If every document linked to the Biden presidency vanished overnight, federal agencies would be unable to verify which procedures were still lawful, which had been replaced since 2017, which were superseded by statute, and which simply no longer exist. Large parts of federal law would become unmapped because modern agencies do not rely on the U.S. Code alone — they rely on the hundreds of documents that interpret the Code into workable, legally compliant procedures. Programs would be halted by attorneys across agencies to avoid unlawful action. Payments, grants, inspections, border processing, security coordination, federal contracting, environmental enforcement, and public-health operations would slow dramatically or stop.
Older documents from earlier administrations would not save the system. Many were superseded, corrected, or partially repealed, and restoring them would create thousands of conflicts with current statutes, court rulings, and budget obligations. Agencies would face incompatible instructions, missing procedures, contradictory authorities, and unclear legal mandates. Career staff would freeze major operations until new guidance existed. Federal workers could not legally guess their way forward.
Within days, this would produce the closest thing the United States has ever seen to administrative paralysis: interagency coordination failures, delayed disaster response, inconsistent border enforcement, suspended regulatory actions, frozen contracting, stalled benefits, and a national-security posture weakened by missing or outdated protocols. It would not resemble policy change; it would resemble disabling the operating system of the federal government while it is running.
In short: eliminating all Biden executive orders is destabilizing. Eliminating all executive documents tied to the entire Biden term is incompatible with the continued functioning of the federal government. It would force a shutdown of major operations until an entirely new governing architecture was rebuilt from scratch.
