President Donald Trump announced Friday that he was canceling executive orders signed using President Joe Biden’s autopen.
Like other presidents, including Trump, Biden used an autopen to sign certain official documents. Republicans have claimed the autopen was used by the people around Biden to circumvent a mentally declining president.
“Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect,” he wrote on Truth Social. “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.”
Biden’s team did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the former president has rejected these claims in the past, saying in June: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency.”
“I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations,” he said at the time. “Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false.”
There’s no public record of how many documents were signed by autopen during Biden’s presidency. President Barack Obama was the first president to use an autopen and signed pardons while on vacation. Biden is known to have used it while traveling, too: CNN reported in 2024 that Biden signed a funding extension for federal aviation programs with the autopen, which an official said was used to avoid a lapse in funding while the president was on the West Coast.
Last month, House Republicans declared that they viewed executive actions signed by Biden’s autopen “without proper, corresponding, contemporaneous, written approval traceable to the president’s own consent” as void and urged the Department of Justice to investigate the matter.
“Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury,” Trump continued in his Friday Truth Social post.
Perjury is the crime of lying under oath; Biden has not publicly testified under oath about the autopen. The former president has previously defended his use of the autopen in a New York Times interview.
