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

3. Central Personnel Agencies · Notable

Reissue Executive Order 13839 on removal procedures

Partially done

73 3. Central Personnel Agencies

“Unfortunately, the order was overturned by the Biden Administration, so it will need to be reintroduced in 2025.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    Half of the July proposal became final. The Merit Systems Protection Board, finalizing only its own part of the joint rulemaking under the title "Determining the Appropriate Penalty for Federal Employees Charged With Misconduct", amended 5 CFR 1201.56 so that the Board will no longer require the twelve Douglas factors to be considered in every case and will instead ask whether an agency's penalty in a 5 U.S.C. 7513 adverse action is within the tolerable limits of reasonableness on the totality of the circumstances. Effective 2026-10-05, for appeals filed on or after that date. OPM's part of the proposal — no required progressive discipline, no penalty tables, the bar on settlement agreements that clean an employee's record — is not finalized here; the Board says OPM "is finalizing its proposals separately". Still partial: a regulation carrying some of EO 13839's content is now final, the rest is a proposal, and the order the Quote names remains unissued.

  2. Partially done

    OPM and the Merit Systems Protection Board jointly proposed to write EO 13839's content into the regulations: no required progressive discipline, no mandatory or recommended penalty tables, the Douglas factors retired in favor of a totality-of-the-circumstances penalty review, and a bar on settlement agreements that erase performance or conduct records from an employee's file. The proposed rule cites EO 13839 throughout as the source of the policies it is codifying. Still partial at the close of the evidence window: this is a proposal, no final rule had issued, and the order the Quote names remains unissued.

  3. Partially done

    The policies came back; the order did not. Executive Order 14148 revoked President Biden's Executive Order 14003, and section 6 of Executive Order 14171 directed agencies to reverse the policy changes made under 14003 — which, as OPM puts it, "on net directed agencies to return to the disciplinary and unacceptable performance policies implemented pursuant to E.O. 13839." OPM's own position is that "E.O. 13839 is not currently in effect". Partial rather than done because the Mandate asks for the order itself to be reintroduced and it was not; the substance was restored by a cross-reference inside a different order.

Research log

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

Research notes

Researched 2026-08-27.

No executive order reissued EO 13839. Checked directly: the Federal Register full-text API for “13839” since 2025-01-20 returns seven documents, and only two are on point — OPM’s Promoting Employee Accountability proposed rule and the Reduction in Force proposed rule. The complete list of 251 executive orders in the window (presidential documents in the Federal Register, EO 14170 through EO 14420) contains no reissue.

What happened instead, in OPM’s own words in the 2026-07-02 proposed rule (read on govinfo.gov):

“Shortly after taking the oath of office on January 20, 2025, President Trump revoked E.O. 14003 and restored the policies of E.O. 13839.”

and, in the footnote, “section 6 of E.O. 14171 directed agencies to reverse changes to agency policies pertaining to disciplinary actions and unacceptable performance effectuated under E.O. 14003. That order in turn had required agencies to reverse changes to such policies effectuated under E.O. 13839. Consequently, E.O. 14171 on net directed agencies to return to the disciplinary and unacceptable performance policies implemented pursuant to E.O. 13839.”

and, on the order’s own status: “While E.O. 13839 is not currently in effect, President Trump directed agencies to rescind regulations and other policies implemented pursuant to E.O. 14003.”

The proposed rule would codify EO 13839’s substance — no mandatory progressive discipline, no penalty tables, retiring the Douglas factors in favor of a totality-of-the-circumstances test, and the ban on settlement agreements that scrub performance or conduct records. It had not been finalized by 2026-08-28. On 2026-09-03 the Board finalized its own half — the penalty-review standard at 5 CFR 1201.56 — as a separate final rule, recorded as an event above; OPM’s half was still a proposal on 2026-09-06 (Federal Register search for RIN 3206-AO91: the July proposal and the Board’s final rule, nothing else).

Reviewed 2026-09-24. OPM’s half is still a proposal, and the comment period was reopened. On 2026-09-15 OPM reopened the Promoting Employee Accountability rulemaking (docket 2025-OPM-0012) for two weeks, releasing “current data that is relevant to the proposed rule” and inviting comment on it and on a report published by We the Doers on 2026-08-27; the original comment period had closed on 2026-08-03 (FR 2026-18943, 2026-09-15, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/09/15/2026-18943/promoting-employee-accountability). No rung moves — reopening a comment period is not a step in the sequence, the reading this record takes for comment-period extensions elsewhere — but it is dated activity on this item’s own instrument and it dates OPM’s half as still unfinished. A first reading from the notice’s Federal Register title and abstract alone was checked against the full notice, read on govinfo.gov, and it holds. The reopened period closes 2026-09-29, and OPM will consider only comments that “address the data published in the supplementary information” — OPM data through June 2026, and the We the Doers report Fast but Fair Federal Firing, which the notice summarizes.

Action
reinstate
Object
Executive Order 13839
ID
111