Executive orders and memorandums are often mixed. “In recent years, especially since the Clinton years, presidents have started using them interchangeably,” Cooper says. The U.S. Constitution does not explicitly give a president the power to enter into executive agreements. However, it may be authorized to do so by Congress or may do so on the basis of its foreign relations management authority. Despite questions about the constitutionality of executive agreements, the Supreme Court ruled in 1937 that they had the same force as treaties. As executive agreements are made on the authority of the president-in-office, they do not necessarily bind his successors. An executive agreement[1] is an agreement between heads of government of two or more nations that has not been ratified by the legislature, since the treaties are ratified. Executive agreements are considered politically binding to distinguish them from legally binding contracts.

An executive agreement is one of three mechanisms through which the United States enters into binding international agreements. Some authors consider them to be treaties because the term is used under international law, since they bind both the United States and a foreign sovereign state. However, they are not considered treaties, since the term is used under U.S. constitutional law, since the treaty procedure of the U.S. Constitution requires the Council and the approval of two-thirds of the Senate, and these agreements are concluded exclusively by the President of the United States. Some other nations have similar provisions for treaty ratification. Executive orders are issued by U.S. presidents and are addressed to U.S. federal officials and agencies. Executive orders have the full force of law if they are based on the authority that derives from the statute or the Constitution itself. The ability to issue such orders is also based on explicit or unspoken laws of Congress, which give the President some discretion (delegated legislation).

[1] While the Presidents have treated executive deputies as restrictively as executive orders, Cooper says, “There is really no clear jurisprudence or statutes on this matter.” Is Trump about to issue more executive orders than former presidents? With respect to “executive actions,” Cooper says the sentence is very general. He explains that executive measures are “only one category” of different policy instruments that presidents often use – including executive orders and memorandums – that do not have their own legal value. A mandate is a call to the executive to take a particular action or change an existing practice, says Phillip J. Cooper, a professor of public administration at the Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University in Portland, Ore. The implementation of executive agreements increased considerably after 1939. Prior to 1940, the U.S. Senate had ratified 800 treaties and presidents had concluded 1,200 executive agreements; From 1940 to 1989, during World War II and the Cold War, presidents signed nearly 800 treaties, but concluded more than 13,000 executive treaties.