President Donald Trump has signed in 18 days more than double the executive orders that former President Joe Biden did over the same period to start his administration, according to data compiled by the American Presidency Project (APP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
According to a running list of 10,441 total executive orders the APP has archived dating back to President George Washington, Trump has signed 60 executive orders during the first two and a half weeks of his administration.
In comparison, Biden enacted 29 executive orders in his first 18 days, while former President Barack Obama signed 14 orders over the same time frame in 2009. According to the data, Trump’s 60 executive orders are more than every president’s combined in the first 18 days of their first or second terms– excluding Trump’s first term–since the start of the Reagan administration.
Biden, Obama, and former Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan combined issued 58 executive orders during the first two and a half weeks of their presidencies, the APP data indicates.
In his first term, Trump enacted 8 executive orders in the first 18 days.
The president has also outpaced all 21st-century predecessors regarding memorandums and proclamations. He has issued 21 memorandums since taking office, more than the 13 Biden signed to begin his term, the 12 Obama signed to start his first term, and the 6 he issued over the same period in his second term beginning in 2013.
Bush signed three memorandums combined in the first two and a half weeks of both of his terms.
Moreover, Trump has issued nine proclamations, eclipsing the eight that Biden did through eighteen days and the eight total that Obama signed to begin both his administrations. Bush ordered three proclamations over similar periods in each of his administrations.
Trump’s latest executive actions came on Thursday when he signed orders establishing a Department of Justice “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” in the federal government and imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The APP notes on its website that it seeks “to be recognized as the authoritative, non-partisan on-line source for presidential public documents.”
