President Donald Trump’s executive orders blitz has included demanding investigations into the previous administration, ordering up an increase in criminal cases connected to the border and calling for more death sentences nationwide.

Again and again, Trump’s orders had a common theme: Put the Justice Department on the case.

The executive actions after Trump took office Monday covered a broad array of topics, including birthright citizenship, gender, the World Health Organization and energy policy.

But several of his orders on high-profile matters were notable for the significant role they assigned to the attorney general, emphasizing how much Trump appears to want the Justice Department to act as both investigator and enforcer of his personal and policy wishes.

One order called for an end to “weaponization of the federal government” and tasks the attorney general with looking for any misbehavior within the Justice Department and other agencies during the Biden administration. Another order directs the attorney general to investigate perceived “government censorship of speech” during President Joe Biden’s term. In both cases, the attorney general is tasked with submitting a report to the White House “with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions.”

The lengthy to-do list Trump left for his incoming attorney general in his raft of executive orders helps show how central the president views the Justice Department in his second-term plans, said Stephen A. Saltzburg, a former department official who now teaches at George Washington University Law School.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that President Trump is committed to rejecting completely the traditional separation between the Department of Justice and the White House,” Saltzburg said. “He does not regard the Justice Department as an independent agency. He views it as a part of a unified executive branch. … They work for him.”

Newly inaugurated presidents often quickly sign orders aimed at putting their stamp on the executive branch. Soon after taking office in January 2009, President Barack Obama signed orders that included one ending harsh interrogation techniques. After Biden took office in January 2021, he signed multiple directives breaking with Trump’s actions during his first term, including an order aimed at putting the United States back in the Paris climate accord. (Trump, on Monday, signed his own order once again withdrawing from that climate pact.)

Trump, though, assumed office this week after long raging against the Justice Department, saying that the agency “has been weaponized against me and other Republicans” and expressing a desire to exert more control over it. During his presidential campaign, Trump told advisers and friends he wanted the Justice Department to investigate his critics and also spoke of prosecuting officials there and at the FBI, The Washington Post has reported.

In his order decrying “weaponization,” Trump used part of the text to reiterate his long-standing claims that the Biden administration targeted political opponents with “investigations, prosecutions, civil enforcement actions” and other tactics.

Trump directed the attorney general to review federal agencies and departments — including the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission — for any signs of political bias during the Biden years. Trump also ordered the Director of National Intelligence to conduct a similar review of the intelligence community during Biden’s term.

The weaponization order leaves unclear precisely what the scope of these reviews would entail, including whether the resulting reports would be made public or potentially recommend any criminal charges. The order only states that these reviews are needed “to ensure accountability” and “correct past misconduct.”

Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, said during her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing Jan. 15 that there would “never be an enemies list” within the department. She sidestepped questions about Trump’s threats to prosecute specific adversaries.

James R. McHenry III, who ran immigration courts at the Justice Department during Trump’s first term, is serving as acting attorney general while Bondi awaits a confirmation vote.

The Justice Department did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment on what actions it might take in response to the president’s orders this week.

There have been some signs of movement. As directed in one of Trump’s executive orders, Justice Department lawyers filed to drop charges against several defendants with pending cases tied to their alleged participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Saltzburg, the former department official, said it was not unusual for incoming presidents to aim to deliver on campaign promises or set clear priorities for executive branch employees from the first days of their administration.

“In the past, the way presidents would do that, they’d let it be known in their meetings with their Cabinet,” Saltzburg said. Of Trump’s executive orders Monday, he said: “To the extent they’re establishing priorities, I don’t think it’s any different than what past presidents have done. It’s just coming in a different form.”

What was unusual about some of the orders, Saltzburg and other former Justice Department officials said, was what they were directing.

Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who now leads the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University, said the order demanding scrutiny on the Biden administration’s actions runs counter to the spirit of policies that have long discouraged communication between the Justice Department and the White House about ongoing investigations.

“It’s not the clearest thing in the world,” she said of that order. “But there’s no indication in this executive order that there is respect for the ‘no contacts’ policy — that there won’t be communications about specific investigations and prosecutions.”

Trump also gave the attorney general tasks related to other issues, including gender and immigration. In one order, he directed the official to “issue guidance to ensure the freedom to express the binary nature of sex.”

In another, Trump ordered the attorney general and Homeland Security secretary to “prioritize the prosecution of offenses that relate to the borders of the United States.”

Trump, a long-standing supporter of the death penalty, used another order to give his attorney general broad instructions to boost use of capital punishment nationwide.

In recent decades, the death penalty’s usage has declined across the country, with executions and new death sentences both significantly down. A Washington Post examination last year found that approximately 2,100 people were on death row, and many of them appeared likely to die there without being executed.

During Trump’s first term, his administration carried out 13 executions. Under Biden, the Justice Department imposed a moratorium on federal executions.

Trump used his order Monday to direct the attorney general to pursue more death sentences in federal cases overall. In addition, he told the attorney general to pursue death sentences “for every federal capital crime” in which a law enforcement officer is murdered or when the defendant is in the country illegally.

The death penalty order appeared aimed at encouraging more death sentences and executions across the country, even beyond federal cases.

Trump wrote that the attorney general should encourage state and local officials to bring more capital cases. He also told the attorney general to help states obtain drugs for lethal injections; in some places, officials have said they could not carry out executions because they were unable to get the drugs involved.

Trump also used the order to assail Biden for his decision last month to commute 37 of the 40 sentences of people on federal death row. Biden changed their sentences to life in prison without parole, leaving three people sentenced to death: the surviving Boston Marathon bomber and gunmen who massacred people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015 and a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

While Trump cannot undo those commutations, he did raise the possibility that his administration could push to have those people sentenced to death again. In his order, Trump directed the attorney general to examine whether they could face new trials on state-level capital crimes. Then, he wrote, the attorney general should “recommend appropriate action to state and local authorities.”

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