Newly elected US president Donald Trump’s wild flurry of executive orders has sparked chaos and confusion in America and around the world.
Earlier this week, I started to rate some of Trump’s avalanche of executive orders; decree being his preferred way of implementing his radical right-wing agenda.
With only two columns a week, it’s hard to keep up, but let’s have a look at another batch of executive orders, and how they might affect the US, South Africa, and the world. As before, I’ll give them an A to F rating, mostly based on how well I think they align with classical liberal principles.
Drill, baby, drill
Let’s begin with a series of orders aimed at opening up government-controlled land for oil and gas exploration and production.
He began by declaring a “national energy emergency”, put the kibosh on offshore wind development, and opened up Alaska’s abundant oil and gas resources to exploitation.
I don’t agree that the US does face an actual emergency, but declaring one permits government agencies to cut through the deep thicket of environmental and other regulation that holds back the rapid development of energy resources.
I have long been a strong supporter of maximising the use of oil and gas, both in South Africa and around the world. I have also long supported developing abundant domestic energy resources, again both in South Africa and around the world.
In the US in particular, energy independence is not only economically beneficial, but has important geostrategic implications. Reducing reliance on imported oil (and gas, but gas is a different animal that doesn’t transport as well) by developing a robust domestic supply gives the US a lot more flexibility in its dealings with non-democratic, socialist, and often hostile foreign countries.
Trump likes to claim that he brought the US energy independence during his first term, but that there is now a crisis. This is not true.
US energy independence – defined as exporting more than importing – was achieved in 2019, but that was on the back of a boom in shale gas and shale oil drilling that began in 2005 under former president George W. Bush, and reached its climax during the Barack Obama administration. Trump was the beneficiary of his predecessor’s energy policies.
It is also not true that energy independence has since been sacrificed by the policies of Joe Biden’s administration. In fact, energy independence soared to record levels during the previous four years.
That said, I believe all sources of energy ought to compete on a level playing field, and those countries will do best – including in environmental performance – that prioritise maximising energy abundance and minimising energy prices in order to fuel economic growth and prosperity.
I didn’t like much of Trump’s inauguration speech, but I’ll give “drill, baby, drill” an A+ any day of the week.
Global tax deal
Next up is a memorandum, rather than an executive order, nullifying any previous agreements related to the Global Tax Deal promoted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
I believe that governments ought to do everything they can to minimise the tax burden on their citizens. The idea of global tax harmonisation runs counter to this ideal, by putting in place a tax floor that all participating countries are supposed to meet or exceed.
The intention is to make countries that levy high tax rates less uncompetitive, by comparison with those that try to minimise their tax rates. High-tax countries feel it is unfair that companies, and even individuals, are able to shift their tax domicile to low-tax jurisdictions, thereby avoiding their own high tax rates.
This is ridiculous. What is unfair is the excessive tax levied by fat, inefficient and bureaucratic governments. It is perfectly legitimate for people and companies to flee such governments, and subject themselves to less rapacious governments instead.
I would love to see a world where governments competed with one another for citizens and business, based on the quality of their service delivery and the modesty of their tax regimes.
As such, I welcome America’s withdrawal from any and all attempts at global tax harmonisation. Another A+ for Mr. Trump.
Foreign aid
While I sympathise with Trump’s desire to quit spending billions on other countries, his executive order to halt all foreign aid disbursements while officials evaluate whether aid programmes align with Trump’s idea of “American values” is reckless and cruel.
This decision has been all over South Africa’s airwaves, of course, since it is a recipient of US foreign aid, particularly in regard to the United States President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), initiated by George W. Bush and his wife Laura in 2003.
I’d look up the numbers, but PEPFAR’s systems have been taken offline.
According to Richard Hanania, president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, PEPFAR has spent $110 billion over 21 years, and saved 26 million lives in that time. To put that in perspective, the US defence budget is $820 billion per year.
Summarily suspending all foreign aid programmes has real-world implications. As in, people will die. Of course the US has the right to review its foreign aid spending, but simply cutting it off is cruel and reckless.
A lot of America’s foreign aid spending – though not all of it – is strongly in the national interest of the United States, such as supporting non-governmental organisations that uphold democracy and hold governments to account, and supporting healthcare and economic development initiatives in countries that reduce the incentive to emigrate.
Trump is right to point out that some foreign aid spending goes against American interests, and destabilises countries instead of stabilising them, but eliminating those programmes requires targeted surgery, not wholesale butchery.
A court has intervened, interdicting the implementation of this executive order until it can hear further arguments on Monday. Let’s hope sanity prevails. This order scores an E for rEckless.
America First, again
Trump issued a very short executive order instructing the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio (who incidentally is a US citizen only by birthright, having been born in America to non-citizen Cuban immigrants), that “the foreign policy of the United States shall champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first”.
This is a curious public position to take for someone who fancies himself a great negotiator. By his own admission, Trump does not read, so he probably hasn’t read the Scottish political economist Adam Smith.
However, Smith wrote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.”
Yet here is Trump, negotiating with the rest of the world by addressing himself not to the interests of others, but to America’s own interests, thus relying upon their benevolence in acquiescing to whatever the Secretary of State may ask of them.
This sort of hard-ball tactic can work, but often it doesn’t. The Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation says hard-bargaining tactics “typically betray a lack of understanding about the gains that can be achieved in most … negotiations,” and “convey that [the negotiator views] negotiation as a win-lose enterprise”.
Trump’s inexplicable approach to trade as some kind of war demonstrates that he falls into this category.
“Individuals who focus solely on themselves and their own situation during preparations neglect (often unintentionally) an important part of the negotiation equation – the other party. Since the other party must eventually agree to any deal, negotiators who fail to take the other party and its perspective into account make a common mistake that negatively impacts the quality of preparation,” says an article in the Ivey Business Journal. “Indeed, negotiators who prepare by assessing both their own situation and their counterpart’s are more thoroughly prepared for their negotiations than those individuals who focus only on themselves.”
Trump’s fans might appreciate his big-man bombast and hard-ball negotiating, but, ultimately, America stands to lose friends and allies if it approaches foreign policy and foreign trade as a deal in which America must win and, by implication, their negotiating partner must lose.
I give this executive order a D for “daft”.
DOGE
The next order establishes the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It will be headed by Elon Musk alone, since Vivek Ramaswamy, the presidential contender who has announced a run to become Ohio’s governor, has withdrawn his nomination.
In principle, this is a great idea. In principle, I could give this an A.
In practice, it may be less so. Musk and Trump aren’t the first to come up with an idea to create a department aimed at improving government efficiency. Even Cyril Ramaphosa has a red tape czar in his office. (Does anyone remember his name? Has he cut any red tape?)
Bureaucracies aimed at streamlining government usually serve only to put a few more people on the government payroll, tangle lines of reporting, create operational uncertainty, and ultimately make government even less efficient.
The worst aspect of DOGE, however, is that Trump is appointing a billionaire with extensive business interests to head it. Musk has enormous vested interests in how his various companies are regulated, by the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Authority, the National Transportation Safety Board, and who knows how many other agencies that try to stop reckless billionaires from blowing everything up for the lulz.
If it was headed by an éminence grise who had divested themselves of direct commercial interest in the government departments and agencies they are tasked with overseeing, I could give this idea a solid B+. As it stands, however, it gets a C, for “crony capitalism”.
Biology
Trump has also issued an executive order that not only “protects women” from the grave danger of trans women invading female-only spaces, which isn’t an unreasonable objective, but also claims to lay down the law on biology.
“It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” reads the order. “These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
This is not incontrovertible reality. Sex is changeable, and sex is not exclusively binary.
There are numerous differences in physical and mental development that make the line between male and female very hazy.
There are chromosomal identities other than XY and XX. There are hormonal conditions that interfere with ordinary sexual development. Some of these result in people with the outward appearance of one sex, but the internal organs of the other, or a mix of both. The brain structure of some trans individuals differs from both their “biological” (or assigned-at-birth) sex and also from their self-perceived gender.
Caster Semenya is a famous local example: she appeared outwardly female at birth, and grew up “officially female”, but has internal testes, male-level testosterone, and XY chromosomes. What would those MAGA idiots who glibly say that even a child knows what a woman is make of Semenya?
Claiming that intersex or transsexual individuals are not biologically real is not “incontrovertible reality”. On the contrary, claiming that they can be classified as biologically distinct male or female categories denies biological reality.
I can understand the impulse to protect women’s spaces and women’s sports. Perhaps people who are not clearly biological women ought to be accommodated in “open” sports categories and use segregated or “unisex” facilities.
I’m not claiming to have a solution, but I am convinced that a civilised society can resolve these issues without turning on each other.
It costs nothing to be compassionate towards people who struggle with gender identity issues, be they biological or psychological, and to treat them with basic human dignity. They deserve the right to life, liberty and happiness just as much as anyone else.
Unlike Trump and his MAGA fanbase, I don’t hate people with differences in sexual development, whether that difference is physical or mental. I believe accommodations can be made for their situation without discriminating against them, insulting them, or rudely denying their lived identity.
Besides, how do you even police this without grossly invading personal privacy? Are mall cops and HR departments going to give masculine-looking women who use women’s toilets (or effeminate men who use men’s toilets) a genital inspection? Are government bureaucrats who issue official documents going to conduct physical exams, hormone level tests and genetic profiling?
And even then, where exactly do you draw the line between male and female? Biological reality isn’t so simple.
Trump’s executive order directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to provide “clear guidance expanding on the sex-based definitions set forth in this order”.
This is an impossible task, and for that, this order gets an F. What people have in their pants is none of the government’s business.
Ending DEI
As he promised, Trump is killing off diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, and reinstituting merit-based recruitment.
It is reasonable to be in two minds about this.
On one hand, being inclusive and welcoming to people, regardless of their sex, gender, gender identity, sexual preferences, race, ethnic origin, nationality, height, left-handedness, or hair colour, seems like a nice thing to do.
One can’t help but sense a degree of validation of racist animus in these orders. Prohibiting preferential hiring can easily lead to exclusion and discrimination against minorities.
On the other, it stands to reason that hiring ought to be based primarily on merit. Hiring less qualified or less experienced people merely to make up racial or gender quotas reduces productivity and efficiency, can reduce workplace harmony, and even reinforces the so-called “soft bigotry of low expectations”. It is insulting to minorities or women to be considered DEI hires, especially when they’re not.
There isn’t a great solution to this problem, but then, the world is not a perfect place. In principle, discrimination on grounds of anything other than merit and the ability to perform a job is undesirable. If everyone is to be treated as an individual, regardless of their race, sex or religion, then one cannot also support affirmative action. That’s having your cake and eating it.
I’d give this an A, but I distrust the motives of Trump’s white nationalist supporters, which pulls it down to a B. But that’s not all.
Although the title of the second of these orders refers merely to “merit”, the body of the order adds some other requirements for employment by American government departments and agencies: candidates must be “dedicated to the furtherance of American ideals, values, and interests” and commit to “faithfully serve the Executive Branch”.
This is an unconscionable loyalty test. The personal ideals, values and interests of public servants are none of the government’s business, and “American ideals, values, and interests” are neither defined, nor appropriate to impose upon individual members of the public. Public officials ought to serve the citizenry, and not their president. Only in authoritarian states is loyalty to the ruling executive valued higher than loyalty to the public interest.
So, we have to subtract some more marks, making this a C overall.
Narcissism R Us
Wrapping up the executive orders of the first day of Trump’s presidency, we have “Restoring names that honor American greatness”.
This is pure pettiness and belligerence. The Gulf of Mexico is to be renamed the Gulf of America, and the name of Denali, the highest mountain peak in North America, is to revert to Mount McKinley.
The first is designed as one-upmanship against Mexico, and the second is designed to marginalise the native Koyukon people.
The mountain peak was called Denali for centuries, until a gold prospector turned up and named it after a politician and presidential candidate, William McKinley in 1896. Twenty-one years later, the US officially recognised the name, until 2015, when its name was changed back to what the locals have always called it.
The Gulf of Mexico had many names, but first appeared on a world map in 1550, long before the United States was even a twinkle in some Italian or Spanish explorer’s eye. It was then, and for centuries since, a Spanish sea. Until 1836, when Texas broke away from Mexico, the latter country actually surrounded at least half of it.
This order is just posturing. It has the same energy as those huge TRUMP logos emblazoned all over Donald Trump’s property developments. In an individual, it would be pure narcissism. In a country, it is crude jingoism.
It gets a C. After all, Americans still measure stuff in ancient British Imperial measures, as if they were still ruled by British kings and queens, and then they call them “freedom units”. Nobody could care less what America puts on its maps.
[Image: Denali, also known as Mount McKinley, as seen from Reflection Pond, also known as Wonder Lake, looking south-south-west, also known as that-a-way. Photo taken on 29 June 2010 by Sandy Brown Jensen. Used under a CC-BY 2.0 licence]
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