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An Executive Order doesn't exceed, or expand, the Constitutional authority of a President. It merely provides guidance regarding various topics ~ for example, something may be need to be defined for clarity, or there could be two laws with conflicting sections, so the Executive ~ absent Congressional correction of the error ~ may need to state which section in which law is to be preferred, and the circumstances.

An EO my grandfather helped get changed had been signed ages ago by some President who decided that federal government employees should not be allowed to communicate directly with their Congressman.

FDR agreed to allow federal employees to write letters to their Congressmen provided they undertook a campaign to eliminate Communist union organizers from government agencies.

So, they thought that was a good deal and got rid of the Commies.

A fellow I worked for at the old Post Office Department found that when he transferred into POD from another agency he lost not only his seniority, he lost his vacation time, sick leave, and the time credit that allowed you to go from 13 days a year to 20 days a year.

That was controlled by an EO signed by some President who thought it important to keep the operation of the federal bureaucracy separate from the POD. This guy found a mistake in the original EO, and persuaded the then current President ~ I believe it was Eisenhower ~ to fix it so that you didn't lose seniority and vacation time moving from one agency to another. So, a new EO was issued correcting the error, and change an "and" to a "but", adding a few commas, and voila, the way the Civil Service Commission interpreted the Constituion was changed ~ by the President ~ all in the absence of legislation one way or the other.

Years later I had a civil service appeal going that'd been languishing for several years, then Ronald Reagan became President. All at once that appeal was acted on ~ concerned a little matter of what constituted an actual personnel action. By changing a couple of words in the way they answered appeals, the MSPB itself readdressed the way an existing EO should be READ ~ not just interpreted ~ and federal agencies could no longer transfer old people around from detail to detail until they retired or quit.

That's a lot of power there guys ~ bureaucratic details ~ calendar notations, petty rules no one is affected by but a handful of employees ~ and only some Freepers and Obama imagine that EOs can be used to totally revise the way the government works.

Well, for a couple of weeks maybe, but then the bureaucrats can decide how to read those EOs and things will happen a little differently than he'd imagined!!!!