Border Lines

There is no “day one” promise more synonymous with a Trump administration than securing America’s southern border and launching “the largest deportation program in American history.”

That policy will be defined in two sets of executive orders. The ones that will translate into the quickest action would restore requirements that lowered illegal crossings during Mr. Trump’s first term, like forcing migrants to “remain in Mexico” while their claims are being handled, setting higher standards for asylum, and reversing the Biden administration’s liberal treatment of migrants’ parole status.

Perhaps as important as the concrete outcomes the changes would have are their deterrent effect; many observers feel the message would-be migrants would be receiving will convince them not to attempt an illegal crossing. That has not been the case during the Biden administration.

“The fact that people expect to be caught and released into the country and then wait years for a court date has been a draw,” says Ira Mehlman, of Federation for American Immigration Reform. “You’ll see an end to that. The new administration will require you to ask for asylum from your home country, and a lot might just decide not to come.”

While “remain in Mexico” can be enacted into US policy through executive order, making it reality requires cooperation from Mexico. The first Trump administration achieved that, and has now added threats of tariffs as part of its strategy to goad Mexico into stemming the flow of migrants at the border. Mr. Mehlman says Mexico is likely to go along, simply because it has so much else to worry about.

“Mexico also has an interest here,” he says. “The growth of cartels threatens their government, and the pressure of people coming through their country is not something they want.”

The next, more complex step will be dealing with the illegal imigrants already here. Signing an executive order directing multiple federal agencies to deport them may be easy — but physically removing the 11 million people who are actually here, according to DHS estimates, will be a far more difficult task. Doing that will require more employees at DHS and ICE. Mr. Trump has indicated that an emergency measures might be employed to allow for state national guards and the Pentagon to lend a hand. Logistics, including finding space for staging grounds and holding facilities, will be a challenge.

“Millions of people didn’t show up yesterday, and they’re not all going home tomorrow, but you have to start somewhere,” says Mr. Mehlman. “You can send signals that you’re serious about enforcing the law. Then the ones who came here for rational reasons might decide to pick up and leave for rational reasons.”

Incoming border czar Thomas Homan has said the administration plans to start by removing the 1.4 million who are already under deportation orders from courts. Another priority is removing some 670,000 with criminal records.

An additional challenge with mass deportations is convincing the deportees’ countries of origin to accept them back. For that, the administration could employ additional tariff threats, as well as the possibility of withholding foreign aid, visas, and other leverage at its disposal.

Another “day one” action Mr. Trump has mentioned repeatedly is rescinding the longstanding American policy of granting citizenship to any child born in its borders. That would undoubtedly set off legal challenges. But Mr. Mehlman says the court fight is exactly the point.

“The purpose is to get this tested in the court,” he says. “There’s a whole industry of birth tourism, people flying here to have children born as American citizens. The argument is that the present application of the 14th Amendment doesn’t make sense in a world where distance and travel have been reduced.”

Opponents of Mr. Trump’s border policies have clamored that mass deportations and fewer illegal aliens will lead to labor shortages and increased prices. Mr. Mehlman says this concern is born of tunnel vision.

“If you offer poor wages and working conditions, then only illegal aliens show up and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that you need them,” he says. “The answer is to offer decent wages and conditions, and you’ll get American workers. It all balances out. You might save a nickel on a cup of coffee because the guy in the back washing dishes is an illegal alien, but it’s costing you 25 cents more in taxes to send his children to school.”

“Drill, Baby, Drill”

Unleashing American energy independence was a bedrock of Mr. Trump’s campaign.

As most of the Biden administration’s moves restricting fossil fuel production and use were instituted through executive orders and regulatory decisions, it is an area where the incoming president can take big steps with the stroke of a pen.

“Look at what Joe Biden did on his day one, and then reverse it to see what President Trump is planning,” says Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment.

The headline promise is to open up more domestic energy production — which primarily means fracking, a hydraulic process to extract natural gas from shale rock. Fracking accounts for two-thirds of the US gas market and 95% of new wells. Presently, most fracking occurs on private land, but Mr. Trump claims that making more licenses available on federal territory could have a deep impact on energy prices.

“There are millions of acres that are now not available for use,” says Mrs. Furchtgott-Roth. “One place to look is Alaska, where President Biden took 66 different actions to stop private companies from using the state’s resources. This is especially important when you look at coastal areas of Alaska near the Arctic, where Russia and China are drilling, too. It’s a matter of global competition.”

The changes the Trump administration is expected to make will also lift restrictions on gas exports and free up pipeline production.

The Biden administration’s barriers to energy production were part of a broader environmentalist goal to lower fossil fuel use and carbon emissions. Mrs. Furchtgott-Roth argues that increasing US exports of natural gas in fact reduces world emissions by helping Europe and third-world nations move away from coal. She cited data that over the past 16 years, US emissions decreased by one billon metric tons, largely as a result of substituting gas for coal as an energy source. Over the past two years, US coal exports to Europe rose by 22%, as US and Russian gas exports went down.

While prices at the pump will not plummet the moment Mr. Trump enters the White House, Mrs. Furchtgott-Roth predicts that the planned polices will likely return gasoline prices to the levels they were at during his first term.

War on Woke

The ravages of “woke” policies in education, from kindergarten through university, formed an effective backdrop to Mr. Trump’s campaign pledging a return to cultural normalcy.

Mr. Trump said that “on day one,” he intends to yank federal dollars from schools teaching CRT (critical race theory), employing DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in their hiring and operations, or promoting ideas seen by many as radical or anti-American.

“Part of the political narrative and Trump victory mandate is that campuses have gone out of control,” says Max Eden, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “That could easily translate into a day one anti-DEI order instructing the Department of Education to take very aggressive actions to go after universities for making campuses into hostile environments.”

Mr. Eden says that same order, or a separate one, would likely target similar problems in K-12 education. The ideologically driven DEI departments that inject ultra-progressive social thinking into schools at all levels could be challenged as violating the Civil Rights Act’s Title VI, which protects people from discrimination based on race, gender, or national origin. That same approach could be employed to hold schools accountable to conform with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, striking down affirmative action practices in admissions.

“The Harvard case showed that DEI is nothing if not racial stereotyping in speech and action,” says Mr. Eden.

Mr. Trump ran amid a steady news cycle of harsh expressions of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment on college campuses, largely driven by the militant anti-Western dogmas now under scrutiny.

Mr. Eden posited that a single executive order empowering the Department of Education to root out radicalism could help Jews and pro-Israel voices on campuses as well.

“DEI ideology, enabled by college leadership, created a situation where you get punished for ‘misgendering,’ but when it comes to Israel, as long as you’re not imminently calling for genocide, whatever you do is fine,” he says. “I think we all know that if there had been an analogous situation with African American students, universities would have reacted quite differently.”

A year of bad press for higher education followed by a decisive Trump victory have many thinking the jig is up for the woke regime at universities. Still, radical ideas and de facto control by left-leaning faculty have been part and parcel of American colleges for decades. The idea of rooting that out with an executive order sounds like a pipe dream. But Mr. Eden is optimistic that if the cudgel of federal funding is wielded effectively, the Trump administration could push universities back toward the center.

“It’s a question of how much political will the administration wants to put into it and what their approach is,” he says. “If the Trump administration wants to go at all levels against Columbia University, they could threaten it fiscally and existentially. At this point, that could be a political winner. Seeing it go down in flames could go a long way in changing entrenched campus culture.”

Drain the Swamp

Since Mr. Trump took center stage of America’s political scene, he has wanted to “drain the swamp” — the Washington political culture fed by the web of regulators, lobbyists, elected officials, and special interests. Aside from its perceived corruption, this culture has contributed greatly to the image of the federal government’s administrative bloat and ineffectiveness.

Now, as Mr. Trump prepares to return to the White House, he has appointed two high-profile tycoons, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to lead a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to bring this culture to heel.

The “day one” promise Mr. Trump made to set this process in motion is an executive order to reenact “Schedule F” —a job classification in the federal civil service that allows for easier removal by the president and his selected appointees. Estimates say it would affect some 50,000 of the federal government’s 2.2 million employees. Schedule F was put in place in the twilight of Mr. Trump’s first term and canceled by the Biden administration.

Stripping federal employees of their thick layer of job security sets the stage for what Mr. Musk and Ramaswamy say will be a two-year process of trimming Washington’s bureaucracy and bringing it more in line with the choices of American voters.

“The federal government fires for poor performance at only one-sixth of the rate as the private sector, and that gets even more extreme when you look at the very top,” says Chris Edwards, who holds a chair in fiscal studies at the Cato Institute and edits the Downsizing Government website. “It’s too much hassle to fire them, so they don’t.”

Messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy have outlined an ambitious plan to cut billions in spending. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (the conservative think tank’s policy wish list) claims that if the plan is done right, over $1 trillion can be saved over a five-year period. That goal might bump up against the limits of what cuts can be made without Congressional action.

Mr. Edwards says that while there are many good reasons to cut the federal workforce, its salaries make up a relatively small slice of the nation’s budget. Making deep changes will necessitate cutting whole agencies and funding programs.

Climate Control

Another set of orders likely to be waiting on Mr. Trump’s desk when he returns from the inauguration will annul some of the Biden administration’s mandates on auto manufactures to phase in higher production of electric cars. Mrs. Furchtgott-Roth says that the market has done a better job of moving consumers toward greener cars than government intervention, pointing to the sluggish sales of electric cars compared to non-plug-in hybrid options. These hybrid cars have not been included in mandates, but are increasingly popular with consumers for their high gas mileage and low costs.

Also awaiting the president’s signature will be an order removing America from the Paris Climate Agreement, which obligates nations to cut carbon emissions in line with United Nation’s framework. Mr. Trump did the same on his first day in office in 2017. Here, too, Mrs. Furchtgott-Roth argues that the agreement does little to reduce emissions but does much to put America at a disadvantage against competitors who themselves produce most of the world’s carbon emissions.

“Firstly, emissions in the United States were declining without the Paris Agreement,” she says. “Secondly, the Paris Agreement is not working, because other countries are getting around it. Even if America stopped all fossil fuel use right now, it would only make a difference of two-tenths of one degree centigrade by the year 2100. Why? Because Russia, China, Asia, and Africa are all burning more coal and producing far more carbon emissions than the US. The agreement does little for the environment and a lot to handicap America.”

Tariff Time

Mr. Trump touted tariffs, “the most beautiful word,” as a tool for reviving domestic production, supplementing revenue, and leveraging American economic power to achieve diplomatic goals.

A few weeks into the transition, the president-elect announced via his social media platform his intention to slap Mexico and Canada with 25% tariffs and China with an additional 10% duty on its already tariffed imports. With the statement came a qualification that tariffs “will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!”

Given tariffs’ centrality to so many angles of the Trump agenda, many have been left to parse whether to interpret his posts as a declaration of policy plans or simply as a warning shot.

David Brog, a cofounder of the national conservatism movement’s Edmund Burke Foundation, says that both tracks are at play in Mr. Trump’s plans, and threats to Mexico and Canada are largely a “negotiating tool.”

“The hope is to get increased cooperation on illegal immigration and drug smuggling,” he says. “It’s a statement to say that this is a new day, and we expect our neighbors to take our demands seriously.”

The threats against Canada and Mexico have set off alarms among some economists. Some have focused on the effects on supply chains, noting that most parts for American-made cars now come from south of the border. Others have warned of the strain these new duties would put on business costs and consumer prices.

In addition to these familiar frets about protectionist policies, many have pointed out that imposing tariffs would violate the USMCA, the renegotiated version of the NAFTA agreement with Mexico and Canada, an achievement on which Mr. Trump prided himself during his first White House stint.

On these issues, Mr. Brog posits that Mr. Trump hopes the threats are enough to convince Mexico and Canada to be more forthcoming, and if that is so, the actual tariffs “will not come to pass.”

Mr. Trump’s plan to impose tariffs by executive fiat have left many asking about the president’s Constitutional authority to do so without Congress. While the Constitution indeed assigns tariff powers to Congress, a set of laws enacted over the past century gave presidents broad authority to impose them on their own.

Tariffs on China are in column two of the Trump trade agenda. While they are intended to pressure China into concessions, that process could take years, and the policy’s success is far from certain.

Raising barriers to trade with China drew scorn from free market fundamentalists. Mr. Brog says that pushing back against Beijing’s practices is needed to achieve the fair market these critics claim to defend.

“China notoriously subsidizes industries, steals technology, and intervenes to give its companies the ability to engage in practices not sustained by free and fair markets,” he says. “These unfair practices are best addressed through negotiation, but to get results, you need a stick, not just a carrot.”

Deep Change

The other goal of Schedule F is to tame the “deep state.” Since coming to office in 2016, the Trump team has warned that right-leaning presidential agendas have been blocked and sabotaged by left-wing federal employees. Mr. Edwards quotes a survey showing that 80% to 90% of federal employees are left leaning and says that their ability to trip up political agendas they disagree with is very real.

“The classic example is leaking damaging information to the media,” he says. “The bureaucracy can do a lot of things to resist changes.”

Critics warn that irrespective of the political leanings of many in the federal government, the expertise of some leading bureaucrats could be difficult to replace, and filling slots based on political loyalty is risky.

“It’s a serious problem,” says Mr. Edwards. “There are already a lot of problematic examples of political appointees who don’t know what they’re doing and don’t act in the public interest…. You want to remove the ones not doing their jobs or resisting filling their legal obligations, but you need people with experience.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1045)