President

Barack Obama

Twelve years teaching constitutional law. Eight years testing its limits.

Barack Obama was a state senator in Springfield in 2004 and president of the United States in 2009, the first Black man to hold the office in its 220-year history. The Nobel Peace Prize followed less than nine months in, before there was much of a record to pin it to — a point his admirers and his critics have been making ever since, for opposite reasons. Before any of it he organized on Chicago's South Side and wrote a memoir about the father he barely knew. Then the 2010 midterms took the House, and the man who had spent a campaign criticizing his predecessor's use of executive power began governing around Congress instead — by order, by memorandum, by rule. He signed 276 executive orders. Nine in ten have never been revoked.

276

executive orders

138 a term — the lowest rate of the five

326

federal judges confirmed for life

Level with the term before, over the same eight years

of them in the first 565 days

The slowest start of any president here

bills vetoed

6 a term — tied for fewest here

customs-duty figures on this page

The Treasury series does not reach this term

The timeline

Actions that changed something

An action appears here if it passed one of two tests, and only these two: it moved a number you can measure, or it created, removed or handed off a legal power. Being newsworthy is not one of them.

Actions that changed something · 20 January 2009 — 20 January 2017

Hover any milestone for the document and the date.

Crisis, recovery & financeExecutive power & the courtsHealth, rights & criminal justiceWars, treaties & alliances

This timeline covers the presidency only. The page as a whole spans 1996 — present — from his first election to the Illinois Senate — so twelve years in state and federal legislatures fall inside the span of this record without yet being inside the record itself.

13 of 13 written

The deep dives

Six questions are asked of every subject at this tier, in the same words each time — fixing them before choosing the subject is what stops the set being picked to suit an argument. Below those sit the dives specific to what this subject has been: an office-holder and a head of government. The record is not complete until all six of the first group exist, and none of the second group is written before then.

Private MoneyWhat they have, and who pays themRead →The OutputWhat they actually made or did, countedRead →ReachWho they can move, and how manyRead →AffiliationsWho they are tied to, upstream and lateralRead →The Legal RecordEvery matter, by posture, never aggregatedRead →StandingHow they are regarded, measured over timeRead →

Office-holderPolicy Record · Budget & Fiscal Control · Appointments & Personnel · Votes & Positions Over Time

Head of governmentExecutive Power · Foreign Policy & Treaties · Emergency & War Powers

The six moved together or not at all, by design: publishing a legal record for a subject without also publishing their money, output, reach, affiliations and standing would be an attack wearing a template. That gate was passed, and every dive above is now written. This record carries two overlays and therefore seven overlay dives; a record carrying three would have more.

What this record does not cover10 of 42 intersections measured · 6 named

Every phase of this record is written, so this is not a queue. Some of what follows is a limit of the sources; the rest is a decision not to publish a figure that would have to be argued rather than shown.

The eight years in the Illinois Senate, and everything since leaving officeinside the span of this page and not inside its record. The four years in the United States Senate now are: both Congresses, 986 votes, are counted on the votes-and-positions dive. The state legislative votes are not. Illinois collects them, not the federal series every other count here rests on, and putting two collection methods in one figure would make the total look better evidenced than it is

Measured deltas for 32 of the 42 intersections10 carry a figure, the rest are named only

The October 2013 lapse in appropriationsa sixteen-day shutdown belongs in a dive about fiscal control and no primary series quantifying it was sourced, so the budget dive names it and leaves it uncounted

Executive agreementsthe instrument that replaced the treaty, made without the Senate and far more numerous. No consistent public series was sourced, so the treaty dive charts the decline of one instrument and states plainly that it is not evidence of less international commitment

Officials serving in confirmed posts without confirmationnamed as uncounted on the appointments dive here as on the other two records, and unsourced on all three

Why the Senate took 193 recorded votes on nominations in the 113th Congress against 45 in the 114ththe appointments dive reports both counts and asserts no cause, because the rules by which a chamber disposes of nominations are its own

A gap on a page about a named person reads as “nothing to report”. It is not. Nothing here is a judgment about what the missing pieces would show, and nothing here is a promise that they are coming.

How this is counted6 rules

Identical to the rules on the other two records, so the three remain comparable.

Terms are not the same length, and the charts say soThis presidency ran two terms; two of the five in these charts ran one. Every bar in the finished-terms chart is split where the terms meet, so a two-term run reads as two terms rather than as one big number — hover or tap a segment for that term on its own. An earlier version of this page divided the total instead and drew the bars from the rate; the split shows the same correction without asking you to take the arithmetic on trust.

The same numbers as the other records, on purposeExecutive orders, judges and vetoes come from the same sources used on /donald-trump and /joe-biden. Three records quoting different figures for one measure would leave no page obviously the error.

Executive orders counted by their numbers, not by the paperworkA total is the last order number minus the first, because counting the documents instead counts twice any order reprinted as a correction.

A missing row rather than a partial oneCustoms duties appear on the other two records and not on this one. The Treasury series used there begins in March 2015 and covers less than a quarter of this presidency, so the row is dropped rather than shown as a partial total that would read like a whole one.

The count of connected subjects was re-run for this phaseIt stood at 33 as a first pass. Counting again in full raised it to 42, removed one entry that credited him with a Senate rules change, and reworded three that named a number moving without naming the action of his that moved it.

No adjectives, no verdictsThese charts carry counts and dates. Whether any of them is good is a question about values, and the page that takes those on is not built.

A figure on this page is only as good as the rule that produced it, and every rule here was chosen before the figure it produces was known.

Counted as of 2026-08-09. Each linked subject owns its own full series; this page owns only the part attributable to this record. The same record exists for Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The whole collection is one graph on the Dot Network.