New executive orders on civil rights, education, the environment, science, and more

Since our recap in April, President Trump has signed and published 54 additional executive orders. Here’s a summary to catch us up.

Civil Rights

Disparate impact liability is a legal doctrine first established in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlaws the implementation of policies that would disproportionately harm marginalized groups, even if the wording of the policy is phrased in a neutral way. An Executive Order signed in April cuts enforcement of this type of provision from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. It raises the burden of proof to punish discriminatory behavior in a way that emboldens covert discrimination. Rep. Bobby Scott (VA), Congressional Black Caucus Member and Ranking Member of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, said in a statement, “Americans are now more likely to be denied ‘equality of opportunity’ and it will be harder for Americans to succeed based solely on their merit.”

Meanwhile, a new Religious Liberty Commission has been established via Executive Order to review current threats to religious liberty in the U.S. and advise the President on strategies to address those threats. It claims that policies have prevented parents from sending their kids to religious schools, threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of faith-based entities, and excluded religious groups from government programs. This comes with the context of a previous Executive Order which aimed to eliminate “anti-Christian bias” from the U.S. government. While this new order doesn’t mention Christianity specifically, the task force has been staffed with Evangelicals, Catholics, and one Jewish Rabbi — hardly a cross-section of religious life in America. A Pew Research study published this year finds that while more than 60% of Americans identify as Christians, 7% are religious but not Christian – that’s nearly 24 million people – and 29% are not religious – more than 98 million people. One member, Eric Metaxas, posted on X in February that “Islam is a death cult.”

Education

Several executive orders pertain to education, from artificial intelligence to discipline to HBCUs. On April 23, President Trump signed an Executive Order focused on advancing AI education for American youth. To prepare kids for a workforce with a growing reliance on AI, it establishes a task force for Artificial Intelligence Education to implement policies and resources encouraging AI literacy and critical thinking in K-12 students, research on AI in education, and teacher training and development with AI. Also focusing on workforce preparedness, another order requires Secretaries of Labor, Commerce, and Education to review federal workforce development programs for trades and submit a plan for reform and expansion of these programs into new industries with a goal of at least 1 million new active apprentices and improved outcome transparency.

A back-and-forth over disciplinary actions in schools continues as Trump signed an Executive Order requiring the Secretary of Education to issue new guidance to address “discriminatory-equity-ideology-based” disciplinary practices. The issue stems from a letter issued by the Obama Administration in 2014 which provided comprehensive guidance for addressing racial disparities for discipline in schools. Trump rescinded the letter in 2018, but in 2023 the Biden Administration released a new letter to “confront the issue of race discrimination in student discipline.” Trump moved to negate the 2023 letter by identifying all racial considerations in school disciplinary actions as discriminatory.

Other orders focus on college education, with one calling for stronger enforcement of foreign funding disclosure requirements for universities and another establishing a White House Initiative for HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). The stated purpose for this initiative is to improve education and innovation outcomes at HBCUs by increasing the role of private-sector investors in fiscal, institutional, and technological management of the universities. It revokes a Biden-era Executive Order which established a White House Initiative for advancing DEI-based initiatives for HBCUs. The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a nonprofit organization, stated that among other concerns, the private-sector focus could undermine institutional autonomy, and the NAACP said the order is “nothing more than smoke and mirrors meant to divert attention away from the severe funding cuts and the larger struggle against equity and racial justice that HBCUs face.”

Energy / Climate

Trump signed an Executive Order in July to create the Make America Beautiful Again Commission to advise the President on the improvement of conservation efforts, recovery of fish and wildlife populations and ecosystems, and expansion of access to public lands through outdoor recreation. The Sierra Club, an environmental organization, calls this order an effort to greenwash the “most anti-environment administration in history.” Greenwashing is the practice of using environmentally friendly marketing messages to conceal anti-environmental actions. For example, another Executive Order recommends increasing the price of admissions into National Parks for nonresident visitors and to use the increase in revenue to improve the infrastructure of these recreation areas. On the same day, Congress passed the reconciliation bill which included hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to national park budgets and staff and mandates for leasing and drilling on public lands, including national parks.

In another Executive Order, Trump eliminates tax credits for “green” energy, repeatedly calling renewable energy unreliable and unaffordable. The Secretary of Interior is tasked with reviewing regulations to root out preferential treatment toward implementation of renewable energy sources. It appears that this order may have been a concession to the House Freedom Caucus during the major government spending bill debates earlier this year. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, renewable energy has become more reliable than fossil fuels and less expensive over time, and a focus on renewable energy in recent years has resulted in more than 20% of our energy being generated from renewable sources. This order may slow growth in the renewable energy industry but it will be difficult to reverse its momentum completely, as hundreds of new plants powered by renewable energy have gone live this year. Plans for a continued expansion through 2030 have been underway since 2020.

Another series of Executive Orders pivots towards an embrace of nuclear energy production but with fewer guardrails than in the past, seeking to speed up the approval process and substantially boost domestic production of nuclear power with stated goals ranging from national security to deregulation. One order calls for the deployment of nuclear reactors on federal lands to power military bases and AI data centers, referring to those data centers as “critical defense facilities.” This order also directs the Secretary of State to pursue at least 20 new nuclear cooperation agreements with foreign countries by 2029, including the facilitation of U.S. generated exports of nuclear materials. Other orders seek to reorganize the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), an agency tasked with regulating the use of nuclear materials to ensure public health and safety, to implement an 18-month target for nuclear project approvals. Typically, the environmental review of such projects could take up to 36 months. Instructions for reform of the testing process for nuclear reactors direct the NRC to expedite and implement new exclusions for environmental reviews. Trump also calls for an expansion of uranium enrichment, the development of workforce training for the nuclear industry, and funding for the restart of decommissioned plants (a limited effort, with as few as three plants viable for revival).

He’s also seeking to expedite commercial mining of seabed minerals within and beyond U.S. territory, a move which concerns the Secretary-General of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), Leticia Reis de Carvalho. She says that for the last 30 years, the U.S. has been a “reliable observer and significant contributor” to international seabed negotiations which provide expertise to the development of ISA environmental and economic regulatory framework. This Executive Order combined with recent permitting requests for outside of U.S. seabed jurisdiction indicate a potential threat to the common resource areas in the oceans which are internationally regulated as global “common heritage.”

Science / Technology

Ruffling feathers in the science community, Trump signed an order instructing an advisor to issue guidance on “gold standard science” to ensure that government-funded scientists don’t engage in “misconduct” in their studies or communications of results. Research advocates worry that this “gold standard” allows a political appointee to determine when findings need to be “corrected” and take disciplinary action against the scientists reporting those findings, establishing a formal policy of political interference in the scientific process. The non-profit Stand Up for Science wrote an open letter against this Executive Order which has collected more than 10,000 signatures calling the order “an escalation of the ongoing assault on science” and a “bad faith appropriation of scientific language and principles.”

Another order seeks to eliminate government use of AI models trained on “woke” topics (such as DEI, “transgenderism,” unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism), instead requiring ideological neutrality. But neutral doesn’t always mean unbiased (similar to the disparate impact liability topic at the start of this article). For example, when Musk updated X AI-Bot Grok to “not shy away from politically incorrect statements, as long as they are well substantiated” it produced anti-semetic responses to prompts, even calling itself “MechaHitler.” AI has been found to produce racist results and this Executive Order would prohibit agencies from choosing AI products which correct that.

Research on the process by which viruses and pathogens mutate is known as gain-of-function research (GOFR). Trump signed an Executive Order which provides oversight and limitations to federal funding for biological research on GOFR. It instructs the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to revise research oversight policies to comply with the Administration’s GOFR policy and track GOFR whether federally funded or not, including by a reporting mechanism requiring scientists to report their findings to the government, prompting questions about the potential for political meddling in those findings. As a result, research programs and projects have been forced to pause their operations while these policies are developed.

But while Trump undermines certain scientific communities, he has encouraged advancements in specific technological industries. With one order, he directs the Department of Commerce to create an AI exports program to strengthen American leadership in AI across the world. Two orders addressing drones in the U.S. intend to crack down on the use of drones for spying and drug smuggling especially by foreign countries, while bolstering the domestic drone industry. The latter does this by loosening regulations for line-of-sight requirements on drones, integration of drones in the National Airspace System, strengthening and promoting the domestic manufacturing of drones and drone technology, and further implementation of drone technology in the military. Supersonic flights over land were banned in the U.S. in the 70’s due to the disruptive sonic booms and property damage caused by planes exceeding the speed of sound. More than fifty years later, the days on this ban are limited, since Trump signed an Executive Order requiring the FAA to repeal the ban and begin a rulemaking process to establish noise standards for such flights. NASA is working to develop aircraft which would be able to travel at supersonic speeds with minimal noise disruption on the ground.

Deregulation

Trump has signed several executive orders in the name of deregulation. Some are aimed at specific industries, such as fisheries or data centers, while others take a more expansive approach to reduce penalties for the regulatory violations from criminal to civil offenses. One Executive Order aims to address wildfire prevention and response by encouraging expansion of coordination and compacts between partners, and promoting strategies such as prescribed burns. Jessica Blackband, Senior Manager of Climate and Environment at the Federation of American Scientists, says the order “contains elements that do not seem feasible against a backdrop of enacted and proposed cuts to federal wildfire staff, programs, and funding” such as NOAA and the U.S. Geological Survey which provide data and forecasting tools crucial to wildfire preparedness and response.

This follows our previous reporting on efforts to establish a regulatory master-switch which reaches beyond the executive authority established by the Administrative Procedures Act.