Heritage Foundation Experts Weigh In on Trump’s Executive Orders

President Donald Trump signed a flurry of executive orders his first day in office. His executive orders covered policies related to the economy, the border, gender ideology and more.

Below, we round up analysis from The Heritage Foundation’s policy experts on these executive orders. This article will be regularly updated to include new analysis.

DEI

Trump’s Executive Order ending Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the federal government, its contractors and grantees takes a necessary sledgehammer to these racist practices. Trump signed “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” in his first day in office, demonstrating the importance of the issue and fulfilling a campaign promise. 

The private sector began to move away from the divisive DEI practices three years ago, but Biden’s federal apparatus had remained DEI’s main line of support. 

All that ended in the early evening of Inauguration Day 2025 with a stroke of Trump’s pen. Trump’s executive order accomplishes its purpose mainly by immediately rescinding Biden’s executive order 13985, which he too signed in his first day in office on January 20, 2021. 

Executive order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” may have been the most fateful act of the Biden years, with reverberations throughout his term. It had mandated that all departments and federal agencies issue “Action Plans” that detailed how deeply they were implementing DEI practices.

Because of Trump’s action, the director of the Office of Management and Budget will coordinate with the attorney general and director of personnel management to ensure that all these program, as well as all “chief diversity officers,” are now terminated.

“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,” said Trump’s order.

—Mike Gonzalez, Angeles T. Arrendo E Pluribus Unum senior fellow, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Birthright citizenship

On Monday, Trump issued Executive Order, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which ends “birthright citizenship” by prohibiting U.S. government agencies from issuing or accepting documents recognizing U.S. citizenship for children born in the U.S. if neither the mother nor father were a lawful permanent resident or a U.S. citizen at the time of the child’s birth.

This new policy is prospective, not retroactive; it only applies to children born within the U.S. after Feb. 19, 2025. The secretaries of state and homeland security, the attorney general, and the commissioner of Social Security are responsible for issuing regulations and policies and enforcing them.

The Heritage Foundation has long criticized the erroneous “birthright citizenship” interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and explained that children born in the U.S. to illegal aliens or temporary visitors should not be considered U.S. citizens because the parents are not “subject to the jurisdiction of” the United States, a requirement of the Amendment.

—Lora Ries, director of Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation

Gender Ideology

Trump’s executive order on gender ideology draws precisely the line that Joe Biden and the gender ideologues advising him spent four years trying to erase. In place of confusion and equivocation about “gender identity” and “sex assigned at birth,” this executive order seeks to ground federal law and policy in the bedrock of biology.

In human beings, there are two, and only two sexes—male and female. They are immutable and complementary but not interchangeable.

Given this basic truth, the madness of gender ideology collapses. This executive order seeks to expunge the federal promotion of gender ideology that Biden called for on his first day in office.

It protects private spaces, including federal prisons, for women. And it calls for an end to federal funding of gender “transition” procedures for federal prison inmates.

Trump has thrown down the gauntlet and made clear that his administration will protect women and girls and fight the gender ideologues who have enjoyed free reign for the past four years.

Of course, what can be done by executive order can be undone in the same way. I hope that this executive order will motivate the new Congress to establish, in law, a precise definition of male and female for all federal purposes, and to do whatever is in its constitutional purview to protect minors from the madness of gender medicine.

—Jay Richards, director of Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation.

DOGE

On Monday, Trump issued an executive order establishing the new Department of Government Efficiency.

This executive order, which is effective immediately, renames an existing federal office, the United States Digital Service, as “the United States DOGE Service,” and stands up a new organization within USDS named “the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization” to pursue what the executive order describes as the president’s “18-month DOGE agenda.”

The order likewise instructs agency heads to stand up DOGE teams within each agency to coordinate with USDS and advise the agency heads on carrying out regulatory reform. And it directs the head of USDS to begin a software modernization program to improve the federal government’s efficiency.

Trump has also revived many of his first-term executive orders on the regulatory process, such as E.O. 13771 (the 2-for-1 order), E.O. 13891 (on guidance), and E.O. 13892 (on administrative enforcement).  He has followed standard practice by pausing regulations that have not yet issued and by urging agencies to delay recently-issued regulations pending reconsideration by his team.

—Paul Ray, director of the Roe Institute at The Heritage Foundation

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