When a new president is sworn into office, especially from the opposite party of his predecessor, much is anticipated of him. In fact, it’s become a January 20 tradition that the incoming commander-in-chief have a set of executive orders queued up to fulfill one or two campaign promises to immediately undo some of the work of the previous administration.
Much of those actions fall along the spectrum of both symbolic and achievable such as when President Bush stopped spending federal tax dollars on research that used stem cells or in the case of President Obama’s subsequent reversal.
But once the pomp and circumstance of a new president’s inaugural ends and the people’s business must be conducted, far more technical work must be started.