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Comment by bumby | Hacker News Reader

I used to think the problem of governance by EO was getting worse too but the stats tell a different story:

https://www.statista.com/chart/7658/number-of-executive-orde...

Somehow "number of EOs" doesn't sound like the right metric to use when determining whether executive power is growing. Surely it's the content that matters.

Especially when there are EOs for naming post offices and other boring mechanical work of the executive.

It would take some serious effort (and there’d be disagreement) but maybe you could classify “important” government changes and if they were enacted by congress, EO, courts, etc.

Also, that link stops with Obama and that leaves out two whole administrations that would be pretty pertinent data in this discussion. Nearly a decade of data. It looks like Trump's first term had 220 and Biden had 162. It would be interesting to see the data classified the way you described and then broken down by party over time. The actual policymaking via EO by each party over the last 50 years would be more elucidating than the straight numbers for sure.

FDR forced people to give up all their gold assets at a fixed rate, under threat of imprisonment for a decade. He then proceeded to nearly double the declared exhange rate up once the government had confiscated everybody's gold.

All done by executive order. Makes basically all modern EOs look pretty innocuous by comparison.

That said I actually agree and would love to see a sharp reduction in executive power, especially as it comes to using the military. If we're going to go bombing places, that should require a declaration of war from Congress. And 'emergency' powers should not be enabled for decades on end.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

FDR truly was the worst president we ever had. The more I learn about him, the more I wish we could roll back history to before his presidency.

I’m open to that, but what context do you think is appropriate and how would you measure it for an unbiased metric?

The number of EOs is a poor measure of the extent of executive power. There are many other ways to concentrate executive power; for example OMB (part of the Executive Office of the President) issues “M-memos” (“M” for “management”) to the heads of all departments, instructing them on how to implement EOs, laws, and White House priorities.

There is a consensus among researchers of the workings of the US government and the legal context thereof that, since FDR and especially since Reagan, that the “imperial presidency” has been gaining ground.

Related to that, the first 100 days are typically when there is the highest number of orders per day. https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/politics/biden-exec...

Tump did 20% of his total, from the first term, in the first 100 days. Biden did just under 1/3 of his total in the first 100 days.

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