As Mayer wrote in a paper in 1999, “An executive order is a presidential directive that requires or authorizes some action within the executive branch.” He goes on to say these orders can reorganize government agencies, affect how legislation is implemented, establish policy and alter regulatory processes.
Ultimately, it was Roosevelt’s strategy that won out, and his legacy has continued to shape how presidents exert power over the nation.īefore jumping into Roosevelt’s fondness for executive orders, a quick reminder of what they are. “His view was ‘Unless I can’t, I will,’ while Taft’s was ‘Unless I can, I can’t.’” “ was the first president who asserted a broad scope of inherent presidential authority,” says Kenneth Mayer, professor of political science at the University of Madison-Wisconsin and the author of With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power. During his time in office, he quadrupled the amount of protected land (from 42 million acres to 172 million), created 150 new national forests, 18 national monuments, five national parks and 51 wildlife refuges-often with the assistance of executive orders. Roosevelt’s special focus was conservation. While many of the orders were clerical or relatively insignificant-such as exempting a civil service employee from mandatory age-based retirement-others had a profound impact on the country. Over the course of his eight years in office, Roosevelt issued more than 1,000 executive orders, nearly 10 times as many as his predecessor, William McKinley. “There was a great clamor that I was usurping legislative power… I did not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power,” Roosevelt wrote. If any Americans had doubts as to whether the former president regretted decisions made in office, Roosevelt was quick to set the record straight in his autobiography, published in 1913: it had been his duty to use as much power as was available to him to do whatever the nation demanded, unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution. In the twilight of his political career, Theodore Roosevelt took his legacy into his own hands.
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