One of the most interesting sources of information is the government. There’s financial data, census data, crime data, even a list of winning lottery numbers for the New York state lottery. But one thing they don’t have is data about executive orders. Specifically, how many were issued by each president.

Turns out, though, you can download a partial list of executive orders from the Federal Register. They even have a RESTful API for downloading documents. For executive orders specifically, they have an easy link to download the current compiled dataset for executive orders.

Executive orders are pretty common; they’re basically how the President manages the executive branch. From the Federal Register page on executive orders:

citation Federal Register, “Executive Orders” The President of the United States manages the operations of the Executive branch of Government through Executive orders. After the President signs an Executive order, the White House sends it to the Office of the Federal Register (OFR).

Trend chart for presidential executive orders

Incidentally, this led to the most pleasant exchange of emails I’ve ever had with the government:

FedReg Info <FedReg.Info@nara.gov>
Feb 2, 2021, 12:21 PM
to FedReg, me

Thank you. We're looking into it now.
Digital Development Staff,
Office of the Federal Register

On Thursday, January 28, 2021 at 11:08:02 PM UTC-5 Christopher Pitts wrote:
Hello,

I was exploring the data available on the Federal Register's data
portal for executive orders:
https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/executive-orders,
and I noticed that there is some missing data in the downloadable
files. Specifically, an executive order signed by President Trump,
document number 2019-27678. This EO is missing the order number, in
both the 1994-today dataset and the President Trump-specific
dataset. Looking up the publication page for the order gives the
missing number: 13900. This caused a processing script of mine to
error, and after finding the cause, I thought I would pass this along
to contribute the valuable service of open government data. Thank you
for providing the site, datasets, and API, it has been very helpful!

-- Christopher Pitts


FedReg Info <FedReg.Info@nara.gov>
Feb 2, 2021, 12:55 PM
to FedReg, me

It's been fixed. Thanks again.

The original plot I did several years ago had the information for president Biden and former presidents Trump, Obama, and Bush. Partial data was available for Clinton, so it was left out. Here’s that plot:

TODO: insert original plot

I checked the Federal Register’s website again as I was writing this post, and discovered that they now had data going back to the 1930s! Naturally, I updated the plot:

TODO: insert current line plot(s)

I also created some new ones:

TODO: insert new plots

I also discovered three inaccuracies in the current data available for download:

TODO: detail inaccuracies

Photo Attributions

The various photographers for the official presidential photos:

  • Barack Obama: Pete Souza, White House
  • JFK: Cecil Stoughton, White House
  • George Bush: Eric Draper, White House
  • Bill Clinton: Bob McNeely, White House
  • Jimmy Carter: Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, Naval Photographic Center
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower: White House, Eisenhower Presidential Library
  • FDR: Leon Perskie (1899–1982), FDR Presidential Library & Museum
  • Gerald R. Ford: David Hume Kennerly
  • Harry S. Truman: National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Office of Presidential Libraries, Harry S. Truman Library
  • Joe Biden: Adam Schultz, White House
  • LBJ: Arnold Newman, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Muesuem
  • Richard Nixon: Department of Defense, Department of the Army, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, U.S. Army Audiovisual Center
  • George H. W. Bush: Unknown, per Wikipedia (you would think the White House would make this information easy to find)
  • Ronald Reagan: Michael Evans