The First Pen: Ten Executive Actions That Would Restore Conservative Governance on Day One

The modern presidency has become an engine of administrative governance, and conservatives have spent too long pretending otherwise. The reality is blunt: when an outgoing administration has spent four years governing by memorandum, press release, and agency fiat, the incoming one has not merely a right but an obligation to act with equal speed. The pen is not a substitute for legislation — but it is a legitimate instrument of Article II authority, and it should not be left in the drawer while the administrative state consolidates its gains.

Here are ten executive orders a conservative president should sign before the inaugural balls begin.

1. Rescind the Regulatory Flood

The first order should direct every federal agency to rescind, for review and probable revocation, all major regulations issued in the prior administration that impose costs exceeding $100 million without clear statutory authorization. The legal rationale is straightforward: agencies possess only the authority Congress delegated, and the Supreme Court's retreat from Chevron deference in Loper Bright has restored the judiciary's role as the interpretive final word. Grassroots conservatives have watched unelected bureaucrats write rules that Congress would never pass. This order makes that grievance policy.

2. Unleash American Energy

A sweeping energy order should approve pending liquefied natural gas export permits, reopen oil and gas leasing on federal lands, and rescind restrictions on the Keystone corridor. Energy independence is not merely an economic policy — it is a national security imperative. Every barrel we do not produce here is leverage handed to adversaries abroad. The political appeal crosses party lines in energy-producing states from Texas to North Dakota, and working families feel it at the pump.

3. End the Weaponization of Federal Agencies

An order establishing a shield for political neutrality within the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the IRS would prohibit the investigation of citizens for their political or religious expression absent articulable criminal predicates. The IRS targeting scandals of the past decade taught conservatives that the administrative state can be turned against ordinary Americans. This order says: never again.

4. Restore the Schedule F Civil Service Reforms

Reinstating reforms that allow the removal of policy-influencing federal employees in positions of confidence is essential. The permanent bureaucracy — roughly two million career personnel who do not answer to any voter — has become a shadow government. This is the single most consequential structural reform available to a president acting alone.

5. Secure the Border by Proclamation

An order directing the Department of Homeland Security to resume border wall construction, end catch-and-release, and reinstate the Migrant Protection Protocols rests on firm statutory ground under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Communities from Yuma to Chicago have borne the consequences of open borders. This is the order grassroots conservatives will frame and hang on the wall.

6. Protect Women's Sports and Intimate Spaces

A Title IX enforcement order clarifying that sex means biological sex in federally funded athletics and facilities honors the statute as Congress wrote it. This is not culture war for its own sake; it is fidelity to the text of the law and to the safety and dignity of American women and girls.

7. Reinstate the Mexico City Policy and Defund the Global Abortion Lobby

Restoring pro-life protections on foreign aid is a decades-old reform with an unambiguous legal basis: no president is obligated to spend taxpayer dollars promoting abortion overseas. Social conservatives deserve this on day one, not as a deferred promise.

8. End Federal Vaccine and Mask Mandates in Schools

An order conditioning federal education funds on the prohibition of coercive pandemic-related mandates honors both parental rights and the constitutional principle that public health authority resides with the states. The school closures of 2020-2021 remain a scar on the administrative conscience.

9. Revive the Public Charge Rule and Immigration Self-Sufficiency Standards

Reinstating the public charge rule restores a century-old principle: immigrants should be admitted based on self-sufficiency, not on the promise of taxpayer benefits. This is the historical norm, not the exception.

10. Establish a Sunset Commission for the Administrative State

Finally, an order requiring every agency to justify its continued existence and every regulation to expire after ten years absent reauthorization would begin the long work of unwinding a century of bureaucratic accretion. This is the order the others make possible.

The Deeper Point

Critics will call this government by pen — and they said the same of the last three presidents, two of whom were not conservative. The difference is that each of these orders restores limits rather than expands power. That is the conservative test: not whether the executive can act, but whether the action narrows the state's claim on American life. On day one, the answer should be yes, ten times over.