An EO is the legal mechanism to command an agency to take an action. Agencies shouldn’t be taking instructions from random tweets, TV appearances and speeches as it’s hard to interpret the exact meaning. Further if some random bureaucrat were to act on a random Tweet and then be sued they’d be unable to say “I was just following orders.”
> An EO is the legal mechanism to command an agency to take an action. Agencies shouldn’t be taking instructions from random tweets, TV appearances and speeches as it’s hard to interpret the exact meaning.
Yes, but it'd not be unusual for the agency's director to check in with the president on a course of action or vice versa, verbally or via memorandum, without the president formally invoking his presidential authority via executive order.
To put the whole thing in perspective, the number of EOs issued annually by recent presidents Bush and Obama was very modest, averaging 36.4 and 34.6 respectively.
