President Donald Trump signed 46 presidential actions during his first 12 hours in office, including overturning 78 of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders. Between Trump’s moves with major ramifications (like
ending all wind permits) and those that seem to represent more personal grievances (like free-flowing showerheads), there has been much confusion over what they all mean.
Some would argue that is the entire point: “The more bizarreness Trump generates,” the journalist Edward Luce wrote last year
for The Financial Times, “the less people notice.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during his rise to power in 2015 and 2016, memorably described this as a deliberate technique of “flood[ing] the zone with shit.”
Whatever way you frame it, though, where there’s Trump, there’s noises, which means news can fall through the cracks. Here’s our list of what you might have missed during Trump’s first hours as president and what might happen next.
Environmental Justice
In one of his first actions in office, Trump repealed almost seven-dozen Biden-era executive orders, including Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”
Signed on Biden’s Inauguration Day, the policy called for the government to take a “comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” That meant that the Environmental Protection Agency
considered things like race and socioeconomic status — given the historic burdens put on frontline communities — during its permitting processes. Trump also signed a new executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which limits government agencies from considering the impacts on disadvantaged communities. The administration has reportedly gone as far as to warn government employees that they could face consequences for failing to report on colleagues whose diversity and inclusion efforts might slip past its notice.
As Dan Farber
writes for Legal Planet, however, to carry out this anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive order, “agencies will have to eliminate their own environmental justice regulations. At that point, the door will be open to judicial review. I think agencies will have a hard time justifying the repeals.”
Trump further
overturned Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” another first-week Biden policy. In addition to declaring climate change a national security risk, the order also created the Justice40 initiative, directing 40% of federal climate spending to disadvantaged communities.
Jillian Blanchard, the Climate Change and Environmental Justice Program director at Lawyers for Good Government, told me this was also legally dubious. “There’s already existing infrastructure and policies in place that can’t be undone by an executive order,” she said — for example, grants for
ongoing efforts to install EV chargers in disadvantaged communities, or clean-up projects in coal mining communities in Appalachia. “I think it’s important to take a minute and say, okay, what does this mean in practice?”
Blanchard added that, in particular, Trump’s moves on environmental justice “make me question what this administration plans to do with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act,” which prohibits race-based discrimination in programs that receive federal funding. “There’s really important questions here that are being raised that everyone should be paying attention to.”
ESG
Trump also repealed Executive Order 14030, “Climate-Related Financial Risk,” signed by Biden in May 2021.
The executive order called for government-wide assessment and disclosure of climate-related financial risks to U.S. programs, and ordered the Secretary of Labor to submit a report on actions to protect U.S. workers’ savings and pensions from those same threats. Executive Order 14030 also established the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which called for government agencies to be more conservative when siting projects that could face sea-level rise or flood threats.
In addition to government agencies no longer being required to consider how extreme weather and climate risks
might threaten their operations, Trump’s executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” also takes aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices, or the “social” aspect of ESG.
Renaming Denali
Though you’ve probably already heard about Trump’s attempt to spangle the Gulf of Mexico with a new name, the “
Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness” executive order also calls for reverting the name of North America’s highest peak, Denali, back to Mt. McKinley.
The political effort to change the mountain’s name to Denali, backed by the state’s Republican politicians, dates back to the 1970s. (It took until 2015 for the name to be changed to the Alaskan Athabaskan word meaning “the high one” because of the Ohio delegation’s insistence on honoring its native president.) Trump’s decision to restore the mountain’s colonial name is a pointed brush-off of Alaskan Natives and represents a troubling precedent by his administration of undermining promises made to Indigenous partners by the federal government.
Tribal partners have historically
assisted the U.S. government on issues of land use, resource management, and climate resiliency, and can prove formidable opponents to projects that lack their support. By disregarding Alaskan Natives’ support of the name Denali, Trump risks alienating the greater Indigenous community and starting off on a contentious footing with one of the government’s most valuable allies.
California water
When the Los Angeles County fires began earlier this month, Trump launched a renewed crusade against
the “essentially worthless” Delta smelt, a nearly extinct two-inch-long fish. Per the then-president-elect, California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom had supposedly refused to sign a “water restoration declaration” that would have “allowed millions of gallons of water … from the North to flow daily into many parts of California,” where it allegedly could have helped to fight the devastating fires.
Only, there
was no “water restoration declaration.” The vast majority of Los Angeles’ water doesn’t come from northern California, and the smelt have nothing to do with the water shortages some fire crews faced. That didn’t prevent Trump from issuing a memorandum to “stop radical environmentalism” and put “people over fish.” Still, it is so vague that it appears to be more of a nod to the Trump-supporting farmers in California’s Central Valley, who occasionally face water restrictions during droughts to protect the smelt.
“It’s all political posturing — it’s all an attempt to shock and awe,” Blanchard told me of the executive orders taken in sum. She added that “it’s going to be really important for people to take a deep breath and recognize that many of these things are not legal and challenges will be put in place.”
“Don’t become too distracted by fear and uncertainty,” she went on, “because that is one of their main goals.”
Read more of Heatmap’s coverage of Trump’s first week executive orders
With plenty more to come.
Lithium extraction plants in Chile. Lucas Aguayo Araos/Anadolu via Getty Images