2. Executive Office of the President · Notable
Reinstate Executive Orders 13891 and 13892 on agency guidance documents
Printed page 49 2. Executive Office of the President
“The next President should also revive the directive in Executive Order 13891 that significant guidance documents also must pass through OIRA review.”
Printed again in Chapter 11.
Printed page 357 11. Department of Education
“The President should immediately reinstate and reissue Executive Order 13891: Promoting the Rule of Law Through Improved Agency Guidance Documents, 84 Fed. Reg. 55235 (Oct. 9, 2019), and Executive Order 13892: Promoting the Rule of Law Through Transparency and Fairness in Civil Administrative Enforcement and Adjudication (Oct. 15, 2019).”
What has happened
- Partially done
The same machinery was extended to the independent agencies. M-25-24, implementing section 3 of EO 14215, defines "regulatory action" for those agencies to include agency "guidance documents, whether published in the Federal Register or elsewhere", again using the definition in section 2(b) of EO 13891, and requires them to be submitted to OIRA for a significance determination. EO 14219 had already, on 19 February 2025, folded "guidance document" as defined in EO 13422 into the unlawful-regulation review. The directive lives on in guidance; the orders themselves do not.
- Partially done
The substance of EO 13891's directive is operating again without the order being revived. M-25-20 defines an "EO 14192 regulatory action" to include "a significant guidance document, broadly conceived (e.g., significant interpretive guidance) reviewed by OIRA under the procedures of EO 12866", and defines "significant guidance document" by importing EO 13891's own definition — with the telling qualifier "when that order was in effect". Significant guidance is therefore back inside OIRA review and inside the regulatory budget, but EO 13891 and EO 13892 have not been reissued and neither has the public guidance portal each agency was required to build.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
Leveled the same way as #51 in this chapter: an order’s substance revived by a different instrument is partial, not done, when the order itself has not been re-issued. The reading is confirmed by M-25-20’s own parenthetical that EO 13891’s definition applied “when that order was in effect” — OIRA is quoting a revoked order for its definition, not reviving it.
An earlier review recorded M-25-24 as a lead because its PDF text could not be read; it reads cleanly, and it is used as Evidence here and on #43.
- Action
- reinstate
- Object
- Executive Order 13891 guidance-document review directive
- ID
- 47