Breaking: Trump cancels Biden executive orders and actions that were signed by autopen

President Donald Trump on Friday announced that he is canceling all executive orders and actions taken during the Biden administration that were signed with an autopen rather than by Joe Biden personally, declaring them illegal.

Trump said that approximately 92% of Biden-era documents relied on an autopen and therefore lacked the president’s specific approval. He pointed to years of speculation over Biden’s signature practices, including a House Oversight Committee report last year that examined questions of mental fitness and alleged that many official documents bore signatures that did not match Biden’s known handwriting.

In a written statement, Trump said: “I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally.” He asserted that any executive order, pardon, directive, or federal action using an autopen stands invalid unless someone can prove Biden physically signed it.

The proclamation is unprecedented and likely to trigger extensive litigation.

Some have said federal law does not require presidents to hand-sign documents, and that autopens have been routinely used by presidents across administrations, including by President Trump himself Congress expressly authorized autopen use for presidential signatures in 2005 for certain classes of documents, and successive White Houses have used them for years to handle large volumes of routine or ceremonial paperwork.

It’s also unclear if a president can unilaterally void actions of a previous administration on the basis of signature method alone, particularly those considered constitutionally final, such as pardons. Biden pardoned more people than any president in history, most via auto-pen. Some actions, like executive orders, can be revoked or superseded at will by a current president, but others, including commutations, appointments, and classified directives, are cases that will be tested, no doubt, in court. But the court case may be precisely what the president wants, in order to depose people who were in the decision making circle of Biden.

Trump’s announcement places the burden on federal departments to determine which Biden-era actions relied on an autopen. Even if courts ultimately reject Trump’s interpretation, the directive could freeze or delay agency operations while they review past records.