Featured Image Credit: Andrew Harnik / Staff / Getty
President Donald Trump has been busy since his January 20 inauguration, but alongside having his Diet Coke button reinstalled and raking in the profits of his meme coin, he's been signing a slew of executive orders. There are almost too many to count, with everything from DEI initiatives to the classified JFK assassination files, birthright citizenship to the death penalty poised to get an overhaul.
It seems like a lot of work to have delivered so many executive orders in such a short space of time, but according to some accusations, President Trump might've had a helping hand.
Economist Robert Reich took to X and claimed that at least 16 executive orders have been pulled from the controversial Project 2025 playbook.
First produced by the Heritage Foundation ahead of Ronald Reagan taking office in 1981, Project 2025 is a supposed Republican 'wish list' that comes from the prominent right-wing think tank.
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The Heritage Foundation laid out proposals for Trump's first term, later boasting that nearly two-thirds of them were adopted by the White House. Project 2025 was released in April 2023 and flew under the radar until the Democrats drew attention to it under Kamala Harris. There was a "Stop Project 2025 Task Force" that included a tip line encouraging people to keep the Democrats up to date on what the Heritage Foundation was up to.
Trump claimed he knew nothing about Project 2025, but for some, it isn't adding up.
The Independent writes: "Many of Trump’s orders are difficult to read and understand, marked by errors and stilted language, observers have noted, which could be a problem for Trump if challenged in court, as many of them are likely to be."
As for allegations that Trump has been using artificial intelligence to write some of his executive orders, appellate lawyer Raffi Melkonian posted on BlueSky and said that a description of the Gulf of Mexico that was written in an order renaming it as Gulf of America was 'absolutely written by AI'. He went on to joke: "Write a description of the Gulf of Mexico for idiots."
Slate journalist and legal expert Mark Joseph Stern posted elsewhere on BlueSky, saying that Trump was hoping to avoid the "sloppy legal work that plagued his first administration.” Instead, Stern said: "This is poor, slipshod work obviously assisted by AI."
There's also a mention of his executive order declaring there are only two genders, highlighting the questionable science that gender is determined at conception. The particular phrase, "Person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell," has been called out as 'garbled'.
Typos and formatting errors get repeated across EOs, revealing extensive use of copy-paste. The rhetoric sounds like a ChatGPT imitation of the 5th Circuit’s laziest rulings. And the legal arguments are frequently fringe in the extreme, in a way that will likely piss off Roberts and Barrett.
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) 21 January 2025 at 03:12
The irony is that these allegations come at a time when Trump himself has pushed for more AI innovation. He's already signed the "Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence" executive order. The POTUS says he wants to eliminate the 'harmful' orders put in place by the Biden Administration that were keeping a close eye on AI policies.
In a government fact sheet, the White House writes: "President Trump is fulfilling his promise to revoke Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI innovation and imposes onerous and unnecessary government control over the development of AI."
There's also the AI-driven StarGate project pushing the USA toward an AI future. Well, that's if it's not decimated by China's DeepSeek AI undercutting Trump's big tech buddies.
