Policy

President Donald Trump’s flurry of day-one actions included a reprieve for TikTok, the creation of a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an order on social media “censorship,” a declaration of an energy emergency, and reversal of a Biden order on artificial intelligence.

The TikTok executive order attempts to delay enforcement of a US law that requires TikTok to be banned unless its Chinese owner ByteDance sells the platform. “I am instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today to allow my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans,” Trump’s order said.

TikTok shut down in the US for part of the weekend but re-emerged after Trump said on Sunday that he would issue an order to “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.” Trump also suggested that the US should own half of TikTok.

Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) criticized Trump’s TikTok action. “I have serious concerns with President Trump’s executive order because he is circumventing national security legislation passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress… ByteDance has had 270 days to sell TikTok to an American company, and it’s disgraceful they spent all that time playing political games rather than working to find a buyer,” Pallone said.

Trump’s order doesn’t necessarily remove liability for any company that helps TikTok stay available in the US, The Washington Post reported:

Legal experts and some lawmakers said that with the ban already in force, companies that host or distribute the app will be in violation and could be held liable, no matter what Trump says. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned Sunday after Trump detailed his TikTok plans that companies could still “face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law,” even if Trump’s Justice Department does not enforce it.

Trump also issued an order revoking numerous Biden administration orders. One is an October 2023 order titled Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. That Biden order, as we wrote at the time, “includes testing mandates for advanced AI models to ensure they can’t be used for creating weapons, suggestions for watermarking AI-generated media, and provisions addressing privacy and job displacement.”

In other White House actions we wrote about yesterday and today, Trump ordered the US to withdraw from the World Health Organization and reversed steps taken to promote electric vehicles.

DOGE

Trump’s executive order establishing a Department of Government Efficiency has been expected since November, when he announced the plan and said that DOGE would be led by Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Instead of creating a brand-new department, the order gives a new name to the existing US Digital Service.

“The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President,” Trump’s order said.

The US Digital Service was launched in 2014 by the Obama administration as a “small team of America’s best digital experts” to “work in collaboration with other government agencies to make websites more consumer friendly, to identify and fix problems, and to help upgrade the government’s technology infrastructure.”

Trump said in November that DOGE “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” Yesterday’s executive order said the department will focus on “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

Federal agencies will have to collaborate with DOGE. “Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization,” the order said. “Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, in coordination with the USDS Administrator and to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure USDS has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems. USDS shall adhere to rigorous data protection standards.”

Speech on social media

Trump tackled social media in an order titled Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship. The order targets the Biden administration’s practice of contacting social media platforms about content that government officials believe should have been moderated or blocked.

In 2023, the Supreme Court blocked an injunction that would have prevented the Biden administration from pressuring social media firms to take down content. Justices expressed skepticism during oral arguments about whether federal government officials should face limits on their communications with social media networks like Facebook and ruled in favor of the Biden administration in June 2024.

Despite the Biden court win, Trump’s order described the Biden administration’s approach as a threat to the First Amendment.

“Over the last 4 years, the previous administration trampled free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms, often by exerting substantial coercive pressure on third parties, such as social media companies, to moderate, deplatform, or otherwise suppress speech that the Federal Government did not approve,” Trump’s order said. “Under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’ the Federal Government infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate. Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”

The order goes on to say that federal government employees and officials are prohibited from “engag[ing] in or facilitat[ing] any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” Trump further directed his administration to”identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech.”

Fossil fuels good, wind bad

On the energy front, the most striking executive order is one declaring that the US is facing an energy emergency. This comes despite the fact that the US has been producing, in the words of its own agency, “more crude oil than any country, ever.” It’s also producing record volumes of natural gas. Prices for both have been low in part due to this large supply. Yet the executive order states that “identification, leasing, development, production, transportation, refining, and generation capacity of the United States are all far too inadequate to meet our Nation’s needs.”

The order describes ways to streamline permitting for all of these under emergency provisions overseen by the US Army Corps of Engineers. On the face of it, this would seem to also be good for wind and solar power, which are produced domestically and suffer from permitting barriers and a backlog of requests for connections to the grid. But toward the end of the text, “energy” is defined in a way that excludes wind and solar. “The term ‘energy’ or ‘energy resources’ means crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals,” the order says.

If the animosity toward the fastest-growing sources of renewable energy weren’t clear there, a separate executive order makes them explicit, as Trump is putting a temporary end to all offshore wind lease sales. “This withdrawal temporarily prevents consideration of any area in the [Offshore Continental Shelf] for any new or renewed wind energy leasing for the purposes of generation of electricity or any other such use derived from the use of wind,” it reads. “This withdrawal does not apply to leasing related to any other purposes such as, but not limited to, oil, gas, minerals, and environmental conservation.”

The ostensible reason for this is “alleged legal deficiencies” in the environmental reviews that were conducted prior to the leasing process. There will also be an attempt to claw back existing leases. The secretary of the interior and attorney general are instructed to “conduct a comprehensive review of the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending any existing wind energy leases.”

As an added bonus, the same accusations of legal deficiencies is leveled against a single land-based project, the proposed Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho. So all government activities related to that project are on hold until it’s reviewed.

“Burdensome” regulations targeted

When it comes to fossil fuel development on the continental shelf, a Trump order alleges that “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations” are impeding development. The order takes several steps to speed up permitting of fossil fuel projects. It also kills a grab bag of climate-related programs.

One of the most prominent efforts is to do away with the emissions waivers, allowed under the Clean Air Act, which enable states like California to set stricter rules than the federal government. The Supreme Court recently declined even to consider an attempt to challenge these waivers. Yet as part of an attack on electric vehicles, the administration is adopting a policy of “terminating, where appropriate, state emissions waivers that function to limit sales of gasoline-powered automobiles.”

Also targeted for termination is the American Climate Corps, a job training program focused on people entering the workforce. The Biden administration’s effort to determine and consider the social cost of carbon emissions during federal rulemaking will also be ended.

Several federal rules and executive orders will be targets, notably those on implementing the energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, which have subsidized renewable energy and funded programs like carbon capture and hydrogen production. Many of these are already formal rules published in the Federal Register, which means that new rulemaking processes will be required to eliminate them, something that typically takes over a year and can be subject to court challenge.

In a separate part of the order, titled “Terminating the Green New Deal,” the Order suspends funding provided under two laws that were not part of the Green New Deal: the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Given those funds have already been allocated by Congress, it’s not clear how long Trump can delay this spending.

Finally, Trump decided he would attack the foundation of US efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions: the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gasses are a threat to the public as defined by the Clean Air Act. The endangerment finding is solidly based on well-established science, so much so that attempts to challenge it during the first Trump administration were reportedly abandoned as being unrealistic. Now, the incoming EPA administrator is given just 30 days to “submit joint recommendations to the Director of [Office of Management and Budget] on the legality and continuing applicability of the Administrator’s findings.”