Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has leaned heavily on the use of executive orders, issuing more than 200 directives on topics ranging from immigration to tariffs and climate change.
While the use of executive orders dates to George Washington, no president has issued more during their first 100 days in office than Trump. But Trump’s use of executive orders has also invited questions about their legal basis—and the limits of presidential power.
We asked three experts at the University of Chicago Law School to explain: William Baude, the Harry Kalven, Jr. Professor of Law and the faculty director of the Constitutional Law Institute; Aziz Huq, the Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law; and Alison LaCroix, the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law and Associate Member of the Department of History.
In the edited Q&A below, the three scholars examine the basics of executive orders: how they differ from laws, the ways they’ve shaped history and the checks that keep them in balance today.
What is an executive order? What’s their legal or constitutional basis?
Baude: An executive order is a way for the president to exercise his legal powers, but it is not a source of power in itself. That means that every executive order has to come from some other legal power—like an enacted statute or a provision of the Constitution. An executive order can never stand on its own.
Huq: An executive order is an instruction issued by the president, generally under their constitutional powers in Article II, or under a federal statute. While presidents since George Washington have used executive orders for administrative and policy ends, they are not mentioned in the Constitution.
What makes an executive order different from a law?
Baude: Federal laws have to be enacted by Congress and then presented to the president for his signature. They can deal with a broad range of topics, such as appropriating money, creating new crimes, and giving new powers to the president or other agencies. An executive order is issued by the president alone and it cannot do any of these things.
LaCroix: An executive order is essentially a written instrument through which the U.S. president acts to enforce or execute the laws. In order to be valid, an executive order has to be based on some power granted to the president by the Constitution—typically in Article II, which governs presidential power.
A “law,” by contrast, has to come from Congress, and it has to follow the procedure that the Constitution lays out for lawmaking. This is passage by a majority in each house of Congress, plus either the president’s signature or, in the event of a presidential veto, approval by two-thirds of both houses.
“Statute” and “legislation” are synonyms for “laws,” meaning regulations that issue from Congress, under its constitutional powers.
What executive orders has Trump been signing? Do you note any patterns there?
Huq: As of early September 2025, President Trump has signed more than 200 executive orders. To gain a perspective, consider a simple comparison to his first term. In his first four years in office, Trump issued 220 executive orders. Many of them target “culture war” issues, such as diversity, gender identity and immigration. Many have been invalidated by the federal courts, as with the birthright citizenship order.
Baude: In his second term, President Trump has signed a huge range of executive orders, in part because Congress has enacted so few new laws. Some of them are lawful orders that may be good policy; some of them clearly exceed his powers; and some of them attempt to use valid presidential powers for invalid purposes. A lot of these are being challenged in the courts.
Can executive orders be overturned?
LaCroix: Yes. The most direct way of overturning an executive order is for the president who issued it, or a successor president, to revoke it. An executive order can also be invalidated by a federal court if the court determines the order exceeds the president’s powers. Finally, Congress could pass legislation either invalidating an executive order or revoking the prior law that was the basis of the order—meaning the law that the president was using the executive order to execute. For that legislation to become law, it would have to be signed by the president, which is probably unlikely, or else Congress would have to override the president’s veto with the two-thirds vote mentioned above.
Congress could also indirectly frustrate the executive order by refusing to use its spending and appropriations powers to fund whatever the president is trying to do with the order.
What is the historical precedent for executive orders? Which presidents used them most or most effectively?
LaCroix: The history of executive orders stretches back to our first president, George Washington, in 1791. Since then, every president except William Henry Harrison, who died just one month after taking office in 1841, has issued what we’d now call executive orders in some form. Before the 20th century, executive orders were less formalized—for example, they weren’t systematically numbered. Early presidents also issued other forms of written statements, such as proclamations, memoranda, or letters, which today would likely take the form of an executive order.
Franklin D. Roosevelt currently holds the record for the most executive orders issued during a presidency: more than 3,700 across more than three terms in office, prior to the passage of the 22nd Amendment limiting the president to two terms. During the Roosevelt administration, Congress was also extremely active, passing many large-scale statutes in response to the Great Depression and then World War II.
According to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Donald Trump issued more executive orders in the first hundred days of his second term than any other president: 143. By comparison, FDR issued 99 executive orders in his first hundred days, and Joe Biden issued 42.
What are some notable orders from the past that we might use as points of comparison?
LaCroix: One of most significant executive orders in American history is the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by Abraham Lincoln on Sept. 22, 1862, which ended slavery in the rebelling Confederate states as of Jan. 1, 1863.
Other important executive orders include Harry Truman’s order directing the seizure of certain steel companies, an order the Supreme Court invalidated two years later in the landmark case of Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer. Less high-profile uses over the years have included establishing advisory committees and commissions—including Washington’s 1791 order appointing commissioners to survey the boundaries of the nation’s new capital, the District of Columbia.
What are the limits on executive orders; meaning what power does the president have to issue them and how are they enforced or carried out?
Huq: The president needs to have legal authority either under the Constitution—the most relevant part is Article II—or a federal statute, for an executive order. Many speak directly to officials within the federal executive, and as such are directly operative. Others can have direct effects on third parties, as with the loss of grants or contracts or even citizenship. Yet others rely on federal agencies for their implementation.
What role do the courts play in reviewing executive orders? Can a judge block an executive order?
Huq: If there is a person with “standing” to sue, a technical concept that boils down to the right kind of harm, then they can challenge an executive order in court. A 2025 study found some 150 judicial decisions concerning executive orders. This number is likely much bigger now, as many of Trump’s orders have been challenged on constitutional grounds—for example, the First Amendment challenges to law firm-related orders—or as exceeding statutory authority.
— Interested in hearing more from UChicago scholars? Watch the “Battle of the Branches” series, a joint project of the Law School, Harris School of Public Policy and the Social Sciences Division, featuring conversations about the shifting powers in the federal government.