Policy

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Sub-topics: 📈 Federal Economy 🚧 Immigration ✂️ Safety Net Cuts

131 events

1 posts

1 contributor

Since Mar 2016

Primer

The Policy category documents the substance of governance — executive orders, legislation, regulatory changes, budget decisions — and how policy was increasingly wielded as a political weapon rather than a governing tool.

Key areas:
- Tariffs and trade war: From 2018 steel tariffs through 2025 universal tariffs on 60 countries — the largest trade disruption since Smoot-Hawley
- Immigration policy: From "Muslim ban" to family separation to "Remain in Mexico" to the largest deportation operation in American history
- Climate and environmental rollbacks: Withdrawal from Paris Agreement (twice), gutting of EPA enforcement, suppression of climate science
- Education: Dissolution of Department of Education, block-granting of federal funds
- Healthcare: Repeated attempts to repeal ACA, COVID response failures
- Foreign policy: NATO disruption, Iran deal withdrawal, North Korea diplomacy, Ukraine, Greenland threats

Policy events are the tangible consequences of Trump's rhetoric — they show what happens when the things he says at rallies become the things the government actually does.

Corpus

POLICY — Executive Power, Deregulation, and the Administrative State

The policy corpus documents the Trump administration's approach to governance through executive action — the systematic use of executive orders, agency directives, and regulatory rollback to reshape federal policy without congressional approval. The story is not simply a catalog of policy decisions; it is a case study in how executive power was expanded, how the administrative state was dismantled, and how the normal channels of democratic governance were bypassed.

The pattern was established in the first week. On January 27, 2017, seven days into his presidency, Trump signed Executive Order 13769 — the "Muslim Ban" — blocking entry from seven Muslim-majority countries. The order caused chaos at airports nationwide, was blocked by courts, and was revised twice before the Supreme Court upheld a third version in June 2018. The Muslim Ban established the template: Trump would push the boundaries of executive power, let the courts sort it out, and blame the judiciary when challenged. The policy was not designed to withstand legal scrutiny — it was designed to signal to his base that he would act decisively, regardless of legal constraints.

The deregulation agenda was equally systematic. On January 30, 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13771, the "2-for-1" deregulation order, requiring that for every new regulation issued, at least two prior regulations be identified for elimination. The order was not based on any analysis of whether the regulations were effective or necessary — it was based on a numerical target. The result was a systematic rollback of environmental protections, labor standards, consumer safeguards, and public health regulations. The EPA's enforcement capacity was gutted. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was defanged. The Department of Labor's overtime rules were blocked. Each rollback was justified on the grounds of "reducing burdens on business" — but the effect was to transfer power from the public to the private sector, from regulators to the regulated.

The tax policy followed the same pattern. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was passed on a party-line vote without a single Democratic vote in the Senate. The law cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, reduced individual tax rates, and nearly doubled the standard deduction. The law was sold on the promise that it would "pay for itself" through economic growth — a claim that was debunked by every major economic analysis. The law added an estimated $1.9 trillion to the federal deficit over ten years. The benefits flowed disproportionately to the wealthy: the top 1% received an average tax cut of $51,000, while the bottom 20% received an average cut of $60. The law was a massive upward transfer of wealth, justified by supply-side economic theory that had been discredited for decades.

The immigration policy was built on executive action as well. The "zero tolerance" policy of April 2018, which resulted in the systematic separation of families at the border, was not authorized by Congress. The "Remain in Mexico" policy of January 2019, which sent over 70,000 asylum seekers to dangerous Mexican border cities, was not authorized by Congress. The Title 42 expulsions of March 2020, which were used over 2.8 million times to expel migrants without allowing them to seek asylum, were based on a public health law from 1944 that had never been used for immigration enforcement. Each policy was an expansion of executive power, justified by emergency or necessity, and each one normalized the use of executive authority to achieve policy goals that Congress had not authorized.

The foreign policy was equally unilateral. The withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA) on May 8, 2018, was announced by Trump alone, against the advice of America's European allies, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his own Secretary of Defense. The reimposition of sanctions was an executive decision, not a congressional one. The designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in April 2019 was the first time the US had designated a part of another government as a terrorist group — a decision that collapsed the diplomatic channel and escalated tensions to the brink of war. The Soleimani strike of January 3, 2020, was ordered without congressional authorization, and the administration never produced a formal legal opinion justifying it under the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force.

The pattern across all of these policy decisions was the same: executive action without congressional authorization, legal justification after the fact, and a willingness to test the boundaries of presidential power. The policy corpus is also a record of how much policy can change by presidential fiat alone. Every major action — the Muslim Ban, the deregulation agenda, the tax cuts, the family separation policy, the Iran deal withdrawal — was an executive order or agency directive, not legislation. Congress never approved the family separation policy, the wall funding, or the mass deportation operation. The policy story is a story about the expansion of executive power over the democratic process.

The policy corpus connects directly to the immigration corpus (the Muslim Ban, zero tolerance, Remain in Mexico, Title 42, and mass deportation were all immigration policies), the iran corpus (the JCPOA withdrawal and maximum pressure campaign were foreign policy decisions), the korruption corpus (the tax cuts benefited Trump personally, the deregulation benefited his donors), and the project-2025 corpus (the 2025 policy implementation was the culmination of the executive power expansion that began in 2017). The pattern across all of them is the same: the use of executive authority to achieve policy goals that could not be achieved through the normal channels of democratic governance.

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FDA Issues Blanket Recommendation Limiting Pain Prescriptions to 90 MME

💊Drug Policy 📑Policy 👑Trump Regime March 15, 2016

The FDA issued blanket recommendations to limit pain prescriptions to 90 MME (morphine milligram equivalents) per day, based on cherry-picked research that conflated poly-pharmacy drug users with legitimate pain patients. The research had extremely small sample sizes and no statistical power, yet was used to justify sweeping policy changes that devastated chronic pain patients.

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