What are executive orders? The powerful tool used by US presidents

Sometimes the orders are made during wartime or to avert a domestic crisis. In February 1942, President Franklin D Roosevelt signed an executive order that led to the creation of detention centres for about 120,000 Japanese Americans.

In 1952 President Harry Truman issued an order that put the steel industry under the control of the government in an attempt to avoid a strike.

On his first day in office on 20 January, 2021, Biden signed an order beginning the process of re-joining the 2015 Paris climate agreement, from which his predecessor Trump formally withdrew. Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said it was “to help us all avoid catastrophic planetary warming”.