Common-sense Governance

Summary of selected recent Executive Orders as of January 24, 2025

Tidings, photogravure etching

Waves of Executive Orders sweeping over the failed and absurd policies of the recent past are re-placing competence and merit at the center of judgment in the U.S. Federal Government. With his preternatural instinct for common-sense, President Trump got rid of the ‘DEI’ state-within-a-state that substituted race, sex, and ersatz identity for real attainments. All the tributaries of the Federal Government — regulatory agencies, the military, States, corporate contractors, educational grantees, and others — will likewise have to dismantle the DEI bureaucracies that have subverted their real purposes, or else they could lose ‘their’ tax funding. (It isn’t ‘theirs’ of course, the funds belong to the taxpayers, who voted to do away with these wasteful and divisive programs.)

Toward a Colorblind Society. A January 20, 2025 Executive Order entitled ‘Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing’ specifies:

The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear. To carry out this directive, the Director of OPM, with the assistance of the Attorney General as requested, shall review and revise, as appropriate, all existing Federal employment practices, union contracts, and training policies or programs to comply with this order. Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.

Anticipating evasion, the order establishes a procedure for discovering whether any program, activity, or budget item is ‘misleadingly relabeled in an attempt to preserve [its] pre-November 4, 2024 function’. The Order also applies to Federal contractors and grantees.

Another Executive Order ‘ending-illegal-discrimination-and-restoring-merit-based-opportunity’ notes ‘the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing’. In addition to the injustice of such pernicious discrimination, selecting people for jobs in the medical, aviation, and law-enforcement sectors on the basis of identity rather than ability threatens the health and safety of all Americans. Among the recent examples of disasters resulting from identity-based employment are the near-fatal negligence of Secret Service security at Butler Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, and the quasi-natural fires in Los Angeles worsened by the ineffectual response of a Fire Chief selected for her identity. The Order revokes a series of previous Executive Orders enforcing identity-based preferences, and abolishes all ‘workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin’. The Order applies to all Federal agencies, contractors, subcontractors, grantees, and counterparties. It further requires them to:

Excise references to DEI and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear, from Federal acquisition, contracting, grants, and financial assistance procedures to streamline those procedures, improve speed and efficiency, lower costs, and comply with civil-rights laws; and

Terminate all “diversity,” “equity,” “equitable decision-making,” “equitable deployment of financial and technical assistance,” “advancing equity,” and like mandates, requirements, programs, or activities, as appropriate.

Free Speech. The various tyrannies that have proliferated to silence the slightest hint of dissent are finally coming to a long-overdue end. These reached absurd extremes like the denial of biological reality, which its proponents reified into harmful medical practices for self-enrichment and belief protection. The vast ‘all-of-Government’ censorship apparatus erected to eradicate free speech is on the way out, per an Executive Order ‘Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship’. It re-establishes the Constitution’s First-Amendment guarantee of free speech and directs that ‘No Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources’ to limit ‘the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech’. The Attorney General is directed to investigate prior violations of Americans’ free speech rights by Federal officials and recommend ‘remedial actions’. Notably missing from the Order are any terminations or prosecutions, which could follow from violations discovered (again) and documented.

Another Executive Order that names specific culprits revokes the security clearances of the famous ‘51 former Intelligence officials’ who asserted that clear evidence of bribery of the Biden family recovered from a computer belonging to Hunter Biden was probably ‘Russian disinformation’. The 51 were rounded up by Biden campaign aide Anthony Blinken. Suppression of this bona fide bribery evidence, later further confirmed by actual bank records of illicit payments, contributed to changing the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election. Blinken was rewarded with the position of Secretary of State. This Executive Order aims to prevent such abuses in future by making it the policy of the United States ‘to ensure that the Intelligence Community not be engaged in partisan politics or otherwise used by a U.S. political campaign for electioneering purposes’. Revoking security clearances hardly qualifies as ‘holding former officials accountable’, but at least it deprives them of whatever remnants of credibility their access to official secrets may provide.

Globalists Be Gone. Unelected global organizations claiming jurisdiction over Americans as if their nation did not exist have been told to get lost. An Executive Order ‘withdrawing from the World Health Organization calls for detachment from the most prominent offendor in this category. WHO assisted in concealing the origins of the covid pandemic, promoted ‘vaccines’ that caused cardio-vascular, neurological, and other diseases, then sought to impose its own flawed medical judgment globally through international agreements without the consent of people subject to them. The Executive Order says ‘The United States intends to withdraw from the WHO’, and halts or ‘pause[s] the future transfer of any United States Government funds, support, or resources to the WHO’. Actual withdrawal from WHO will presumably follow the availability of other organizations to take up legitimate WHO functions.

Financial Surveillance. Less noticed, but equally threatening to human freedom, the under-the-radar movement to install Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) to enforce obedience financially, has been set back and, for the moment, outlawed. This Executive Order supports the active development of digital banking, crypto-currency, distriubted-ledger technologies, and ‘the self-custody of digital assets’ while simultaneously preventing their absorption into central-banking systems. This is a tall order, particularly aimed at politically driven denial of banking services, financial surveillance, misuse of central-banking financial systems to enforce social-credit scoring, and diktats of how and where people can use their own money. Each part reinforces the other, for if free commerce is restricted to the extent central bankers would prefer, black markets will inevitably emerge. Freeing commerce from central-bank control will, on the other hand, vastly increase the flow and volume of trade, the range of consumer choice, entrepreneurial opportunity, and hence overall prosperity. The key action is set forth in Section 5:

Sec. 5. Prohibition of Central Bank Digital Currencies.

(a) Except to the extent required by law, agencies are hereby prohibited from undertaking any action to establish, issue, or promote CBDCs within the jurisdiction of the United States or abroad.

(b) Except to the extent required by law, any ongoing plans or initiatives at any agency related to the creation of a CBDC within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be immediately terminated, and no further actions may be taken to develop or implement such plans or initiatives.

Energy and Inflation. As energy percolates through the economy, its costs drive all other costs, such as manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and data centers, among others. It was sheer folly to believe there ever was such a thing as ‘green energy’, or that it did anything other than move by-products and pollution from one place to another. Prioritizing it fueled inflation rather than growth, and made America vulnerable to foreign extortion. Making more energy available will drive costs down throughout all economic sectors in America and the world. Two Executive Orders, Declaring a National Energy Emergency and Unleashing American Energy, appear designed to clear away a thicket of regulations restricting energy exploration, production, and distribution. Recent experience with medical emergencies might counsel caution and skepticism about emergency declarations in general. Nevertheless inadequate electrical capacity in, for example, California has caused immediately life-threatening emergencies from fires due to overloaded power lines sagging into dry brush and igniting it. The Executive Order asserts that neglect of energy development threatens the nation both geopolitically and domestically:

This active threat to the American people from high energy prices is exacerbated by our Nation’s diminished capacity to insulate itself from hostile foreign actors. Energy security is an increasingly crucial theater of global competition. In an effort to harm the American people, hostile state and non-state foreign actors have targeted our domestic energy infrastructure, weaponized our reliance on foreign energy, and abused their ability to cause dramatic swings within international commodity markets. An affordable and reliable domestic supply of energy is a fundamental requirement for the national and economic security of any nation.

The Order sets up an expedited procedure for consideration of environmental regulations related to energy projects. It does not seek to repeal them, but rather sets a schedule for an up-or-down conclusion instead of the customary indefinite delay. The ‘Unleashing’ order eliminates the electric vehicle (EV) mandate, tax subsidies for EV charging stations, and related tax subsidies. This may surprise those who assumed this Administration would favor Elon Musk’s Tesla. The Order terminates the ‘Green New Deal’ and freezes all funds appropriated to advance its purposes.

As with cars, so it is with other products ‘including but not limited to lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads’ that officials have sought to regulate — consumer choice is now the policy of the United States. The Order also establishes a procedure for determining where over-reaching regulations interfere with energy production, rectifying that imbalance, and streamlining the process for obtaining energy infrastructure permits. It abolishes the Climate Corps, ‘a national service of the US government focused on climate change prevention’, and immediately terminates all programs, activities, and operations associated with it. In addition, it abolishes the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases and invalidates any guidance, recommendation, or instruction it made. All in all, the two Energy Orders primarily clear away obstacles to energy development and usage.

J6 Hostages. With his characteristic no-nonsense thoroughness, President Trump freed the J6 hostages, many of whom were imprisoned without trial — a clear violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of due process. Their imprisonment put the United States in the sad list of countries like the Soviet Union and North Korea that deprive people of their liberties solely on account of peaceful political opposition to the government of the day. Among the protestors were 26 FBI agents, some of whom incited violence to smear the entire group. In fact, the intentional murder of the unarmed Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt by Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd was the most egregious violence of that day. Congressional leadership required a violent episode exactly when Representatives were about to object to the electoral vote count in their States, as provided in the Constitution. That procedure for questioning the electoral vote count was effectively nullified by the timely disturbances at the Capitol, which were soon reified into an ‘insurrection’ with hostages illegally imprisoned for more than four years. No temporizing interfered with their release — it is unconditional.

These Executive Orders may be subject to Court challenges, and may require Congressional approval to ensure they remain intact beyond President Trump’s term of office. Nevertheless the heedless careening of the Federal bureaucracy toward certain disaster for itself and the nation it supposedly serves is averted. As Christopher Rufo notes regarding the end of DEI, ‘None of it was inevitable—and nothing will be going forward, either’. The durability of these long-overdue Executive Orders will depend on the continued attention of those who voted for them. As noted in my previous post, the current task in regard to every harmful, invasive, or wasteful Government program is ‘simple though epic: Just stop it’. I haven’t noticed President Trump’s name among my subscribers, but he appears to be moved by the same common-sense imperatives.