3. Central Personnel Agencies · Notable
Reinstate Executive Order 13836 on collective bargaining agreements
Printed page 82 3. Central Personnel Agencies
“Executive Order 13836, encouraging agencies to renegotiate all union collective bargaining agreements to ensure consistency with the law and respect for management rights … All were revoked by the Biden Administration and should be reinstated by the next Administration”
What has happened
- Partially done
Executive Order 13836 has not been reinstated, and no government-wide renegotiation of collective bargaining agreements has been ordered. What the administration did instead is narrower in reach and harsher inside it: OPM told every agency covered by the labor-relations exclusion orders to notify its unions that their agreements are terminated, supplied a template termination notice and required monthly reporting until every notice is executed. That disposes of the agreements at the excluded agencies rather than bringing them into line with the law and management rights, and it leaves agreements at agencies still covered by Chapter 71 untouched. Partial on delivery of a piece.
- Attempted
The President went at the agreements the Mandate is worried about without reissuing the order. The memorandum on lame-duck collective bargaining agreements bars agencies from making, substantively changing or extending a CBA in the 30 days before a change of administration and directs agency heads to disapprove any that were executed in that window — naming the Department of Education's agreement of 2025-01-17, signed three days before the inauguration, which barred the agency from recalling remote employees. A rule about future and pending agreements, leaving existing ones in place.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Researched 2026-08-27.
EO 13836 was not reissued: the Federal Register full-text API for “13836” since 2025-01-20 returns three documents, none of them relevant (a resource advisory committee notice, a sanctions rule, a species status review), and the full list of executive orders in the window contains no reissue.
What exists instead is a two-step attack on the same object:
- Presidential Memorandum of 2025-01-31, “Limiting Lame-Duck Collective Bargaining Agreements That Improperly Attempt To Constrain the New President”, read in full. Agencies may not make a CBA in the 30 days before a change of administration that creates new obligations, makes substantive changes or extends an agreement; where subordinate personnel executed one, “such agency head shall promptly disapprove such agreement”. Its worked example is the Department of Education’s CBA of 2025-01-17, which “generally prohibits the agency from returning remote employees to their offices.”
- OPM memorandum of 2026-02-12, which directs agencies covered by EO 14251 and EO 14343 to terminate their CBAs outright, with monthly reporting to OPM.
Neither is EO 13836’s own mechanism — a government-wide instruction to renegotiate every agreement for consistency with law and management rights, supported by the interagency Labor Relations Group. Termination at excluded agencies plus a lame-duck bar at the rest is a different, narrower and in places harsher instrument.
- Action
- reinstate
- Object
- Executive Order 13836
- ID
- 127