President Donald Trump has signed over 30 executive orders since his Jan. 20 inauguration, affecting federal policy in a wide range of sectors including diversity, equity and inclusion, energy, the environment, immigration and public health, according to The New York Times. Dartmouth students and professors expressed mixed reactions to Trump’s orders and their implications for the United States.
Some of Trump’s earliest actions, particularly on climate policy, have been met with skepticism on campus. On Inauguration Day, Trump signed an executive order declaring a national energy emergency, citing “inadequate energy supply and infrastructure” along with “high energy prices.” However, according to geography professor Justin Mankin, the “actual” emergency has more to do with expanding the use of green energy, rather than it being a crisis “of insufficient fossil fuels.”
“The actual energy emergency, if … you were looking to actually help Americans in their day-to-day lives, would be around the provision of cheap electricity … and the clearest way to do that is not through fossilized carbon anymore,” Mankin said. “The future is renewable energy, which is increasingly cheaper and far more reliable.”
On immigration, Trump declared an emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border on Jan. 20 through an executive order titled “Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States.” The declaration will “allow Trump to unlock federal funding for border wall construction,” according to The New York Times.
Further, Trump revoked executive actions issued under the previous administration of former President Joe Biden — including one that facilitated immigration from Central American countries — through a separate Jan. 20 order. Pointing to the novelty of the new administration’s approach, Latin American, Latino & Caribbean Studies professor Matthew Garcia said Trump’s actions marked a “major break” from “the normal procedures of the United States.”
“[Trump’s immigration executive actions] create more uncertainty and precarity for immigrants that are here already under the kind of conditions that prior administrations had,” Garcia said.
Alejandro Menendez ’27 said that Trump’s national emergency declaration sent “a strong message.” He added that the declaration shows that the president is “serious about the job [he is] doing.”
“I’m hopeful that most of those people with serious criminal charges are deported, and that the Trump administration does implement some more border security,” Menendez said.
Trump also signed a Jan. 20 executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which states that birthright citizenship should not extend to children born to parents residing unlawfully or temporarily in the United States and orders agencies “not to issue documents recognizing United States citizenship” to those persons. In response, 22 states filed to block the order — citing the 14th Amendment — with a judge temporarily blocking Trump’s decision on Jan. 23, according to The New York Times.
Assistant professor of sociology Sunmin Kim said the order “throws 120 years of undoubted, undebated legal precedent into question” but believes that it is “ultimately, a power move.”
“I think this is just a smoke screen to … divert attention away from more sinister attempts to … deport people and then make it harder for the newcomers to settle in the United States,” Kim said.
According to the White House website, Trump signed another Jan. 20 executive order titled “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements,” which withdrew the United States from the United Nations’s Paris Agreement — a 2015 international treaty aimed at reducing global warming, according to the U.N.’s website. Xander Dalke ’27, a steering committee member for Fossil Free Dartmouth — a campus organization “urging Dartmouth College to take a stance against fossil fuels,” according to their website — said he sees this order as a “downturn in global climate cooperation.”
“I think that it marks a turnaround for the U.S., and that’s going to lead to other nations being less willing to take climate action,” Dalke said. “If the U.S. isn’t pulling their weight with this, why should other [countries] sacrifice their own GDP or their own economic output?”
The Trump administration also began the process of exiting the United Nations’s World Health Organization. Former U.S. ambassador Erica Barks Ruggles, currently the Magro Family Distinguished Fellow in International Affairs at the Dickey Center for International Understanding, explained that WHO “sets up a system for international disease surveillance and for pandemic surveillance.”
“It helps us prevent an outbreak here, but it also gives us access … to pathogens, so that we can help develop vaccines faster and easier, ” Barks Ruggles said. “If we’re not part of WHO, we don’t have access to that whole system of disease surveillance.”
On Inauguration Day, Trump also rescinded multiple Biden-era health-related executive actions — including “Strengthening Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act,” which began a review of agency practices that may “undermine protections” for people with pre-existing conditions. Dawn Carey, the senior associate director of global health and development at the Dickey Center, said these actions will have a “long rollout,” as there will likely be “state-level and business-level constituents who are going to fight against this.”
“The [Affordable Care Act] itself is meant to be highly accessible,” Carey said. “Some of the things that [Trump is] suggesting will make it less accessible to many of the sicker, disenfranchised people in the United States.”
In addition to actions on healthcare, Trump signed an executive order ordering the elimination of federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which the order described as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.” Dartmouth Democrats member Andrea Mercado-Cruz ’28 said she believes DEI “simply created spaces for people of color to succeed.”
“DEI … is not an initiative that gives unqualified people positions in companies,” Mercado-Cruz said. “It simply provided them the avenue to … be considered for these jobs.”
Menendez noted that “there’s been a big backlash in the United States against DEI policies.”
“I think people want to return to that purely meritocratic outlook on things,” Menendez said. “If you apply for a federal job, what counts should be your credentials, your accomplishments and not your ethnic background.”
Trump’s executive orders range from having immediate implementation up to having over year-long roll-outs. Carey noted that “the next four years” will be “colored by how Congress reacts” to the president’s executive actions.
“We still have rule of law in the country,” Carey said. “My hope is that the democratic elements of the United States will rise up to ameliorate some of the more challenging parts of this administration.”
