Connecting the Dots: Executive Orders are powerful tools that allow presidents to enact policy changes without congressional approval. For Native communities, this means funding for education, healthcare, and infrastructure can shift and even disappear overnight. Unlike laws enacted by Congress, citizens and our elected representatives are often unable to override these orders except through extreme coordinated action, undermining a check on the power of the executive branch.
From land use laws to education funding freezes, executive orders can directly and immediately impact Native communities. When EOs limit funding for Title I schools, Pell Grants, and Native education initiatives, Native students lose access to critical scholarships and academic resources, making it harder to graduate and enter the workforce.
It’s easy to hear about executive orders and think of them as abstract policy changes happening far away in Washington. But for Native communities, these decisions are anything but distant.
A single executive order can determine if Native families have access to clean water, if Native students can afford college, or if sacred lands are protected or opened for development. With the stroke of a pen, tribal sovereignty can be strengthened or weakened, and treaties – contractual agreements made generations ago – can be honored, eroded, or dismantled entirely.
The impact of executive orders isn’t theoretical. It’s not about signing a piece of paper for the cameras and handing out pens. It’s personal. It’s about whether Native languages continue to be spoken, whether Native-owned businesses can thrive, and whether future generations have the same opportunities as we do today. Policies may be written in legal jargon, but their consequences are written into the daily lives of Native people.
Here are just a couple of examples of how the executive orders passed affect real people across Indian Country:
| Executive Order Name | What Does It Do | Who It Affects |
| Protecting the Meaning and Value of Birthright Citizenship | This order seeks to define citizenship as solely belonging to those born in the United States to mothers who, at the time of the birth, were permanent legal residents of the United States | Any non-white person in the United States may be impacted by this order due to increased scrutiny and profiling by skin color. Additionally, anyone who is a US citizen by being born in the US to non-permanent US residents may find that they are no longer citizens of the United States. Native Americans find themselves under threat as some people argue their Tribal sovereignty means those on Tribal land do not live in the United States, were not born in the United States, and therefore are not citizens of the United States. |
| Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing | This order seeks to remove federal funding for any program deemed to exist solely to further diversity, equity, or inclusion. While the effects have been wide reaching, immediate impacts have been a loss of funding for some federal programs, and the loss of thousands of jobs. | Thousands of federal employees have lost their jobs, the majority of them brown and black Americans. Federal programs which should not be seen as DEI initiatives, like funding for Tribal food assistance, have been caught in the crosshairs. As funding is rolled back, reduced, or canceled, services that Americans everywhere, including Tribal Nations, depend on are disappearing overnight. |
| Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity | This EO cancels the Equal Opportunity guidelines that most companies use while hiring and encourages attorneys general and federal law enforcement agencies to target, fine, or prosecute corporations deemed to be hiring based on diversity, equity, and inclusion principles. | As DEI programs are cut at corporations across the country, nonprofit partners, and the people they support, find themselves left behind. So far, the College Fund has lost scholarship funding for more than 100 students, as our corporate funding comes primarily from corporate DEI budgets. Several of our students with internships have lost their jobs as companies stop hiring minority candidates and terminate existing minority hires out of fear of fines and lawsuits. The vagueness of this EO means that further actions expanding its effects are likely. |
