Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

3. Central Personnel Agencies · Notable

Reinstate Executive Order 13837 on official union time

Partially done

82 3. Central Personnel Agencies

“Executive Order 13837, encouraging agencies to prevent union representatives from using official time preparing or pursuing grievances or from engaging in other union activity on government time … All were revoked by the Biden Administration and should be reinstated by the next Administration”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The reporting is back; the limits are not. OPM revived the government-wide accounting of taxpayer-funded union time that Executive Order 13837 created, requiring agencies to report FY2024 hours and collective bargaining expenses and then the same for FY2025, and published the results: 3.24 million hours costing more than $207 million, a rise of nearly 20% in the rate of use since 2019. In July 2026 OPM and the Merit Systems Protection Board proposed to bar official time for representing employees in removal and adverse-action proceedings, expressly "consistent with the policies of E.O. 13837", but that rule was not final at the close of the window. The order itself was not reissued and its operative ceilings — an hour per bargaining unit employee, a quarter of any employee's time, and no official time to prepare grievances — are not in force.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Researched 2026-08-27.

EO 13837 was not reissued — the Federal Register full-text search for “13837” since 2025-01-20 returns three documents, only one of which is on point, and the executive order list contains no reissue.

What came back is the order’s transparency half plus a proposal aimed at its substance:

  • OPM memorandum of 2026-01-30, read in full: OPM required agencies to report FY2024 taxpayer-funded union time and collective bargaining expenses, published “TFUT Usage in the Federal Government: Fiscal Year 2024” in August 2025 — 3.24 million hours at a cost of more than $207 million, a nearly 20% rise in the rate of use since FY2019 — and required the same reporting for FY2025 by 2026-02-23. The reporting categories are EO 13837’s: term negotiations, mid-term negotiations, dispute resolution, general labor-management relations, and hours per bargaining unit employee.
  • OPM/MSPB proposed rule of 2026-07-02: would bar agencies from agreeing to, or authorizing under 5 U.S.C. 7131(d), taxpayer-funded union time for representing employees in performance-based and adverse-action proceedings — “consistent with the policies of E.O. 13837”. Not final at the close of the window.
  • EO 14251 and EO 14343 remove official time altogether wherever they reach, by removing the bargaining relationship.

Not delivered: EO 13837’s operative limits — the one-hour-per-bargaining-unit-employee ceiling, the 25% cap on any employee’s time, and the bar on using official time to prepare grievances — none of which has been reimposed by order or rule.

  • 2026-09-03 (reviewed 2026-09-06): the Board finalized only its own part of the July proposal, the penalty-review standard at 5 CFR 1201.56. The official-time bar is OPM’s provision; the Board’s preamble says OPM “is finalizing its proposals separately”, and it was not final on 2026-09-06.
Action
reinstate
Object
Executive Order 13837
ID
128