Gregory Korte

USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — As the nation's attention has shifted to the campaign to elect the next president of the United States, the man who is already president isn't done yet.

With 100 days to go in his presidency, President Obama still has the power to usher in long-lasting policy changes through regulation, executive orders, and the pardon power.

Presidents actually have a lot of things that they can do," said Kenneth Mayer, who studies executive orders at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "What was once considered to be a low point of presidential activity actually has high levels of presidential activity."

How outgoing presidents use that authority can depend in large part on who is elected to succeed them. But whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is elected Nov. 8, Obama has been attempting to solidify changes in policy before his successor takes over.

In some areas, Obama's late-term executive actions are simply the "culmination of years of work," White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said earlier this year.

But in other areas, the White House has a clear strategy of making his policies as difficult as possible to undo.

"When it comes to our Cuba policy, for example, we've made no bones about the fact that we are seeking to lock in that change in approach toward Cuba," Earnest said.

Obama has had more vetoes than signing ceremonies this year, and outgoing presidents are often at a low point of their influence over Congress.

But the White House is still pushing to get congressional approval on a number of priorities — especially on issues where Republicans may be even more leery of a Clinton presidency. Those include the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which Clinton helped negotiate but now opposes, and the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland, who may prove to be more moderate than a first-year Clinton nominee.

Congress also punted on the 2017 spending bill, passing a stopgap measure last month while they negotiate a new spending bill by Dec. 8. The White House is pushing for Congress to fund a number of its priorities, including a fix of the lead-contaminated water system in Flint, Mich., and Vice President Biden's cancer "moonshot."

Executive orders

If the first 100 days of a presidency is all about the legislative agenda, the last 100 are usually about executive action.

In the last few months, Obama has signed a number of executive orders that will make permanent — at least, unless rescinded by a future executive order — policies that were already in effect during his presidency. He formalized the Atrocities Review Board that had already been operating since the early days of his administration, ordered more transparency on drone strikes, and created a structure to continue his work on global entrepreneurship after he leaves office.

"If there is an opportunity for us to routinize that approach to dealing with these complicated issues, the president believes the country would benefit from that," Earnest said on the drone strike policy. "After all, because that routinized approach didn’t exist when President Obama took office, it required a lot of work to figure out how to most effectively deal with this policy challenge and be transparent about it."

Obama's executive orders you never hear about

A new president could rescind any one of those executive orders — but likely at a political cost.

"In a strict formal legalistic sense it is true: The next president can step in and amend or overturn something this president did unilaterally," said William Howell, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who has studied the last 100 days of presidents' terms. "But there also can be a change on the politics that surround a particular policy."

Once enacted, transparency measures are difficult to rescind without creating attention, for example.

Obama is also under pressure from liberal-leaning groups to take executive action on any number of issues, including an order requiring federal contractors to disclose their political spending, and allowing taxpayer funding of abortion in violation of the long-standing Hyde Amendment.

And then there's Guantanamo Bay, an issue that has dogged Obama throughout his presidency. Congress has continuously blocked Obama's efforts to close the military prison for terrorist suspects in Cuba, so the president has pursued a strategy of transferring prisoners in an attempt to get the population to near zero before he leaves office.

Obama can't close Guantanamo Bay outright. But could he simply empty it out?

'Midnight' regulations

Regulations usually spike in election years, although Obama himself is the exception to the rule. In 2012, the White House slowed down its review of regulations until after the election.

But this year, the Obama White House has approved 112 significant regulations through September, according to the American Action Forum, a conservative advocacy group. In 2008, the Bush White House had approved 89 through the same time frame.

But the average length of time the White House has taken to review those regulations was a longer-than-normal 68 days, suggesting that the White House could be waiting until after the election to approve new regulations.

There are 31 significant regulations awaiting approval from the White House, with most coming from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the pipeline are rules that would decrease the allowable emissions for heavy duty trucks and increasing the amount of fuel coming from renewable sources. Both are aimed at helping the United States meet its commitments under the Paris climate accord — a non-binding agreement that relies largely on executive action to implement. Clinton has promised to keep that commitment; Trump has said he would cancel it.

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"Obviously, an administration has authority to publish anything it wants, and if a regulation gets published in the midnight period, there's nothing inherently wrong with that," said Sam Batkins, the AAF's director of regulatory policy.

"What is concerning is when you see a surge in regulations, especially when you have a new administration coming in of a different political party," he said. "There's a concern that the rules aren't being vetted."

Incoming presidents of both parties have dealt with that surge by ordering a moratorium on enforcing new regulations for the first 60 days. Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, went even further, sending a memo ordering agencies to withdraw any regulations that hadn't gone into effect by being published in the Federal Register.

But unlike executive orders, regulations are even more difficult to reverse — requiring the agency to do just as much work to deregulate as it took to regulate in the first place, leading to a sort of regulatory inertia.

One textbook example: In December 2000, the Clinton administration enacted a new regulation reducing the levels of arsenic allowable in water supplies by one-fifth. President George W. Bush tried to reverse that regulation, but Clinton had already redefined the status quo: Bush was perceived as trying to increase the level of arsenic by five times. After an outcry, the Bush administration relented to the Clinton standard.

Pardons and commutations

The ability to "grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States" is one of the most absolute constitutional powers a president has. But Obama largely neglected it for the first six years of his presidency, waiting almost two years to issue just nine pardons.

But Obama has sought to "reinvigorate" that power in his last year — granting record-setting numbers of commutations in order to shorten the sentences of drug offenders. The clemency initiative was an effort to jump-start criminal justice reform efforts in Congress by highlighting the long drug sentences enacted during the 1980s and 1990s.

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Obama has also said he hopes to grant a number of pardons comparable to his successors — but pledged that he would not let "political considerations" play a role in any last-minute pardons he might grant.

"The process that I put in place is not going to vary depending on how close I get to the election," he said in August, with the Justice Department vetting clemency applications before they come to the White House.

Obama promises more pardons, but can he do it?