Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) are draft classified executive orders, proclamations, and messages to Congress that are prepared for the President of the United States to exercise or expand powers in anticipation of a range of emergency hypothetical worst-case scenarios, so that they are ready to sign and put into effect the moment one of those scenarios comes to pass.
[3] No PEADs have been declassified; however, they are referenced in FBI memoranda that were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, agency manuals, and court records.
They are therefore obscure and generally unknown to average Americans, scholars and even Executive branch officials, and are sometimes referred to as "secret powers" of the President.
[3] They even called for the creation of new government agencies to be chaired by a mixture of both civilian businessmen and cabinet secretaries without any scope of their exact function or lifespan, the only focus being on their activation on the day of a nuclear attack.
..." While no declassified PEAD exists, the DRA legislative draft text on censorship and other Presidential Emergency Actions is now in the public domain.
The text of any such censorship PEAD would not be expected to exceed the grant of legislative authority within DRA Title X, based on present understanding.
This committee ended up finding copious amounts of evidence that presidents and their agents had routinely violated the Constitution going back to at least the Roosevelt Administration.
[16] Subsequent investigations have revealed that the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations have continued COG planning and maintained previous PEADs or developed new ones.
"[18] Though there were academic articles and books discussing them since the 1980s, explicit public discussion about PEADS in the media did not begin until March 2020 when President Donald Trump said: "I have the right to do a lot of things that people don't even know about," during a White House press briefing with Prime Minister Leo Varadkar of Ireland[19] leading to an April 10 op-ed in the New York Times by Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice entitled "Trump Has Emergency Powers We Aren't Allowed to Know About.
"[15] This led to several pieces in major news outlets such as CBS News, Politico, and Harper's Weekly, as well as former senior White House officials and Senators going public with what they know of PEADS, such as Former Colorado Senator Gary Hart, Mark Medish, a senior National Security Council director under Clinton, and Joel McCleary, a White House official in the Carter Administration.
On July 22, 2020 a Senate bill, S.4279 or The REIGN Act of 2020, was introduced by Sen. Edward J. Markey D-MA that was the first piece of legislation to directly acknowledge PEADs, making reference to 56 documents described as "presidential emergency action documents" in the budget justification materials for the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice submitted to Congress in support of the budget of the President for fiscal year 2018.
5410 or The National Security Reforms and Accountability Act (NSRAA), that borrows most of the language from the REIGN Act relating to PEADs, was introduced to Congress by James P. McGovern, D-MA, chairman of the House Rules Committee, and Rep. Peter Meijer, R-MI, ranking member of the United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security.
If Congress fails to provide or revokes funding for presidential emergency actions, it is unclear how unpaid federal employees or soldiers would carry them out.
"The constitutional processes for resolving such an impasse may well be political; no federal court has ever ordered Congress to appropriate funds for the Executive Branch.
If the Supreme Court cannot compel Congress to approve money for the Army and Navy, the president might give emergency action orders to the military they are unable to execute.
The Defense Resources Act or similar might address seizure of transportation, but the DRA also contemplates compensation to owners when the federal government commandeers private property.
"[24] The Brennan Center for Justice declared that "we do not know what PEADs contain today" but that in the past, they have been known to include suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.
"[27] Some of the key Supreme Court cases imposing limits on presidential emergency actions include Ex parte Milligan (restricting martial law) and Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer.