Prepare for an imperial presidency.

Donald Trump has pledged to “reform the entire regulatory code,” to “cancel immediately all illegal and overreaching executive orders,” and to place a “temporary moratorium on new agency regulations that are not compelled by Congress or public safety.”


On the chopping block will be regulations to address climate change (which he’s labeled a Chinese hoax); to implement Obamacare (“a disaster”); and to rein in Wall Street (“We’re too involved in regulation of the banks”). Gone, too, will be President Barack Obama’s executive actions protecting the children of undocumented immigrants and tightening restrictions on gun sales.

The GOP’s continuing majorities in the House and Senate will clear the decks for any legislation the president-elect proposes, but Trump is impatient to assert his presidential authority (“I alone can fix it”) and to dismantle much of Obama’s agenda with the stroke of a pen.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday that Obama will try to persuade Trump when they meet Thursday to limit the reversals to preserve continuity.

But that’s likely to be in vain. In consolidating power within the executive branch, Trump will be continuing a century-old trend that accelerated starting in the 1990s after the “Republican Revolution” gave the GOP majorities in both chambers of Congress for the first time in four decades. “The president is still relevant here,” then-President Bill Clinton was reduced briefly to asserting.

Clinton reaffirmed the presidency’s relevance through a string of executive orders on environmental protection and other matters. President George W. Bush expanded his office’s powers further through the liberal use of “signing statements” that in effect rewrote bills after Congress passed them. Obama continued the pattern through executive orders and regulations concerning immigration, wages and climate change, among other issues.

“One of the problems I have with what Obama did is he's always signing executive orders,” Trump said on “Meet the Press” in January. But when asked whether he would issue executive orders of his own, Trump said he wouldn’t “refuse them,” adding that Obama “led the way. … If I get elected, many of those executive orders that he signed, the first day, they're going to be unsigned.”

Here’s what Trump has pledged to do by executive fiat in key policy areas:

Climate change

Trump’s transition adviser for the Environmental Protection Agency — and possible choice to run the EPA — is Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Ebell has fought for years against “alarmism” over human-caused global warming, and battled the scientific consensus that industrial activity is the major contributor to climate change. Trump has pledged to “cancel” the Paris climate change agreement that took effect just days ago (though withdrawing would likely take years). He’s also promised to discard the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which limits carbon emissions. The Supreme Court stayed the plan’s implementation in February pending judicial review.

Health care

The Health and Human Services secretary (and therefore the president) enjoys significant discretion over how to implement the Affordable Care Act. Trump will be able to limit Medicaid expansion and to give states greater latitude to set up alternatives to the ACA.

In addition, Trump can “do a great deal to interfere” with the ACA’s implementation by changing guidances, observed Timothy Jost, law professor emeritus at Washington and Lee, in a blog for the magazine Health Affairs. Unlike regulations, guidances can be changed without public comment and cost-benefit analysis. Moreover, “If a Trump administration simply stopped implementing or enforcing certain regulatory requirements, there might be little that could be done about it.” For instance, Jost wrote, the Trump administration could stop efforts to enroll patients in Obamacare.

Financial regulation

“It’s [Trump’s] view that banks are overregulated rather than underregulated,” Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore told POLITICO. The lead agencies that implement Dodd-Frank — the Securities and Exchange Commission and especially the Federal Reserve — operate independently from the White House, but President Trump will decide who runs them. Trump has been hugely critical of Yellen (“she is very political … she should be ashamed of herself”) and it seems unlikely he’ll reappoint her when her term ends in Feb. 2018. Indeed, there’s some speculation that he’ll pressure her to resign before that.

Immigration

Trump has repeatedly vowed to repeal Obama’s executive actions creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allows the children of undocumented immigrants who arrived after 2007 at age 16 or younger to receive two-year work permits and exemption from deportation. According to the Migration Policy Institute, 1.3 million young adults age 15 and older were eligible for the program as of 2016. Sixty-three percent of this group population had applied as of March 2016, of whom 89 percent were approved.

Trump has said that “we have to make a whole new set of standards.” Although he would “keep the families together,” illegal immigrants would be deported under his presidency: “They have to go.” Trump also vowed to repeal the 2014 executive orders that expanded the DACA program and created a similar program for undocumented parents. The Supreme Court saved him the trouble in June by striking down those measures, rendering them moot.

Gun control

Even before Obama announced his executive actions to reduce gun violence on Jan. 4, candidate Trump pledged to “unsign” them. “I don't like anything having to do with changing our Second Amendment,” Trump said on “Face the Nation.” “We have plenty of rules and regulations. There’s plenty of things that they can do right now that are already there.” The president’s executive actions included a revised definition of who is “engaged in the business” of selling guns to cover people who do so at gun shows.

Victoria Guida, Jennifer Haberkorn, Elana Schor, and Zachary Warmbrodt contributed to this story.