Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Evaluating Trump’s first ‘Hundred Day’ economic plan
Evaluating Trump’s first ‘Hundred Day’ economic plan
Aug 15, 2026 4:43 PM

In a radio address on July 24, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to the 100-day session of the 73rd United States Congress between March 9 and June 17, a session thatproduced a record-breaking volume of new laws.

Despite the fact that the 100 days referred to a legislative session and not the beginning of a presidency, the term has e a metric for what a new president can plish and how effective they will be during their term. For this reason, president-elects often lay out a proposal for what they hope to plish during the early days after the Inauguration.

During a speech at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania last October, Donald Trumplaid out his own planfor what he’d do in his first days.

Below is a summary of all the actions related to economics that Trump promised to tackle in his Hundred Days and an evaluation of what he actually plished:

EXECUTIVE ACTIONS

The following are actions Trump said he would take either through the executive orders or through the other powers of his office:

Promise: Issue a requirement that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.

Evaluation: Promise kept. Ten days after taking office the president signed an executive order titled, “Reducing Regulation And Controlling Regulatory Costs.”One of the provisions of the order is that whenever an executive department or agency publicly proposes for notice ment or otherwise promulgates a new regulation, it must identify at least two existing regulations to be repealed.

Promise: Announce his intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205.

Evaluation: Promise deferred. According to Trump, he was all set to announce his intent to renegotiate NAFTA—and then had his mind changed by phone calls with the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

Promise: Announce that the United States will be withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Evaluation: Promise kept. Trump withdrew from the trade agreement three days after taking office.

Promise: Direct his Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator.

Evaluation: Promise broken. “They’re not currency manipulators,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in April.

Promise: Direct his Secretary of Commerce and U.S. Trade Representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that “unfairly impact American workers” and direct them to use “every tool under American and international law to end those abuses immediately.”

Evaluation: Promise kept. In April Trump signed an executive order calling for pletion of a large-scale report to identify “every form of trade abuse and every non-reciprocal practice that now contributes to the U.S. trade deficit.”

Promise: Lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.

Evaluation: In process. Trump signed an executive order to that will begin rolling back some of the energy restriction put in place by President Obama.

Promise: Remove any obstacles to “vital energy infrastructure projects” (e.g., the Keystone Pipeline) so that the projects can move forward.

Evaluation: Promise kept. Four days after taking office Trump signed a memo clearing the way for construction on the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Promise: Cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.

Evaluation: Pending. Trump included this in his proposed budget, but it’s unclear whether Congress will cancel the payments.

LEGISLATIVE PROPOSALS

The following are proposals for economic-related legislation that President Trump said he would send to Congress:

Promise: Middle Class Tax Relief And Simplification Act— An economic plan designed to grow the economy 4% per year and create at least 25 million new jobs through massive tax reduction and simplification, bination with trade reform, regulatory relief, and lifting the restrictions on American energy. The largest tax reductions are for the middle class. A middle-class family with 2 children will get a 35% tax cut. The current number of brackets will be reduced from 7 to 3, and tax forms will likewise be greatly simplified. The business rate will be lowered from 35 to 15 percent, and the trillions of dollars of American corporate money overseas can now be brought back at a 10 percent rate.

Evaluation: Partial credit. In an attempt to get something out before the Hundred Day deadline, the Trump administration released a one-page outline on tax reform. No detailed plan yet exists, though, and nothing has been sent to Congress.

Promise: End The Offshoring Act— Establishes tariffs to panies from laying off their workers in order to relocate in other countries and ship their products back to the U.S. tax-free.

Evaluation: Promise broken. No legislation has been proposed by the Trump administration.

Promise: American Energy & Infrastructure Act— Leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over 10 years. It is revenue neutral.

Evaluation: Promise broken. No legislation has been proposed by the Trump administration.

Promise: School Choice And Education Opportunity Act— Redirects education dollars to give parents the right to send their kid to the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of their choice. mon core, brings education supervision to munities. It expands vocational and technical education, and make 2 and 4-year college more affordable.

Evaluation: Promise broken. No legislation has been proposed by the Trump administration.

Promise: Repeal and Replace Obamacare Act— Fully repeals Obamacare and replaces it with Health Savings Accounts, the ability to purchase health insurance across state lines, and lets states manage Medicaid funds. Reforms will also include cutting the red tape at the FDA: there are over 4,000 drugs awaiting approval, and we especially want to speed the approval of life-saving medications.

Evaluation: Promise deferred. Neither the Trump administration nor Republicans in Congress have a way to fully repeal Obamacare, and the current plan to make changes has been rejected by both Democrats and conservative Republicans.

Promise: Affordable Childcare and Eldercare Act— Allows Americans to deduct childcare and elder care from their taxes, incentivizes employers to provide on-side childcare services, and creates tax-free Dependent Care Savings Accounts for both young and elderly dependents, with matching contributions for e families.

Evaluation: Promise broken. No legislation has been proposed by the Trump administration.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Audio: Samuel Gregg on Religious Pathologies
Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg joined host Shelia Liaugminas on Relevant Radio’s A Closer Lookto examine those times and places where religion can e pathological – when divine and human reason are set aside. They look back ten years to Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address, in which he addressed this issue in what would e one of the most controversial momentsof his papacy. You can listen to the interview via the audio player below. ...
10 Things You Should Know About the Minimum Wage Debate
Since 1938, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the first federal minimum wage in the U.S., a debate has raged about whether wage floors help or hurt workers. But thanks to a radical economic experiment in California, we may be only a few years away from having a definitive answer. California Gov. Jerry Brown and state legislators have reached an agreement to raise California’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022. Under California’s plan, its minimum wage — already...
Radio Free Acton: William B. Allen On The Centrality of Freedom Of Conscience
As the Supreme Court considers how to rule in the Little Sisters of the Poor case, we have a timely edition of Radio Free Acton for your consideration.William B. Allen, Emeritus Professor of Political Philosophy in the Department of Political Science and Emeritus Dean, James Madison College, at Michigan State University, joins the podcast to talk about what the 2016 presidential race says about the national character of the United States, and emphasizes the centrality of the freedom of conscience...
Martin Luther on Vocation and Serving Our Neighbors
“For Martin Luther, vocation is nothing less than the locus of the Christian life,” says Gene Edward Veith in this week’s Acton Commentary. “God works in and through vocation, but he does so by calling human beings to work in their vocations.” In Jesus Christ, who bore our sins and gives us new life in his resurrection, God saves us for eternal life. But in the meantime he places us in our temporal life where we grow in faith and...
Explainer: Supreme Court Rules on Conservative Challenge to Public-Sector Unions
What just happened? Earlier today the U.S. Supreme Court split 4-4 on a legal challenge to a California law that forces non-union workers to pay fees to public-employee unions. What was the case about? California law requires every teacher working in most of its public schools to financially contribute to the local teachers’ union and that union’s state and national affiliates in order to subsidize expenses the union claims are related to collective bargaining. California law also requires public school...
What Hamburgers (and the Division of Labor) Can Teach Us about Prosperity
A simple example of hamburgers being made at home versus at a restaurant can help illuminate the explosion of prosperity since the Industrial Revolution, says Don Boudreaux in this Marginal Revolution University video. The story of the division of labor and development of specialized tools is an old story (Adam Smith introduced the concept in his Wealth of Nations), but it still has tremendous explanatory power about how prosperity is created. ...
Remembering the World’s Most Important Farmer
The world’s most important farmer was born 102 years ago today. The late Norman Borlaug worked on his family’s Iowa farm from the time he was 7 and attended a one-room schoolhouse through eighth grade. Graduating high school during the Great Depression, he received a scholarship to the University of Minnesota, where he studied forestry. In graduate school he switchedto the study of plant pathology —a decision that would lead to a Nobel Prize and the saving of over a...
Religious Shareholders Stump for Union Super PACs
Hoo boy … this campaign season is exhausting enough already without reporting the efforts of religious shareholder activist groups uniting to undo the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. But, to quote Michael Corleone in the third Godfather film: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” Joining the anti-Citizens United religious shareholders are public-sector unions, riding high after the eight-justice Supreme Court split evenly this week on Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. The split decision...
What Apple’s Encryption Fight Has to Do with Religious Freedom
The early church father Tertullian once asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” by which he meant “What has Greek thought and philosophy to do with Christianity and its Biblical heritage?” Today we might ask a similar question, “What has Apple to do with Hobby Lobby?” or “What does the conflict between Apple and the federal government over encryption have to do with Hobby Lobby’s struggle with the government over religious liberty?” The answer is: More than you might...
Could Jesus Be a Chinese Communist?
“If Jesus were alive today, do you think he would fortable with the Communist Party government in China?” That’s a question BBC reporter John Sudworth asked Pastor Wu Weiqing, a Beijing based priest, who serves in an official, state-sanctioned church. The pastor replies without hesitation: “Absolutely. I think so.” Oh my. First of all, as the Easter holiday reminds us, Jesus is alive today. Second, Jesus would most definitely not fortable with the Communist Party government in China. And the...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved