Trump's twenty-first week in office began with the President holding a cabinet meeting in front of the media in which he declared himself to be one of "the most productive presidents in American history," which his advisors strongly corroborated. Trump has begun to nominate replacements for the many US attorneys that he removed from office after assuming the presidency. He has also begun to rescind regulations put into place after the financial crisis of 2008, stripping power from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the process. However, Trump's administration is facing increasingly more challenges in court. The attorney generals of both Washington D.C. and Maryland have filed a lawsuit that claims that Trump's business dealings run counter to the Constitution. Yet another federal appeals court has ruled against his travel ban.
These legal challenges can be expected to accumulate as the policies of Trump's administration continue to undercut and dismantle the work of former President Barack Obama. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos declared this week that she would be delaying the "defense to repayment" rule, pioneered by the Obama administration, which would allow defrauded borrowers to have their federal student loans waived. The delay is currently indefinite. DeVos also stated her intent to re-write an Obama-era rule of "gainful employment", which requires universities to meet set standards in order to have access to money for federal student loans. College loan debt is currently a trillion-dollar problem in the United States, and these decisions are a harsh blow against defrauded students.
DeVos is also cutting over forty positions from her department's civil rights office. The Labor Department has made similar moves, and proposed that it dissolve its discrimination complaint office. The Environmental Protection Agency is currently deliberating on whether or not to do away with its environmental justice program, which investigates the effects of environmental policies on at-risk and minority neighborhoods (which are often one and the same). Former EPA senior advisor Mustafa Ali quit the agency in protest, stating that the EPA was turning its back on "those who need our help most." Vanita Gupta, the former acting head of the Department of Justice's civil rights division under Barack Obama, stated, ""At best, this administration believes that civil rights enforcement is superfluous and can be easily cut. At worst, it really is part of a systematic agenda to roll back civil rights."
Overseas, the Trump administration has loosened regulations on Obama-era policies requiring consistent high-level and inter-agency collaboration before launching troops or drone strikes into areas that are not active war-zones. While US officials have argued that having such regulations hinders military responses to rapidly emerging threats, human rights advocates have stated that Trump's new policies essentially allow the Pentagon to engage in unwarranted warfare with far too little oversight. The Department of Defense has also been given the autonomy to decide on its own whether or not more troops are needed in Afghanistan. The issue of a troop surge in the Middle East has been a contested topic in the White House for weeks. Chief strategist Steve Bannon has stood against a surge, whereas Defense Secretary James Mattis has argued staunchly for it. The decision in Mattis' favor marks yet another expansion in military muscle, one of the many and compounding changes under the Trump administration that have shifted the nation's course away from the visions of the Obama era.