From policy on gun control to immigration and labor regulations, President Barack Obama has issued more presidential memoranda than any other commander-in-chief in history, a
USA Today review shows.
As recently as Tuesday, he used a memorandum to declare Bristol Bay, Alaska, off-limits to oil and gas exploration, the newspaper reports.
Obama has so far issued 195 executive orders. Published alongside them in the Federal Register are 198 presidential memoranda — all of which carry the same legal force as executive orders, USA Today reports.
Though the president has been prolific with memoranda, he has insisted he's used his executive power less than other presidents.
"The truth is, even with all the actions I've taken this year, I'm issuing executive orders at the lowest rate in more than 100 years," Obama said last July, USA Today notes.
"So, it's not clear how it is that Republicans didn't seem to mind when President Bush took more executive actions than I did."
But according to the USA Today review, Obama has already signed 33 percent more presidential memoranda in less than six years than Bush did in eight – and 45 percent more than the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
Kenneth Lowande, a political science doctoral student at the University of Virginia, told the newspaper that the memoranda appear to be replacing executive orders.
"If you look at some of the titles of memoranda recently, they do look like and mirror
executive orders," Lowande told USA Today.
The difference may be in the political messaging.
"An executive order immediately evokes potentially damaging questions of 'imperial
overreach,'" he told the newspaper.
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