Setting the record straight: President Trump’s first 100 days
For many years reporters have come to us to fact-check statistics on legislative activity. This year we were asked by several reporters to fact-check the President’s claim that his first 100 days in office were “historic.”
The President’s numbers were wrong (more on that at the end), and they were the wrong numbers to look at.
More legislation than any president since Truman?
The White House’s Claim
On Tuesday, the White House issued a press statement claiming that the President’s 30 executive orders and 28 laws signed (it’s 29 now) were the most in any first 100 days of a presidency since President Truman (that’s wrong — see below):
What is “more legislation”?
Although President Trump affixed more signatures to bills than past presidents since Truman (Politifact rated that Mostly True), the laws Trump signed were historically short.
President Obama signed into law 15 times more legislation in his first 100 days that President Trump if you look inside the laws, as this graphic by Business Insider shows, based on data we provided to them:
Compared to the 79,003 words in the 29 laws Trump signed so far, Obama signed 14 laws containing 1,122,603 words in his first 100 days. Those 14 laws in early 2009:
- Kept the government open for a six month period (358,113 words — compared to the 256 words Trump signed yesterday to keep the government funded for one more week)
- Arguably kept the economy going (294,307 words in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was planned well before Obama took office)
- And there was also a major public lands law (356,228 words) and funding for AmeriCorps (105,542 words), both of which had significant support from both parties.
Rolling back regulations was historic, that part is true
What was historic about Trump’s signed laws were the 13 that rolled back regulations pursuant to a process called the Congressional Review Act (CRA).
The CRA had never been used before to this extent. And some of the rolled back regulations were significant, including one that would have prevented states from withholding Title X funding to Planned Parenthood. (The New York Times explains some of the others.)
It doesn’t take many words to roll back a regulation:
We’re not saying that lengthier laws are better than shorter laws. But the White House statement didn’t make the claim that the legislation President Trump signed was better, only that there was more of it. That’s false. Are Trump’s short laws better? Well they’re not all that Trump signed…
What else did Trump sign?
The vast majority of the legislation that Trump signed, by counting pages or words, actually was about:
- Funding NASA to send humans to Mars by 2033.
- Improved weather forecasting and prediction of high-impact weather events.
Neither of those laws are in line with a small-government agenda — both increase federal spending. NPR covered the full list:
Keep in mind in any case that neither Trump nor Obama wrote the laws they signed. They can only sign the bills that Congress gives them, and although presidents like to take lots of credit they actually have an insignificant role in the passage of most of them.
Trump’s first 100 days ends tomorrow at noon.
Fixing the numbers
While the White House’s claim about the 28 laws was true if you count presidential signatures — UPDATE: It wasn’t, see below — the numbers provided by the White House for many past presidents were not.
Here’s what the White House said:
The correct counts are actually:
President Obama — 14 laws (not 11)
President Clinton — 22 laws (not 24)
President Carter — 23 laws (not 22) (Carter could also be 21 if you’re not counting full days in office.)
President Nixon — 11 laws (not 9) [added Dec. 2017]
President Kennedy — 27 laws (not 26) [added Dec. 2017]
President Eisenhower — 29 laws (not 22) [added Dec. 2017]
President Truman — 126 laws (not 55) [added Dec. 2017]
Update Dec 2017: By our count, Trump matched Eisenhower and did not surpass him. Trump surpassed Kennedy’s record and subsequent presidents at 100 days.
Business Insider was the first to notice the discrepancy. (Obama’s laws are easily counted here, for instance, with 100 days ending on April 30.)
There was an additional error in the press statement, which compared President Trump’s 30 executive orders to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 9. But as Peter A. Shulman first reported, the White House’s number for FDR was bogus:
Where did the White House go wrong? These four mistakes match the same four mistakes in an article published by FiveThirtyEight earlier this year, so it’s clear that the White House must have copied the numbers about past presidents from this article without checking them:
Where did FiveThirtyEight go wrong?
The reporter at FiveThirtyEight appears to have counted laws in the first 100 days of past Congresses instead of past presidents. Congress begins on January 3, while presidents are inaugurated on January 20. That 17-day difference changes the numbers a bit. (The reporter used GovTrack’s bill search to count up the numbers for Clinton and Obama — if only the reporter had reached out to us to check their methodology— and an academic paper that clearly stated it was counting Congress’s first 100 days, not presidents’.)
FiveThirtyEight has since posted a correction for the mistaken count of FDR’s executive orders, but not of the laws.
This post was written by GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer.
