To signal a changing of the guard — and start delivering on his 2024 campaign promises — President Trump spent his first hours back in office Monday issuing a total of 26 executive orders, 12 memorandums and four proclamations.
“Can you imagine [former President Joe] Biden doing this?” Trump asked as he signed a stack of documents onstage at Washington, D.C.’s Capital One Arena. “I don’t think so.”
Here’s how four of Trump’s higher-profile executive actions could affect you — plus a comprehensive list of everything he did on day one.
Birthright citizenship
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution — which was ratified three years after the end of the Civil War — states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
That’s birthright citizenship. At the time, the idea was to protect former slaves as equal citizens under the law. But the courts have since interpreted the 14th Amendment to mean that all U.S.-born children are citizens regardless of their parents’ status (unless they’re the children of foreign diplomats, who aren’t “subject” to U.S. law).
Trump and his allies disagree. They claim birthright citizenship incentivizes immigrants to enter the country illegally — and they argue that such immigrants shouldn’t be seen as “subject to [U.S.] jurisdiction.”
And so Trump issued an executive order Monday that attempts to deny birthright citizenship to any child whose father was “not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident” at the time of birth, and whose mother was either “unlawfully present in the United States” or present lawfully but temporarily — as in “visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or … on a student, work, or tourist visa.”
If Trump’s order stands, it wouldn’t retroactively affect current U.S. citizens — only children born after Feb. 19, 2025.
On Tuesday, 18 states sued President Trump, saying he can’t legally revoke a right written into the Constitution.
“Presidents have broad power,” said New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin, a Democrat. “But they are not kings.
Prescription drug prices
The first executive order Trump signed at the Capital One Arena Monday covered “initial rescissions,” immediately revoking 78 “destructive and radical executive actions of the previous administration,” as the new president put it onstage.
Among those rescissions were three Biden administration efforts aimed at further lowering the cost of prescription drugs.
Biden has long touted Medicare’s newfound ability to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies as one of his signature achievements. But he also launched a series of experiments that could have capped certain generic drug prices at $2 for Medicare beneficiaries; improved access to expensive cell and gene therapies for Medicaid recipients; and streamlined the evidence-gathering process for new drugs, potentially expediting the availability of effective treatments.
Trump ended these experiments with a stroke of his pen.
“The Biden executive order Trump rescinded called for the development of new approaches to lower drug costs,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote on X. “The big question, which Trump hasn’t addressed yet, is what he’ll do with government negotiation of drug prices under the Inflation Reduction Act.”
Remote work for federal employees
Many federal employees have reshaped their family and office responsibilities around the hybrid remote work schedules once necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic — and in early December, the Social Security Administration agreed to a five-year extension of work-from-home arrangements for tens of thousands of them.
But on Monday, Trump signed an executive order requiring federal department heads to “terminate remote work arrangements” and require all federal workers to return to in-person work five days a week.
Why? In part it’s because Trump sees such arrangements as a sign of Democratic excess — “a gift to the union,” as he put it last month. But it’s also because those around him — namely Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the two business executives he initially picked to lead his Department of Government Efficiency — believe that mandating in-person work is a good way to shrink the federal bureaucracy.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the COVID-era privilege of staying home.”
The ‘Gulf of America’
It has been known as the Gulf of Mexico since 1607 — the body of water “bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba.”
But now Trump wants to call it the Gulf of America.
In an executive order called “Restoring Names that Honor American Greatness,” Trump declared Monday that “the naming of our national treasures, including breathtaking natural wonders and historic works of art, should honor the contributions of visionary and patriotic Americans in our Nation’s rich past” — and that after four centuries, the Gulf of Mexico was no longer a fitting name for an area that had contributed so much to America’s energy, fishing, maritime and tourism industries.
The Secretary of the Interior now has 30 days to “update the [Geographic Names Information System] to reflect the renaming of the Gulf and remove all references to the Gulf of Mexico from the GNIS.”
Other countries do not have to acknowledge the name change. Earlier this month, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum dryly suggested that North America should be called “América Mexicana,” or “Mexican America,” because that’s how a document from 1814 referred to the continent.
“For us and for the entire world it will continue to be called the Gulf of Mexico,” Sheinbaum added Tuesday.
Credit: Yahoo News