Axios reports President Donald Trump's second term is creating few new laws that will outlive his presidency.
“[N]o president since at least Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 has signed fewer bills into law in a similar governing period, GovTrack Insider found, despite Trump's party controlling both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue,” reports Axios.
It’s a “Santa and Grinch presidency,” in which almost every day reveals a new promise to give something of financial value to a nation, group or individual — or take it away. But rarely do these transactions cement new laws.
“This reality reflects Trump's improvisational and dealmaking impulses. But it also means that a lot of what he does will be easily reversible,” reports Axios, which included a list of fleeting policy moves that will evaporate with his term.
After Democrats trampled Republicans in last Tuesday’s off-year elections, Trump called for tariff rebate checks and 50-year mortgages, neither of which were sealed into law.
Trump prizes his real estate savvy, but openly supported the idea of a 50-year mortgage — complete with the jaw-dropping interest rate payments that will accrue over the half-century life of the loans. Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director known for digging up dirt to fuel Trump’s indictments of people on his enemies list, called the loans “a complete game changer." But critics in the real estate industry and members of Trump’s own party, are slamming the proposal.
Trump’s tariff rebate checks are just as insubstantial because the Supreme Court might nullify the tariffs, in part because he didn't get them signed into law. And even if the courts do permit the White House to usurp the power of Congress to collect and redistribute taxes, nothing stops the next president from simply ending the rebate checks and the tariffs that fund them through a simple policy change.
“Anything not codified by law can be easily undone by the courts — or by Democrats when they win back the White House,” reports Axios.
Even Trump, himself, can end the policies “if the winds shift the right way,” said Axios, pointing out that Trump later decided to give auto companies a partial refund for the tariffs that he personally imposed on the industry.
Trump’s push for lower prescription prices for GLP-1 weight loss drugs is just as short-lived because he again failed to work with both Republicans and Democrats to pass a law and instead pressured pharmaceutical companies.
“Almost all of Trump's astonishing expansions of precedent-stretching presidential power flow not from law, or even congressional approval. It's just Trump doing what he wants ... to whoever he wants ... when he wants,” reports Axios.
Read the Axios report at this link.