Executive Action Tracker
Executive orders and signed legislation, by volume and subject.
By Dallas AI Metrics, LLC · Analysis as of 2026-08-04 · Computed from 440 roll calls across 526 members · Methodology
Not all federal policy runs through Congress. A significant share is made in the executive branch, through orders and directives that require no legislative vote — and the balance between the two routes has shifted repeatedly across administrations of both parties.
This page tracks the executive side: orders issued, and legislation signed into law.
Two different instruments
An executive order directs the operations of the federal government. It carries legal force within the executive branch and can be issued, amended, or revoked by a president acting alone. It cannot create new statutory authority, appropriate money, or override existing law — though the boundary between directing how a law is implemented and effectively rewriting it is contested, and is frequently litigated.
Signed legislation is the other route. A bill that passes both chambers and is signed becomes statute, with durability an order does not have: repealing it requires another act of Congress.
The practical distinction is reversibility. An order can be undone by the next administration with a stroke; a statute usually cannot. Counting both together would obscure that, so they are reported separately here.
| Year | Executive orders |
|---|---|
| 2026 | 173 |
| 2025 | 2 |
Reading the volume
Counts of executive orders are among the most frequently misused statistics in political commentary. A few cautions.
Orders are not equivalent in scope. One may restructure a major programme; another may adjust an advisory committee's membership or continue a routine designation. Counting them equally treats those as the same act, which they plainly are not.
Volume is not a measure of unilateralism. A president who issues many narrow, procedural orders will out-count one who issues a handful of sweeping ones. Comparisons of raw totals across administrations are a poor guide to how aggressively executive authority was used.
Timing is uneven by design. Order volume clusters at the start of an administration, when a new government is reversing predecessor policy and establishing its own, and around specific events. Year-over-year changes often reflect the calendar of an administration rather than a change in approach.
Substitution
The more interesting question is the relationship between the two instruments. Executive action tends to expand when legislative routes are blocked — when a president faces a Congress controlled by the other party, or a narrowly divided one that cannot move contested bills.
Read alongside the bill survival data, the pattern becomes visible: periods of low legislative throughput are frequently periods of elevated executive activity. Policy does not stop being made when Congress stalls; it shifts to the instrument that requires fewer signatures — and, correspondingly, to one that the next administration can more easily undo.
| Date | Order |
|---|---|
| 2026-08-03 | Visas: Visa Bond Program |
| 2026-08-03 | Rescinding Portions of Department of the Treasury Title VI Regulations To Conform More Closely With the Statutory Text and To Implement an Executive Order |
| 2026-08-03 | Medicare Program; FY 2027 Hospice Wage Index and Payment Rate Update and Hospice Quality Reporting Program Requirements |
| 2026-08-03 | Reducing Bureaucracy and Burden in Family Violence and Prevention Services |
| 2026-08-03 | Medicare Program; Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility Prospective Payment System for Federal Fiscal Year 2027 and Updates to the IRF Quality Reporting Program |
| 2026-08-03 | Amendment of Very High Frequency Omnidirectional Range Federal Airways V-108 in the Vicinity of Concord, California |
| 2026-08-03 | Establishment of United States Area Navigation Route T-581 in the Vicinity of Missoula, Montana |
| 2026-07-31 | Clingstone Peach Diversion Program; Amendment of Program Regulations |
| 2026-07-31 | Medicare Program; FY 2027 Inpatient Psychiatric Facilities Prospective Payment System-Rate Update |
| 2026-07-31 | Reducing Bureaucracy and Burden for Family Assistance Programs |
| 2026-07-31 | Medicare Program; Prospective Payment System and Consolidated Billing for Skilled Nursing Facilities; Updates to the Quality Reporting Program for Federal Fiscal Year 2027 |
| 2026-07-31 | Amendment of United States Area Navigation Routes (RNAV) T-285 and T-286 in the Vicinity of Thedford, NE |
| 2026-07-31 | Amendment of United States Area Navigation Route T-388 in the Vicinity of Kodiak, Alaska |
| 2026-07-31 | Requirements for Interference-Tolerant Radio Altimeter Systems |
| 2026-07-31 | Pipeline Safety: Standards Update-ASTM A53/A53M |
Coverage
This tracker covers the period in the current dataset, not the full history of the presidency. It is a window, not an archive, and comparisons to historical administrations cannot be made from it.
Orders are recorded from official sources as published. Proclamations, memoranda, and national security directives are separate instruments that are not consistently captured here, so the totals should be read as executive orders specifically rather than as all unilateral executive action — the true figure for the latter is higher.
Sources and rules are documented in the methodology.