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The US is stuck in a repeating cycle of presidents undoing each other

Analysis by Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — If you’re looking for consistency, you’ve come to the wrong country.

It’s a new era of American whiplash as the country settles into a multi-year cycle of presidents correcting each other.

President Donald Trump’s first day in office set the stage for an effort to undo whatever Joe Biden and his administration did. Trump’s most shocking actions were his mass pardon of people who were charged in the January 6, 2021, attack of the US Capitol and his challenge to birthright citizenship, which is in the Constitution. The latter is already the subject of a lawsuit from Democratic state attorneys general.

But much of what Trump did was specifically aimed at turning Biden’s four years into the interregnum between two Trump terms, undoing Biden immigration policies, ending government diversity programs and climate change efforts and taking more political control of the federal bureaucracy.

Trump’s actions are the mirror image of four years ago, when Biden came into office and signed executive orders to undo multiple Trump immigration policies, restore protections for government workers, expand diversity and inclusion programs in the government and reverse Trump environmental policies.

What one president does, the next is looking to undo.

Denali. McKinley. Denali. McKinley.

Whether the nation’s highest peak should have the traditional Alaskan name Denali, meaning “Great One,” or be known as Mt. McKinley to honor a Republican president from Ohio who was assassinated at the turn of the 20th century, is a Rorschach test for the moment.

President Barack Obama renamed it Denali. President Donald Trump, ignoring Alaska Republicans, is renaming it Mt. McKinley.

But naming a mountain seems small compared to some other zigging and zagging by the government in recent years.

Paris climate agreement: in and out and in and out

► Obama joined the Paris climate agreement in 2016.

► Trump pulled the US out in 2017.

► Biden rejoined in 2021.

► Now Trump is pulling the US out again, arguing the US should not have to do so much to address the world’s changing climate.

The trend extends further back, since President Bill Clinton’s administration agreed to join the international Kyoto Protocol – which predated the Paris agreement – but President George W. Bush’s administration pulled the US out.

World Health Organization: Restarting the departure again

► President Harry Truman joined the World Health Organization in 1948. “We must and will give freely of our great knowledge to help liberate men everywhere from the overhanging dread of preventable disease,” Truman said at the time.

► Trump began the process of pulling the US out of the WHO in 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, complaining the US was contributing too much money compared to China.

► Biden restored the US to the WHO on his first day in office in 2021.

► Trump restarted the process of pulling the US on his first day in office in 2025.

Re-reclassifying federal workers again

Complaining of a “deep state” bent against him, Trump tried in 2020 to reclassify some federal workers who have a role in policy making as “Schedule F” to make it easier to fire them.

Biden stopped the process in 2021 and went a step further, signing an order with new protections for federal workers.

Trump is moving to revive Schedule F and has said the bureaucracy must be more responsive to his will. “Any power they have is delegated by the President, and they must be accountable to the President, who is the only member of the executive branch,” Trump wrote.

CNN’s report notes that critics fear Trump’s effort to instill a federal workforce more loyal to him will undermine the merit-based professional civil service created to replace a corrupt spoils system just before McKinley’s time as president.

To drill or not to drill

Trump 1.0 tried to undo Obama’s ban on oil drilling in arctic waters.

Trump 2.0 will now try undo Biden’s ban on offshore oil drilling. It’s not clear how much additional oil drilling Trump’s action would create since the US is already producing more oil than any other country.

On the other hand, Trump is halting Biden’s efforts to end land and water leasing for wind energy.

And on the automobile front, Obama tried to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles, including by publishing rules to limit tailpipe emissions.

Trump rolled them back again in 2020. Biden took another shot at tailpipe emissions and pushing for electric and hybrid vehicles. Trump plans to roll those back too, although the car market is already moving toward EVs, with or without the US government.

On some issues, Trump is ready to correct himself

During his first administration Trump made a very big deal of renegotiating the North America Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which was put in place by President Bill Clinton.

Trump negotiated the replacement US-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, one of the successes of his first term. In the early days of his second term, however, Trump is threatening Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs to kick in on February 1. Those import taxes would seem to jeopardize his own treaty and make things more expensive for Americans, but does set up the prospect of new concessions from Canada and Mexico.

The real news on tariffs may be that Trump has delayed, for the moment, talk of broad new tariffs on all imports and specifically on Chinese goods.

Biden, for the record, maintained Trump’s first-term tariffs on China – proof that not everything one president does will be undone by the next.

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