About

The Executive Record holds 1,531 executive orders signed between 1993 and 2026, each with its full text, its official source links, and a plain-language summary. 1,530 of them carry a current summary.

It exists because executive orders are consequential, publicly available, and almost unreadable. The official text is authoritative and written for lawyers. Most coverage of it is written to persuade. There was room for something that just says what an order does and shows you where to check.

Every order is drawn from the Federal Register, the official daily journal of the United States government, through its public API. The full text you see is the text the government published.

Each page links to the Federal Register’s own copy, the official PDF, and the plain text. Those links sit at the top of the page rather than the bottom, and they say plainly that where this site and the source disagree, the source governs. A reference tool that cannot be checked in one click is asking to be taken on trust, and this one would rather not be.

Each summary is generated automatically from the order’s own text by a large language model, and published without human review. That is defensible only if it is impossible to miss, so every summary carries a label on the panel above it naming the model and the prompt version that produced it, with the date.

The model is instructed to describe what the order directs, who must act, and by when — and is explicitly forbidden from assessing whether an order is lawful, evaluating the policy, describing political motivation, or adding anything not supported by the document in front of it. Every summary is checked by code before it is stored, and one that fails is not published.

They still get things wrong. Each order’s page has a correction form that records the exact wording you read, so a report can be told apart from one a later revision already fixed. Corrections are read.

One order — EO 12936 — has no summary and never will. It was published entirely as scanned images with no machine-readable text. Its page says so, rather than showing a blank.

Several obvious features are missing on purpose. Each would increase engagement, and each would require making an editorial judgement this site does not make.

• No topics or categories. The Federal Register publishes no topic taxonomy for presidential documents, so classifying orders by subject would mean inventing one — deciding, for instance, whether an order is about “immigration” or “national security”. Keyword search covers the need without anyone having to make that call.
• No “trending”, “notable” or “most viewed” list. Any such module is the site telling you which orders matter. The register is chronological and you choose.
• No legal verdict without a citation. When the legal-standing layer arrives it will report what courts have actually done, with sources. Where an order has not been tested, it will say so and name the contested question rather than guess. There is no version of this site that offers its own constitutional opinion.
• No commentary, and no ranking by importance.

The site is free to read, with no accounts, no subscriptions and no paid tier — not as a launch offer but as a design constraint: there is no billing concept anywhere in it.

It is intended to be supported by advertising. None runs today. When it does, advertisements will be visually distinct from the record, and no advertiser will influence which orders appear, how they are described, or the order in which they are listed.

The next substantial addition is the legal-standing layer: for each order, whether it has been challenged, what courts have done, and — where there is no direct ruling — the closest cited precedent. Every element of it will trace to a source, and an order with no such record will be described as untested rather than as likely or unlikely to survive.

Each order’s page already reserves the space where that will appear, and says why it is empty.

Corrections, questions and enquiries go to the contact form. For a specific summary, the correction form on that order’s page is better — it records which text you are reporting.