Executive Orders API: Presidential Documents, Refreshed Daily

An executive orders API returns presidential documents as structured JSON instead of scraped HTML. Vaquill AI's EXECUTIVE_ACTION corpus holds 3,674 documents (the live coverage endpoint's count on 12 October 2026) pulled from the Federal Register's presidential documents stream, covering 2015 to today, refreshed daily. That includes executive orders, proclamations, presidential memoranda, and notices, each with a president, a signingDate, and a link back to the publisher's own copy. The part most teams get wrong is what an order actually does: it directs the executive branch, it doesn't amend a statute, and its real-world effect usually shows up months later as an agency rule.

Reviewed and corrected on 12 October 2026. This is general information, not legal advice.

TL;DR

• The corpus is Federal Register presidential documents, 2015 to present, 3,674 items, filtered with corpusType=EXECUTIVE_ACTION and narrowed to orders with documentType=presidential.
• An executive order binds agencies, not Congress. It can't repeal a statute. Its operational effect arrives downstream as a proposed rule, then a final rule, then codified text in the CFR.
• The hard question is not "what does this order say," it is "is it still in force." Orders revoke and amend each other, and an order's own text can never tell you what a later order did to it.
• The API gives you the full text, the president and signing date, change capture, and the official Federal Register link on every order. Whether an order is still in force is a separate check against later orders and the Federal Register's own revocation notes. Earlier text is a reconstruction: asOf=YYYY-MM-DD rebuilds it from changes we observed and flags isBounded when the answer rests on when capture began.
• Monitoring is a daily loop: one free GET /boards call to confirm the Federal Register board was retrieved recently, then a changedSince search on EXECUTIVE_ACTION for what is new.
• If you need the full presidential archive back to Roosevelt, this corpus is the wrong tool. It starts in 2015 and says so.

This is one entry in our US primary law corpus series, which takes the corpus one source at a time.

The companion piece on the statutory side is Statutes at Large API: Reading Federal Law As Enacted, the other corpus that serves federal law as issued rather than as compiled. For the rulemaking an order sets off, see Federal Register API: Querying Over 196,000 Final and Proposed Rules.

What is actually in the EXECUTIVE_ACTION corpus

The source is the Federal Register's presidential documents stream, not a White House press page and not a third-party tracker. That matters because the Federal Register is the statutory publication of record.

Under 44 U.S.C. 1505, the Federal Register publishes "Presidential proclamations and Executive orders, except those not having general applicability and legal effect or effective only against Federal agencies or persons in their capacity as officers, agents, or employees thereof."

Read that exception carefully, because it defines the edge of the corpus. A purely internal directive with no general applicability may never appear in the Federal Register at all, and so won't appear here either.

Those four corpora are the whole chain, and you will use more than one of them. Each token is defined in the corpus types reference. An order alone almost never answers a compliance question. The two you will reach for most are documented in Federal Register API: Querying Over 196,000 Final and Proposed Rules and CFR API: 222,311 Federal Regulation Sections, Refreshed Daily.

A fifth corpus sits alongside them for the statutory side of the same question: SESSION_LAW, the federal law as Congress enacted it, covered in Statutes at Large: reading federal law as enacted.

A short history: from Washington's memo to a numbered series

Nobody wrote a rulebook for executive orders. A Congressional Research Service introduction to the topic says that neither the Constitution nor any statute defines the term, and that no statute grants the President the general power to issue them. It is still "widely accepted" that he has it. The same report points to George Washington asking his department heads for "a clear account" of their affairs as one of the first examples.

The paper trail came much later. Congress passed the Federal Register Act in 1935, after a Supreme Court case in which two Texas oil companies had been charged under a provision of regulations that, technically, didn't exist when they were charged. The Office of the Federal Register's brief history says the first issue appeared on March 14, 1936, and that the documents the new Register would carry were to include "Presidential proclamations and Executive orders." So the daily stream this corpus is built on is about ninety years old.

The National Archives describes the series as official documents "numbered consecutively," with the text appearing in the Federal Register "as each Executive order is signed" and received by the Office of the Federal Register. Its notes add a detail developers should care about: the counts include "number-and-letter designated orders, such as 9577-A." If your database stores an order number as an integer, those orders are about to cause you a very boring afternoon.

What an executive order can and cannot do

An executive order is a written directive from the President to the executive branch. Its authority comes from Article II or from a statute that delegates power to the President. It binds agencies and federal officers.

It doesn't bind Congress, it doesn't amend the United States Code, and it doesn't repeal a regulation on its own. When an order exceeds the President's authority, a court can set it aside, which is the whole point of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).

For a policy monitoring or GRC tool, the practical consequence is blunt. The order is the trigger, and the agency rule is the obligation.

The steel mill story

If you want to see the limit of presidential orders at full speed, look at 1952. To head off a nationwide steel strike during the Korean War, President Truman signed Executive Order 10340 on April 8, directing the Secretary of Commerce to seize most of the steel mills and keep them running. The mill owners sued. A district court enjoined the seizure on April 30, and the Supreme Court heard argument on May 12 and 13 and decided the case on June 2, 1952. The facts are all in the opinion itself.

Justice Black, writing for the Court, put the test in one sentence: "The President's power, if any, to issue the order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself." The Court found neither, and the order lost. Keep that sentence handy. When an order surprises you, the first question is what it rests on.

Take a concrete pair. Executive Order 12866, "Regulatory Planning and Review," signed by President Clinton in 1993, set the cost-benefit review process that OIRA runs for significant rules.

Eighteen years later, President Obama signed Executive Order 13563, "Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review," on January 18, 2011, which reaffirmed the cost-benefit provisions of EO 12866 and added retrospective review duties on top.

Neither order is readable on its own. Anyone who reads only 12866 gets a stale answer, and anyone who reads only 13563 misses the framework it supplements. The chain keeps moving: President Biden's Executive Order 14094 (April 6, 2023) amended 12866, and Executive Order 14148 (January 20, 2025) revoked 14094. The Federal Register's own notes on each order record these links.

The fields you will actually filter on

Search runs at POST /us/statutes/search against https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1, authenticated with a bearer key. The filters relevant to presidential documents are small enough to memorize.

president, signingDate, publicationDate and rescindedOn are result fields. You read them from each hit. They are not search filters, so slice by administration with yearFrom and yearTo and read president off the results. The publishedFrom and publishedTo filters belong on FEDERAL_REGISTER queries, as in the second example below. We tried publishedFrom on an EXECUTIVE_ACTION search on 12 October 2026, with and without documentType, and it returned no results at all, so do not use it to window presidential documents. Use yearFrom and yearTo, or changedSince. Every result carries an actId, a stable per-document identifier. Take it from a response and never build it.

A first query looks like this, and the API playground will run it without any code.

curl -s https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/statutes/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "federal contractor labor standards",
    "corpusType": "EXECUTIVE_ACTION",
    "documentType": "presidential",
    "limit": 25
  }'

Then take the same subject downstream, into the rulemaking that carries the actual obligation.

curl -s https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/statutes/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "federal contractor labor standards",
    "corpusType": "FEDERAL_REGISTER",
    "documentType": "final",
    "publishedFrom": "2024-01-01",
    "limit": 25
  }'

Two things about the mechanics are worth knowing before you build a pager. Paging is cut from a single ranking, so results don't repeat or vanish between pages, and every page costs the same. The deepest reachable result is offset plus limit, with offset capped at 70. Unknown filter values return a 422 instead of silently matching nothing, which is the difference between a loud bug and a quiet one.

The real operational problem: is this order still in force

Here is the thing that breaks naive executive-order tooling. Orders modify each other, and the modification is recorded in the later order, not the earlier one.

A later order might say "Executive Order 13XXX is hereby revoked." Nothing is written back into the target document. If you fetch the target and read its text, it reads exactly as it did the day it was signed, with no hint that it stopped operating.

Two real examples from the Federal Register's own notes. Executive Order 14026, "Increasing the Minimum Wage for Federal Contractors" (April 27, 2021), is marked "Revoked by: EO 14236, March 14, 2025." Executive Order 13891, "Promoting the Rule of Law Through Improved Agency Guidance Documents" (October 9, 2019), is marked "Revoked by: EO 13992, January 20, 2021," and EO 13992 was itself revoked by EO 14148 on January 20, 2025. Revoking the revoking order does not by itself bring the original back, so the chain has to be read order by order. Our guide to whether agency guidance has the force of law covers the 13891 and 13992 pair.

Multiply that by amendment. An order can be partially amended, have one section struck, or be superseded in effect without the word "revoke" appearing anywhere. The status of any given order is a function of every later order that touched it.

A quick story: one order, four presidents

The Congressional Research Service report gives a clean example of this. In April 1992, President George H. W. Bush issued an order requiring most federal contracts to include a notice that employees couldn't be required to join or keep up membership in a labor union. President Clinton revoked it in February 1993. President George W. Bush revoked the revocation in February 2001. President Obama revoked that one in January 2009.

Four orders, three reversals, and the 1992 text sat untouched in the archive the whole time. A reader who pulled the 1992 text in 2005 would have found a clean document with no hint that Clinton had cancelled it twelve years earlier. The order that mattered by then was the 2001 one. The revoking order is where the news lives. The CRS report is dated March 2021, so check the Federal Register's current notes on any order in this chain before relying on its status.

The rulemaking rules went through a similar relay. Executive Order 11821 (Ford, 1974) asked for inflation impact statements, Carter's 12044 (1978) asked for economic analysis, Reagan's 12291 (1981) required cost-benefit analysis, and Clinton's 12866 modified that system. Bush then amended 12866 twice, and Obama revoked both of those amendments in 2009. The text of 12866 you read today only makes sense alongside that history. The CRS report quotes a 2003 Boston University Law Review article by Jack Beermann on why this keeps happening: "Executive orders are also freely revocable and revisable by a subsequent President."

What the API gives you toward this

• The order's text, signer and dates. Each result carries president, signingDate and publicationDate, so you can place an order in its administration and read the exact text.
• Change capture on a daily-refreshed corpus. The EXECUTIVE_ACTION corpus is refreshed daily, and a changedSince search returns the documents we observed change since a date, so a new order appears in your feed soon after the Federal Register publishes it.
• The publisher's own URL on every result. Every item carries the official source link in externalUrl, so a reviewer can check the Federal Register copy without trusting our rendering.
• Full text search across the whole set. Searching the corpus for a specific order number surfaces every later document that names it, which is the closest thing to a reverse-revocation index.

What the API does not give you

It also doesn't ship an editorially maintained "in force / not in force" verdict for every order. Every document in this corpus carries actStatus: "in_force" and goodLawStatus: "unknown", which describes the document as published and says nothing about later orders. The rescindedOn field exists on the record and is empty unless a rescission date has been recorded, so an empty value is not a statement that the order is still operative. Nobody should sell you a certified flag without showing their work, because that determination is a legal judgment about scope and effect, not a field you can scrape.

The honest recipe is a hybrid. Search the corpus for the order number to find later documents that name it, read the Federal Register's own "Revokes", "Revoked by" and "Amended by" notes on the order, and add a human review step before anything reaches a client. The Office of the Federal Register's disposition tables are the other official record of what happened to each order.

A daily monitoring recipe

The monitoring pattern has two halves: prove the source is fresh, then ask what changed.

Step 1: check the board before you trust the data

GET /boards costs nothing. It lists the watchable boards, one per corpus or source group, and returns fields you should log on every run.

curl -s https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/boards \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY"

The board to watch for the Federal Register stream is federal_register, labeled "Federal Register", with a daily cadence. On 12 October 2026 it showed a lastRetrievedAt of that morning. Presidential documents are not listed as a board of their own, so treat that entry as the freshness signal for the stream and use the next step to see what is new in EXECUTIVE_ACTION itself.

A quiet feed and a broken feed look identical from the outside. This is the single most common way a compliance monitor fails silently, and one free call per run removes it. How We Know a Law Changed: Boards, Diffs, and the False Positives Nobody Talks About walks the rest of that failure surface.

Step 2: ask what changed since yesterday

Run one search a day with changedSince set to the previous date. The filter returns only documents we observed changing on or after that date, which for a newly published order is typically the day we first capture it.

curl -s https://api.vaquill.ai/api/v1/us/statutes/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAQUILL_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "query": "executive order proclamation memorandum",
    "corpusType": "EXECUTIVE_ACTION",
    "changedSince": "2026-10-11",
    "fields": ["citation", "title", "president", "signingDate", "publicationDate", "externalUrl"],
    "limit": 50
  }'

Not run as written in our October 2026 review, because the endpoint needs an API key. We ran the same search through the Vaquill MCP server on 12 October 2026 with changedSince set to 2026-10-01. It returned nine presidential documents with publication dates from September 30 to October 9, each with actStatus in_force and rescindedOn null, including "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence" (91 FR 63129). The filter says when we observed a change, not when the order took effect.

Store each actId you have seen, and treat any new id as a new document. For every new order, search the corpus for its number to find later documents that name it, and read its Federal Register notes as described above.

Optional: push delivery

The alerts surface works on the boards that GET /boards lists, over REST (documented in the alerts guide) and on the MCP server at mcp.vaquill.ai, where the operations are named directly: list_boards, create_watch, test_watch, list_watch_changes, get_watch_change_diff and list_watch_deliveries. Run test_watch before you go live, so you find a webhook signature bug on a Tuesday afternoon instead of during a real change, and keep list_watch_deliveries handy for when someone asks why an alert never arrived. Check which board a watch is attached to before you rely on it for presidential documents.

Where this corpus is the wrong choice

Say it plainly, because a mismatch here wastes a quarter.

• You need the full historical presidential archive. Coverage starts in 2015. Research on Reagan-era or New Deal orders needs a different source.
• You need adjudicated legal effect. Whether an order survived a challenge is case law, and this is a statutes and regulations corpus, not a case-law product.
• You need internal directives with no general applicability. Those are excepted from Federal Register publication by 44 U.S.C. 1505, so they aren't in the publication of record.
• You need a certified in-force register. No such field is published, and inventing one would be worse than the gap.

What it is good at is narrower and more useful: a stable, daily-refreshed, machine-readable feed of published presidential documents, joined to the agency rulemaking they trigger, with the publisher's own URL on every row.

The sourcing rule for this corpus is the government publisher that issued the document. A commercial aggregator is never the source, and it isn't used as a fallback either. The collection layer is published at Vaquill-AI/open-us-law, so the parsers behind these documents are readable rather than asserted.

FAQ

Is there an official executive orders API?

Yes, two official ones. The Federal Register has a free API that needs no key and returns presidential documents when you filter on the document type PRESDOCU (https://www.federalregister.gov/api/v1/documents.json?conditions[type][]=PRESDOCU). We called it on 12 October 2026 and it reported 3,674 presidential documents published since January 1, 2015. The National Archives also maintains disposition tables that record what happened to each order. What neither gives you is a single query surface that joins an order to the agency rulemaking it triggered, with stable ids and change detection across corpora, which is what this API adds.

How many executive orders are in the Vaquill AI corpus?

The EXECUTIVE_ACTION corpus holds 3,674 presidential documents from 2015 to present, refreshed daily. That count includes executive orders, proclamations, presidential memoranda, and notices, since the Federal Register publishes them in one presidential documents stream.

Can an executive order change a federal statute?

No. An order directs the executive branch and draws its authority from Article II or from a statute that delegates power to the President. Changing statutory text requires Congress. When an order pushes past the President's authority, courts can set it aside, as in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952).

How do I tell whether an executive order has been revoked?

Run a full-text search on the order number across the corpus, because a later order that revokes or amends it will name it in its own text. Then read the Federal Register's own notes on the order, which list what it revokes, what revoked it and what amended it, for example "Revoked by: EO 14236, March 14, 2025" on Executive Order 14026. The actStatus on an order reads in_force for every document in this corpus, so it does not settle the question. Neither step is a substitute for a human reading the operative language.

Does the API support a point-in-time or historical query?

Yes, as a reconstruction. Add asOf=YYYY-MM-DD to the section body call and the earlier text is rebuilt from changes observed after your date, with isBounded marking answers that rest on when capture began. A document we know changed but cannot rebuild comes back unavailable. Amendment history, a yearFrom/yearTo currency filter, change events per refresh, and per-document diffs on watched boards sit alongside it, and teams that need an exact record can keep the diffs they receive.

What is the difference between documentType presidential and final?

presidential selects presidential documents such as orders and proclamations. final selects final agency rules, which is what you want when you are chasing the enforceable obligation rather than the directive that started it. proposed selects rules still in the comment stage.

How do I find the agency rule that an executive order produced?

Search EXECUTIVE_ACTION for the order, note the agency and the subject, then search FEDERAL_REGISTER with documentType=final and a publishedFrom date after the signing date. The order is the trigger and the rule is the obligation, so budget for a lag of months between the two.

How often is the executive orders data refreshed?

Daily. You can check the Federal Register stream yourself with a free GET /boards call, which returns lastRetrievedAt and cadence for each watchable board, and then run a changedSince search on EXECUTIVE_ACTION to see what arrived. Log those fields on each run so a stalled feed doesn't read as a quiet news week.

Do failed API calls cost credits?

Failed and refunded calls bill 0 credits, and a search costs 4 credits when it succeeds. GET /us/statutes/coverage and GET /boards are free, so freshness checks and coverage checks don't eat your budget.

Can I get executive orders through MCP instead of REST?

Yes. The same surface is published as an MCP server at mcp.vaquill.ai, using the same vq_key_ credential, so an agent can call search_us_statutes, list_boards and create_watch directly. See adding legal research to an AI agent over MCP for the wiring.

Priyansh Khodiyar

Co-Founder & CTO

Priyansh leads engineering and AI at Vaquill AI: the pipelines that pull statutes, regulations and court rules from every US jurisdiction's official publisher, and the REST API, MCP server and open dataset that serve them.