Every number in this report comes from the United States Senate's official table, Vetoes, 1789 to Present, which records regular vetoes, pocket vetoes, totals, and overrides for every president, cross-checked against The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara and the Congressional Research Service report Regular Vetoes and Pocket Vetoes: In Brief (RS22188). The Senate table counts 1,533 regular vetoes, 1,066 pocket vetoes, 2,599 total vetoes, and 112 overrides through July 2026 (Senate.gov). Grover Cleveland's two non-consecutive administrations are combined into one record, as are Donald Trump's.
The primary ranking metric is total vetoes, a direct measure of how hard a president wielded the pen. Ranks 1 through 20 list the twenty highest totals. Ranks 21 through 25 are not the next-highest totals; they are five landmark low-volume records selected for documented historical significance, the first veto, the first override, the veto's transformation into a policy weapon, the worst override rate, and the current president, and each entry says why it is included. Override rate is computed as overrides divided by regular vetoes only, because pocket vetoes cannot be overridden (CRS RS22188).
The framework pays no attention to which party a president belonged to, or to whether any particular veto was wise. Volume, overrides, and rates are counted, not graded for virtue. Seven presidents who never vetoed anything are covered in the narrative rather than ranked.
", "entries": [ { "rank": 1, "name": "Franklin D. Roosevelt", "detail": "President 1933-1945", "score": "635", "blurb": "The record holder: 372 regular vetoes and 263 pocket vetoes across twelve years, with only 9 overridden, an override rate of 2.4 percent of regular vetoes (Senate.gov). He reportedly told aides to find him something to veto, to remind Congress it was being watched." }, { "rank": 2, "name": "Grover Cleveland", "detail": "President 1885-1889 and 1893-1897", "score": "584", "blurb": "Both terms combined: 346 regular and 238 pocket vetoes, 7 overridden (Senate.gov). His 414 first-term vetoes, most against private Civil War pension bills, remain the most of any single four-year term in history." }, { "rank": 3, "name": "Harry S. Truman", "detail": "President 1945-1953", "score": "250", "blurb": "180 regular and 70 pocket vetoes, 12 overridden, tied for the second-most overrides ever (Senate.gov). The overrides included the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) and the McCarran-Walter Act (1952), two of the most consequential overrides in history." }, { "rank": 4, "name": "Dwight D. Eisenhower", "detail": "President 1953-1961", "score": "181", "blurb": "73 regular and 108 pocket vetoes with only 2 overridden (Senate.gov). Eisenhower is the heaviest pocket-veto user of the postwar era, killing more bills silently than with signed veto messages." }, { "rank": 5, "name": "Ulysses S. Grant", "detail": "President 1869-1877", "score": "93", "blurb": "45 regular and 48 pocket vetoes, 4 overridden (Senate.gov). His 1874 veto of the Inflation Bill, against heavy pressure from his own party, is credited by historians with setting the country back toward the gold standard." }, { "rank": 6, "name": "Theodore Roosevelt", "detail": "President 1901-1909", "score": "82", "blurb": "42 regular and 40 pocket vetoes, 1 overridden (Senate.gov). High volume for a president whose party controlled Congress for all eight years." }, { "rank": 7, "name": "Ronald Reagan", "detail": "President 1981-1989", "score": "78", "blurb": "39 regular and 39 pocket vetoes, 9 overridden (Senate.gov). The overrides included the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (1986), the first override of a presidential foreign policy veto in the 20th century, and the Civil Rights Restoration Act (1988)." }, { "rank": 8, "name": "Gerald R. Ford", "detail": "President 1974-1977", "score": "66", "blurb": "48 regular and 18 pocket vetoes in under two and a half years, with 12 overridden, tied for second-most ever (Senate.gov). An unelected president facing a two-thirds-scale opposition Congress used the veto as his primary policy tool and paid the override price." }, { "rank": 9, "name": "Calvin Coolidge", "detail": "President 1923-1929", "score": "50", "blurb": "20 regular and 30 pocket vetoes, 4 overridden (Senate.gov). He twice vetoed the McNary-Haugen farm subsidy bill (1927, 1928), and both vetoes held." }, { "rank": 10, "name": "Woodrow Wilson", "detail": "President 1913-1921", "score": "44", "blurb": "33 regular and 11 pocket vetoes, 6 overridden (Senate.gov). Congress overrode his veto of the Volstead Act in 1919, putting Prohibition enforcement into law over his objection." }, { "rank": 11, "name": "George H. W. Bush", "detail": "President 1989-1993", "score": "44", "blurb": "29 regular and 15 pocket vetoes, 1 overridden, a 3.4 percent override rate against a Congress controlled by the opposition for all four years (Senate.gov). Only the 1992 cable television reregulation bill beat him." }, { "rank": 12, "name": "Benjamin Harrison", "detail": "President 1889-1893", "score": "44", "blurb": "19 regular and 25 pocket vetoes, 1 overridden (Senate.gov). Sandwiched between Cleveland's two record-setting terms, Harrison kept the pen busy at a fraction of his rival's pace." }, { "rank": 13, "name": "Richard M. Nixon", "detail": "President 1969-1974", "score": "43", "blurb": "26 regular and 17 pocket vetoes, 7 overridden (Senate.gov). The most consequential override in modern history came against him: the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which still governs war-making authority." }, { "rank": 14, "name": "William McKinley", "detail": "President 1897-1901", "score": "42", "blurb": "6 regular and 36 pocket vetoes, none overridden (Senate.gov). McKinley is the most lopsided pocket-vetoer among high-volume presidents, killing bills silently six times more often than openly." }, { "rank": 15, "name": "William H. Taft", "detail": "President 1909-1913", "score": "39", "blurb": "30 regular and 9 pocket vetoes, 1 overridden (Senate.gov). His vetoes of statehood resolutions forced Arizona to strip judicial recall from its proposed constitution before admission in 1912." }, { "rank": 16, "name": "Herbert Hoover", "detail": "President 1929-1933", "score": "37", "blurb": "21 regular and 16 pocket vetoes, 3 overridden (Senate.gov). Depression-era Congresses beat him on veterans' compensation in 1931, an early sign of his collapsing position." }, { "rank": 17, "name": "William J. Clinton", "detail": "President 1993-2001", "score": "37", "blurb": "36 regular vetoes and 1 pocket veto, 2 overridden (Senate.gov). His line-item veto, used on 82 items before the Supreme Court struck the Line Item Veto Act down in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), is counted separately by CRS and not in this total." }, { "rank": 18, "name": "Jimmy Carter", "detail": "President 1977-1981", "score": "31", "blurb": "13 regular and 18 pocket vetoes, 2 overridden (Senate.gov). Both overrides came from a Congress controlled by his own party, a rarity in the modern era." }, { "rank": 19, "name": "Lyndon B. Johnson", "detail": "President 1963-1969", "score": "30", "blurb": "16 regular and 14 pocket vetoes, none overridden (Senate.gov). Johnson and Kennedy together went 51 vetoes without a single override, the longest clean streak of the postwar presidency." }, { "rank": 20, "name": "Andrew Johnson", "detail": "President 1865-1869", "score": "29", "blurb": "21 regular and 8 pocket vetoes, 15 overridden, the most overrides of any president ever (Senate.gov). Congress overrode 71 percent of his regular vetoes, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Acts, effectively governing past him." }, { "rank": 21, "name": "Franklin Pierce", "detail": "President 1853-1857, notable record: worst override rate", "score": "9", "blurb": "9 regular vetoes, 5 overridden, a 56 percent override rate, the worst of any president with multiple vetoes (Senate.gov). The 34th Congress overrode five Pierce vetoes on rivers and harbors bills in his final year." }, { "rank": 22, "name": "Andrew Jackson", "detail": "President 1829-1837, notable record: made the veto a policy weapon", "score": "12", "blurb": "5 regular and 7 pocket vetoes, none overridden (Senate.gov). His 1832 veto of the Second Bank of the United States recharter was the first veto grounded in policy disagreement rather than constitutional objection, and it permanently changed the office." }, { "rank": 23, "name": "Donald J. Trump", "detail": "President 2017-2021 and 2025-present, notable record: current president", "score": "12", "blurb": "10 vetoes in the first administration with 1 overridden, the FY2021 National Defense Authorization Act, plus 2 vetoes so far in the second administration, both issued December 29, 2025, with no overrides as of July 2026 (Senate.gov)." }, { "rank": 24, "name": "John Tyler", "detail": "President 1841-1845, notable record: first override in history", "score": "10", "blurb": "6 regular and 4 pocket vetoes, 1 overridden (Senate.gov). On March 3, 1845, his last full day in office, Congress overrode his veto of a revenue cutter bill, the first successful override in American history." }, { "rank": 25, "name": "George Washington", "detail": "President 1789-1797, notable record: the first veto", "score": "2", "blurb": "2 regular vetoes, none overridden (Senate.gov). His April 5, 1792 veto of the apportionment bill, on constitutional grounds argued by Jefferson, was the first exercise of the power, and Congress sustained it and passed a new bill." } ], "narrative": [ { "heading": "The official count", "html": "The Senate keeps the ledger. From 1789 through July 2026, presidents have vetoed 2,599 bills: 1,533 by regular veto and 1,066 by pocket veto. Congress has overridden 112, which works out to 7.3 percent of regular vetoes, the only kind that can be overridden (Senate.gov, Vetoes, 1789 to Present). Those four numbers frame everything in this report.
The distribution is wildly top-heavy. Franklin Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland together account for 1,219 vetoes, roughly 47 percent of every veto ever cast. Seven presidents never vetoed anything at all. The framework pays no attention to which party a president belonged to; the pen has been wielded hard and been overruled hard on both sides of the aisle.
" }, { "heading": "Who wielded the pen hardest", "html": "Franklin Roosevelt is first by a wide margin: 635 vetoes in twelve years, an average of one roughly every week of his presidency, with only nine overridden (Senate.gov). One of those nine was historic in its own right: the Revenue Act of 1944, the first revenue bill ever passed over a presidential veto.
Cleveland's 584 is the more remarkable number per year. His first term alone produced 414 vetoes, still the record for a single four-year term. The bulk were private pension bills for Civil War veterans that Cleveland judged fraudulent or unsupported, and he read the case files himself. Congress overrode him just twice in that term (Senate.gov). Whatever one thinks of the policy, the volume is documented and unmatched.
Truman's 250 and Eisenhower's 181 round out the heavyweight class, and Eisenhower's split is notable: 108 of his 181 were pocket vetoes, bills killed by silence at the end of a session. The pocket veto leaves Congress no override, which is why the override-rate math in this report uses regular vetoes only (CRS RS22188).
" }, { "heading": "Who got overruled", "html": "Andrew Johnson owns the override record and it is not close: 15 of his 21 regular vetoes were overridden, 71 percent (Senate.gov). Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Acts, and the Tenure of Office Act over his signature, then impeached him when he defied the last of these. For roughly three years, the country was effectively governed by a two-thirds coalition legislating past the president.
Ford and Truman tie for second at 12 overrides each, but the stories differ. Truman's dozen came across eight years and included Taft-Hartley (1947), which still governs American labor law, and the McCarran-Walter immigration act (1952). Ford's dozen came in 29 months. An appointed president with no electoral mandate faced a post-Watergate Congress and used the veto 66 times as his main lever; Congress beat him on a quarter of his regular vetoes (Senate.gov).
Franklin Pierce's record is the worst by rate: five of nine regular vetoes overridden, 56 percent, all five on internal improvement bills in 1856 (Senate.gov). And the single most consequential override belongs to Nixon's ledger: the War Powers Resolution of November 1973, passed over his veto, still constrains every commander in chief.
" }, { "heading": "The zero club and the vanishing veto", "html": "Seven presidents never vetoed a single bill: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and James Garfield (Senate.gov). Two of those served under a month and a year respectively, but Jefferson's eight veto-free years were a deliberate constitutional philosophy: he believed the veto was reserved for unconstitutional bills, and none in his judgment crossed the line.
The modern story is the veto's near-disappearance. George W. Bush vetoed 12 bills, Obama 12, Trump 10 in his first term, Biden 13, and Trump 2 so far in his second (Senate.gov). Compare Ford's 66 in under three years. The cause is documented in congressional output itself: polarized parties rarely pass bills a hostile president would need to veto, because such bills die in the other chamber or by filibuster first. The veto fight has moved upstream into Congress. Trump's two second-term vetoes, both issued December 29, 2025, struck bipartisan bills on a Colorado water pipeline (H.R. 131) and Miccosukee Tribe lands in Florida (H.R. 504), and neither has been overridden as of July 2026 (Senate.gov; NPR, December 31, 2025).
" }, { "heading": "What the veto record actually measures", "html": "Veto volume is not a virtue score. It measures friction between the branches and a president's willingness to spend political capital on saying no. Cleveland's 584 vetoes reflect a president at war with pension fraud in his own era's spending. FDR's 635 reflect total legislative dominance; he could veto freely because overrides were nearly impossible. Ford's 66 reflect weakness, not strength, a president with no other tool.
Override counts measure something cleaner: the moments Congress mustered a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers against a sitting president. That has happened only 112 times in 237 years (Senate.gov). Each one is a documented constitutional event, and the presidents who accumulated them, Johnson with 15, Truman and Ford with 12, were presidents whose vetoes Congress judged worth the extraordinary effort of overruling. The pen is powerful. The record shows exactly when it was not powerful enough.
Two structural notes complete the picture. First, the pocket veto, killing a bill by inaction when Congress adjourns, accounts for 1,066 of the 2,599 total vetoes, and it is absolute: no override is possible (CRS RS22188). Presidents who leaned on it, McKinley with 36 of his 42, Eisenhower with 108 of his 181, ran essentially no override risk by design. Second, the threatened veto never appears in these tables at all. The Statement of Administration Policy, the formal document by which modern presidents warn Congress that a bill will be vetoed, kills or reshapes far more legislation than actual vetoes do, and it leaves no Senate ledger entry. The official count in this report is therefore a floor on veto power, not a ceiling. What it measures with precision is the visible collisions, 2,599 of them, and the 112 times in 237 years that Congress won the collision outright (Senate.gov).
" } ], "settled": "The official numbers are settled beyond argument because the Senate publishes them: 2,599 total vetoes, 112 overrides, Franklin Roosevelt first in volume with 635, Cleveland second with 584, and Andrew Johnson first in overrides with 15 of 21 regular vetoes overturned (Senate.gov). It is also settled that the veto has collapsed in the modern era: the last four presidencies have produced fewer combined vetoes than Gerald Ford issued in 29 months.", "contested": "What the counts mean is legitimately contested. High volume can indicate strength, as with FDR, or isolation, as with Ford, and the raw number cannot distinguish them. Pocket veto counting has genuine disputes: the Senate table itself footnotes a contested Grant pocket veto and two disputed George H. W. Bush intra-session pocket vetoes, and scholars disagree about whether intra-session pocket vetoes are constitutional at all. And because Trump's second term runs through July 2026 with Congress still in session, his combined record of 12 is a live number that may change before the term ends.", "charts": [ { "type": "bar", "title": "Most total vetoes, all presidents", "unit": "vetoes", "data": [ { "label": "F. Roosevelt", "value": 635 }, { "label": "Cleveland", "value": 584 }, { "label": "Truman", "value": 250 }, { "label": "Eisenhower", "value": 181 }, { "label": "Grant", "value": 93 }, { "label": "T. Roosevelt", "value": 82 }, { "label": "Reagan", "value": 78 }, { "label": "Ford", "value": 66 } ] }, { "type": "bar", "title": "Most vetoes overridden by Congress", "unit": "overrides", "data": [ { "label": "A. Johnson", "value": 15 }, { "label": "Truman", "value": 12 }, { "label": "Ford", "value": 12 }, { "label": "F. Roosevelt", "value": 9 }, { "label": "Reagan", "value": 9 }, { "label": "Cleveland", "value": 7 }, { "label": "Nixon", "value": 7 }, { "label": "Wilson", "value": 6 }, { "label": "Pierce", "value": 5 } ] }, { "type": "diverging", "title": "Override rate vs. the historical average of 7.3 percent (regular vetoes only)", "unit": "percentage points", "data": [ { "label": "A. Johnson", "value": 64.1 }, { "label": "Pierce", "value": 48.3 }, { "label": "Nixon", "value": 19.6 }, { "label": "Ford", "value": 17.7 }, { "label": "Reagan", "value": 15.8 }, { "label": "Truman", "value": -0.6 }, { "label": "Eisenhower", "value": -4.6 }, { "label": "F. Roosevelt", "value": -4.9 }, { "label": "Cleveland", "value": -5.3 } ] } ], "sources": [ { "title": "U.S. Senate, Vetoes, 1789 to Present (official summary table)", "url": "https://www.senate.gov/legislative/vetoes/vetoCounts.htm" }, { "title": "U.S. Senate, Vetoes by President Donald J. Trump (2025-2029)", "url": "https://www.senate.gov/legislative/vetoes/TrumpDJ2.htm" }, { "title": "The American Presidency Project, Presidential Vetoes statistics", "url": "https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/presidential-vetoes" }, { "title": "Congressional Research Service, Regular Vetoes and Pocket Vetoes: In Brief (RS22188)", "url": "https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RS22188" }, { "title": "Congressional Research Service, Presidential Vetoes 1789-Present: A Summary Overview (98-148)", "url": "https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/98-148.html" }, { "title": "NPR, Trump just vetoed 2 bills that had passed Congress with broad bipartisan support, December 31, 2025", "url": "https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/nx-s1-5662531/trump-just-vetoed-2-bills-that-had-passed-congress-with-broad-bipartisan-support" }, { "title": "Ballotpedia, Joe Biden: Vetoed legislation", "url": "https://ballotpedia.org/Joe_Biden:_Vetoed_legislation" }, { "title": "Justia, Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417 (1998)", "url": "https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/524/417/" } ], "faq": [ { "q": "Which president vetoed the most bills?", "a": "Franklin D. Roosevelt, with 635 vetoes, 372 regular and 263 pocket, across twelve years, per the official Senate table. Grover Cleveland is second with 584 across his two non-consecutive terms, and his 414 first-term vetoes remain the most in any single term." }, { "q": "Which president had the most vetoes overridden?", "a": "Andrew Johnson, with 15 overrides out of 21 regular vetoes, a 71 percent override rate. Congress overrode him on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Acts, then impeached him in 1868." }, { "q": "How many presidential vetoes have there been in total?", "a": "Through July 2026 the Senate counts 2,599 total vetoes, 1,533 regular and 1,066 pocket, with 112 overridden by Congress. That is an override rate of about 7.3 percent of regular vetoes." }, { "q": "Has President Trump vetoed anything in his second term?", "a": "Yes. As of July 2026 he has issued 2 second-term vetoes, both on December 29, 2025, rejecting H.R. 131, a Colorado water pipeline bill, and H.R. 504, a Miccosukee Tribe lands bill. Neither has been overridden. His first term produced 10 vetoes with 1 override." } ] }