Trump Renews Post-9/11 National Emergency for 25th Year in a Row

President Donald Trump has renewed the national emergency declared by President George W. Bush three days after 9/11, extending the nation’s emergency “terrorist” threat declaration for the 25th year in a row.

Signed September 14, 2001, Proclamation 7463 vastly expanded the executive branch’s authority to mobilize troops and the National Guard in response to the 9/11 attack. In combination with other extraordinary White House moves at the time, these orders expanded the power afforded to the president over the other branches of government — laying the groundwork for Trump’s wide-ranging power grab today.

Trump’s explanation for the renewal of the order, posted earlier this week, was curt. In a notice posted to the Federal Register, the administration said its powers are needed to address “the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States,” because “the terrorist threat continues.”

Every president since Bush has renewed Proclamation 7463 and its companion, Executive Order 13224, signed roughly a week after the military proclamation. Executive Order 13224 gave the State Department and the Department of the Treasury power to label groups as “specially designated global terrorists” and take economic actions against them, like sanctions. Such emergency powers were originally intended to be a fringe application of presidential authority — but instead, EO 13224 has become a keystone of U.S. foreign policy, experts have noted.

Trump’s declaration continues an “emergency” that has now been declared for 25 years now. Congress is supposed to renew such emergencies once every six months, but reports previously found no evidence of this being done properly.

Advocates have previously said that it is laughable to think that the U.S. has faced an emergency over 9/11 for this long.

“The president is given these emergency powers as a temporary measure until Congress has time to act. It stretches credulity to think Congress hasn’t had time to act since 9/11 happened,” Elizabeth Goitein, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told USA Today when Trump renewed the emergency in the first year of his first term. “We should not be treating 9/11 as an emergency in 2017.”

Even conservatives who helped work on these orders during the Bush administration have said that they are long overdue for a reckoning.

Julie Myers Wood, a top official in the Treasury Department after executive orders were put in place, noted recently that the Treasury’s framework under EO 13224 has not meaningfully disrupted illicit financial networks — and that presidents have used it to drastically expand their powers.

“No one decided the framework should be permanent and designed it accordingly. Renewal simply continued, because letting the authority lapse was unthinkable and reopening it was problematic. It became permanent anyway,” wrote Wood, who would later help lead ICE, a then-nascent agency. “Not one of those authorities was written with Venezuela in mind. Or fentanyl. Or a shipping lane.”

Moreover, the renewal is an extension of the post-9/11 “forever” wars and the global “war on terror.” Between 2001 and 2022, these wars cost the U.S. $8 trillion, killed roughly 4.5 million people, and encompassed military operations in at least 78 countries, a recent analysis by Brown University’s Costs of War found. The war on terror has also done an enormous amount of damage to the climate, supercharging the U.S. Department of Defense’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump has extended that war to Iran, the Pacific Ocean, and the Caribbean Sea — as well as in efforts against left-wing dissenters at home.