About Search. The form, substance and numbers of presidential orders jump to table below has varied dramatically in the history of the US Presidency. Numbering of Executive Orders began in by the Department of State, which assigned numbers to all the orders in their files, dating from Lord , viii. Through those efforts, the frequency of unnumbered orders declined sharply. President Hoover attempted to bring further order and regularity to the processing and documenting of Executive orders ibid.
But it was not until the Federal Register Act in that a more thorough contemporaneous documentation of Executive Orders began. Before then, and occasionally afterwards, discovery of an order not previously counted has resulted in assigning a number already in use together with an associated letter e. Today virtually all numbered Executive Orders are published. In addition to the numbered executive orders, there are many unnumbered orders see Lord Estimates have reportedly ranged as high as 50, There have always been many forms of Presidential orders in addition to the numbered Executive Orders and Executive Orders included in the published "unnumbered series".
In this table we present the total number of Executive Orders issued by presidential term not calendar year. Thus, this table does not include other forms of written presidential orders such as memorandums , or discretionary executive actions not accompanied by a published presidential directive. The table below is modified and updated from time to time.
This table includes our own original tallies for the first FDR term based on Lord , But we are confident that we have correctly counted the Lord entries and the NARA figures are very close to ours.
Our APP document collection of numbered Executive Orders is complete with respect to published Orders starting in We are adding earlier orders to the collection as possible, and welcome and will gladly acknowledge contributions to this effort.
