Revoking the AI executive order could not revoke the AI inventory, because Congress had written it
On inauguration day the 2023 AI executive order was revoked, and replacement guidance was weeks away. Agency AI programs could sort their work by legal footing: what rested only on the order, what rested on OMB memoranda awaiting revision, and what statute required regardless.
Looking Back revisits one week at a time, from January 2020 to today, and asks what it meant for the banks, health systems and public agencies we serve. The series was written in 2026, with the benefit of hindsight, and each article says which week it looks back on.
The week
On January 20, 2025, the day of his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order rescinding a long list of prior executive actions. Among them was Executive Order 14110 of October 2023 on the safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of AI. On January 23 he signed an executive order on removing barriers to American leadership in AI. It directed the development of an AI action plan within 180 days and ordered a review of actions taken under the revoked order. It also told OMB to revise, within 60 days, its 2024 memoranda on agency use and acquisition of AI. Those memoranda had required Chief AI Officers, AI use case inventories and minimum practices for rights-impacting and safety-impacting AI, and agencies had spent 2024 implementing them. The same week, a large private AI infrastructure venture was announced at the White House.
For agency AI leaders, the week opened a gap. The executive order behind a year of governance work was gone. The OMB memoranda that turned it into agency requirements were still on the books but marked for revision. Nobody knew what the replacements would keep. An earlier article in this series argued that the 2023 order’s durable legacy was administrative: inventories and named owners. Another, written in election week, argued that an obligation’s legal instrument predicts its survival better than its subject. Rescission week tested both arguments at once.
Agency AI work in late January 2025 rested on one of three footings. Some activities rested only on the revoked order. Some rested on OMB memoranda that remained in force pending revision. And some rested on statute, which no executive order could remove. Every activity in an agency AI program falls under one of those three, and each called for a different decision during the interval.
Work resting only on the revoked order: pause and document
EO 14110 had assigned many specific deliverables: reports with deadlines, interagency working groups, and tasks framed in the order’s language on equity and civil rights. Where an activity existed only because the order required it, the requirement ended on January 20.
The sensible step was to pause such work and record what had been done, not to delete it. Assessments, test results and documentation already produced had value for any future framework, for audits and for litigation. An agency that discarded them risked needing them within months. Deletion also raised a separate legal issue. Documents created in the course of agency business are federal records, and the Federal Records Act governs their disposal whatever happens to the policy that prompted them. Records officers should have been part of any decision to wind down order-specific work. The risk of overcorrection was real. An activity described in the old order’s language might still serve a purpose the new policy would value. Measuring whether a benefits model makes more errors for some groups of applicants, for example, is also a measure of accuracy.
Work resting on OMB memoranda in revision: keep running, lightly
The 2024 memoranda had created Chief AI Officers, AI governance boards and minimum practices for rights- and safety-impacting uses, and set acquisition expectations. The January 23 order directed their revision, not their immediate withdrawal. For roughly ten weeks they sat in limbo.
The practical approach was to keep these functions running at reduced intensity. Chief AI Officers stayed in place. Reviews of high-consequence uses continued, but agencies could defer new procedural steps that might not survive. The new administration’s emphasis on accelerating adoption gave these functions a second justification. An official who knows where AI is used, which projects deliver value and which are stuck is as useful for removing barriers as for imposing controls. Agencies that described their governance this way, as the machinery that lets AI scale safely, were better placed in budget discussions than those that described it as compliance with a revoked order.
Procurement deserved particular care. Solicitations in progress that cited the 2024 acquisition memorandum needed a decision: proceed under existing terms, or amend. Contracting officers needed guidance quickly, because vendors were asking, and a short written instruction from the senior procurement executive was enough to keep awards moving.
Work resting on statute: unaffected
The third footing was the most important and the least discussed that week. Congress had legislated parts of the federal AI governance framework. The Advancing American AI Act, enacted in the fiscal 2023 defense authorization, required agencies to prepare and maintain inventories of their AI use cases, share them across government and publish them where lawful. The AI in Government Act of 2020 required OMB guidance on agency AI use. Neither depended on an executive order.
The inventory provision had its own limits worth knowing. It was written as a five-year requirement, and it excluded some categories, such as most research and development uses and national security systems. An agency program could therefore plan on the inventory continuing at least into 2027, with its scope set by the statute rather than by whichever memorandum was current.
Other statutes kept applying as before. The Privacy Act governs systems of records, including those that feed models. The E-Government Act requires privacy impact assessments. FISMA governs the security of agency systems, AI included. Civil rights laws apply to decisions about the public whatever tools inform them. And the Administrative Procedure Act still lets people challenge arbitrary agency action, which reaches automated decisions that cannot be explained.
For this footing, the right decision was simply to continue. An agency that paused its use case inventory because the executive order was gone would have been out of compliance with a statute. Agencies that tagged each governance activity by its legal footing that week avoided both mistakes: spending on requirements about to disappear, and stopping work the law still required.
With hindsight
The footing proved predictive. On April 3, 2025, OMB replaced the 2024 guidance with two memoranda, on federal use of AI and on AI acquisition. They framed policy around accelerating adoption but kept Chief AI Officers, use case inventories and minimum risk practices for what they called “high-impact” AI, a category close to the earlier rights- and safety-impacting uses. A later article in this series examines how those memos shifted governance into contracts. Inventories continued as a statutory duty, and OMB’s reporting guidance for the 2025 inventories cited both the Advancing American AI Act and the new memorandum. In July 2025 the administration released its AI Action Plan and further executive orders, including one setting requirements for large language models procured by agencies. Budget and staff reductions in 2025 made sustaining governance harder at many agencies, whatever its legal footing.