Trump uses executive orders to impose hiring and regulatory freezes
By
Tom Eley
24 January 2017
In the first days of his presidency, Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders and memoranda that outline his administration’s far-right agenda: economic nationalism and war abroad; attacks on living standards and democratic rights at home.
On Friday, immediately following his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order weakening the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The order, titled “Executive Order Minimizing the Economic Burden of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Pending Repeal,” directs the Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies involved in the ACA’s administration, to the greatest extent possible under the law, to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay” any part of the act that imposes financial burdens on states, insurance corporations, pharmaceuticals, HMOs, or individual health care consumers.
The ACA was not a social reform, as the Obama administration and its allies presented it, but pro-corporate legislation designed to shift the burden of health care onto workers, while providing new revenue streams for the insurance giants. But Trump has cynically exploited widespread popular disillusionment with Obamacare to attack it from the right. It is not clear what portions of the ACA will be preserved, if any, but those measures that were designed to provide some pretense of concern for workers—such as that barring insurers from refusing policies to individuals with preexisting medical conditions—will be scrapped.
Also on Friday, Trump issued an executive memorandum designed to hold up all federal regulations that were in the process of implementation in the Obama administration….