger picture. 

The bigger picture is this: The United States is an increasingly polarised society, divided between people who identify as “progressives” and/or Democrats, and people who identify as “conservatives” or libertarians and/or Republicans. This polarisation has translated into a divisive and acrimonious competition for federal power, that reaches its climax when both sides vie for the presidential office every four years. 

Federal power, whether over public finance and spending, the monetary system, the healthcare system, education, banking, commerce, or public health and hygiene, has grown to such an extent that people’s everyday lives are at the mercy of the person who ends up in the White House or the makeup of the US Supreme Court. This puts people’s freedom and prosperity on a very precarious footing indeed.

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Biden’s Executive Order Nightmare: Government Will Track Every Dime You Spend

When I was a sparring partner for professional boxers many, many years ago, I was taught to be wary of the jab. It is a tactic used to distract an opponent while setting him up for a devastating power punch that takes him down for the count.

Biden is throwing jabs.

The power punch is a little noticed Executive Order with the innocuous number 14067 and its title, “Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets.”

In a 21st Century world where cryptocurrency and cybercrime are now embedded threats to our collective financial security, this Executive Order would seem to address these issues. That is the jab.

In fact, this order includes language that allows the Federal Reserve System to “explore” the possibility of introducing digital currency into the United States. This means that your cash becomes so much colored paper. That would not be the only catastrophic impact on our society and the nation’s economy. 

Under this new digital currency, any transfer of funds to family, friends, charities, or clients would be able to be tracked by the nation’s central bank that issued this virtual money. Big Brother will be in your wallet every hour or every day. 

You will not be able to buy a stick of gum without a Federal Reserve computer knowing where, when, and to whom you just put down a buck.

Like any jab, its starts with a feint.

“At this stage, the Fed is just introducing the subject into the public debate and is weighing the options,” according to Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economics professor who was interviewed by the Associated Press in an Aug. 24 story.

Apologists for the White House insist that the Executive Order does not implement digital currency or give Washington the power to control it.

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Biden Extends ‘National Emergency’ Due to ‘Extraordinary Threat’ of Russian Actions in Ukraine

President Joe Biden has extended an executive order that declared a “national emergency” in the United States because of Russian actions in Ukraine that conflict with U.S. interests, according to a White House notice.

Signed in March 2014 by then-President Barack Obama, Executive Order 13660 declared “a national emergency” amid the “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States constituted by the actions and policies of persons that undermine democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine; threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity; and contribute to the misappropriation of its assets,” the March 2 notice states.

While the order was signed after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, it has been expanded over the years with additional executive orders, including the taking of additional sanctions.

Just days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Biden signed another executive order that “further expanded the scope of the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660” and “relied on for additional steps taken” in other orders.

“The actions and policies addressed in these Executive Orders continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” the White House stated, noting that Biden will continue “for 1 year the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13660.”

The White House stated that executive orders “deal with” individuals who “undermine Ukraine’s democratic processes” as well as threaten the country’s security, peace, and sovereignty.

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Biden reaches for his pen — and undermines separation of powers

Faced with a Congress that would not endorse his expansive regulatory agenda, President Obama famously remarked, “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.” Almost 10 years later, governing by executive fiat continues.

The latest round of policymaking by pen and phone came when President Biden designated 53,804 acres of land in north-central Colorado as the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument. That designation will have significant consequences, because the entire area is now withdrawn from a host of future resource extraction and other productive land use activities.

This is not the first attempt to reserve the area. It was one of the central objectives of the Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy (CORE) Act. Yet the CORE Act failed several times to secure the necessary votes in the Senate to become law. 

A casual observer might wonder how Biden could unilaterally set aside tens of thousands of acres of land with the stroke of a pen, even after Congress made clear that it will not endorse such a policy. The answer lies in presidential abuse of power under the Antiquities Act.

Congress passed the Antiquities Act in 1906 with a narrow focus in mind: to protect Native American archeological sites from looting and destruction. To accomplish this goal, the law permits the president to designate landmarks, structures and objects of historic or scientific interest situated on lands owned or controlled by the federal government as “national monuments.” It also permits the president to reserve surrounding public lands. But such lands must be confined to the smallest area compatible with the protection of the object. Presidents typically designate monuments under the act through “presidential proclamations,” which do not require public notice or an opportunity for the public to comment on the designations.   

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Biden Expected To Sign Executive Order To Fight Republican ‘Bullying’ of LGBTQ Minors

On Wednesday, President Biden is expected to sign an executive order at a White House event aimed at “advancing LGBTQI+ equality.” He is also expected to blast Republicans for allegedly “bullying” LGBT minors.

Per a senior administration official to Fox News: “[Biden will] forcefully condemn the discriminatory attacks on LGBTQI+ children and families that are seeing all across the country.”

“He will talk about how these bills are worsening the mental health crisis that LGBTQ youth are facing, putting them at greater risk of suicide,” he added. “President Biden always stands up to bullies, and that’s what these extreme MAGA laws and policies do. They bully kids.”

Of course, it’s not clear what “discriminatory attacks” the President is referring to. Nor is it understood what “extreme MAGA laws and policies” are responsible for this alleged attack on LGBT children and the high suicide rate amongst the community.

The expected executive order will also call on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to ensure minors can receive gender transition surgeries. It will also “crackdown on conversion therapy”, calling on HHS to clarify that federally funded programs cannot endorse the practice.

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Biden Promises Executive Action on Climate Change as Energy Costs Spike

President Joe Biden reassured donors Monday that he would use his executive powers to act on climate change, even as energy prices are at record highs.

“The climate crisis is the existential threat. That’s not hyperbole; it’s a fact,” Biden said after taking the podium at a Democratic National Committee Fundraiser in Washington, DC.

Biden promised to take “aggressive” executive actions on climate regulations even if the Supreme Court overruled him. He acknowledged that progress on the issue of climate change was difficult to achieve in Congress, hinting that donors could help him pressure lawmakers.

“There’s a long way to go, but we’re running into some obstacles that I’m going to need your help on in terms of individuals, as well as circumstances,” he said.

Biden expressed his desire to keep the predicted rise in global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, warning of a dark future for the planet if he failed.

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