Downstream · the daily issue

Presidential memoranda

A presidential memorandum carries the same authority as an executive order and gets none of its bookkeeping: no number, no series, and publication in the Federal Register only when the President orders it. Of the 75 signed since 21 March 2025, 54 were never printed. An executive order that went missing would leave a hole in a numbered series. A memorandum leaves nothing, which is why it needs a page.

Updated

Where these were printed

What each of these is claiming

In the Federal Register. Printed, with a citation you can cite.

Never printed. Older than the longest publication lag on record and still not in the Federal Register. Publication is ordered by the President rather than required, so this is a choice, not a lapse.

In no official record. Not in the Federal Register and not in GPO’s Daily Compilation either, and old enough that neither is merely late. The whitehouse.gov posting is the only public text, on a site that keeps no version history and does not survive an administration transition.

The two texts differ. The White House posting and the Federal Register printing of the same document are not the same text once spacing and punctuation are set aside. Two arms of the government published one document in two versions; this page reports that rather than choosing between them. The Federal Register PDF is the one to cite.

The last five business days

What this window covers

The five most recent business days ending on the date this page was last updated, not on today. A page rebuilt from an older set of documents goes on describing that older window rather than sliding forward.

Most of those days are quiet. Memoranda arrive a few times a month rather than daily, so a day with nothing signed on it is the ordinary case and not a hole in what is on record here.

→ . No memoranda were posted in this window. Nothing was signed on , , , , .

The window is empty. The archive has every one.

Earlier

75 memoranda before , back to .

The full archive →

Ask an assistant instead

Everything on this page is also a tool call. Add mcp.downstream.sh as an MCP server in Claude, ChatGPT, or any client that speaks the protocol — no key, no account — then paste this:

Using the Downstream MCP server, list every presidential memorandum that was never printed in the Federal Register, newest first, with how many days old each one is. Then tell me which of them are still the only public text of themselves.

Reaches search_presidential_documents. The response carries its own citations and states what it is missing — including which dates it has no record for.