Trump Reverses Biden’s Last-Minute Work-At-Home Extension For Federal Employees

US President Joe Biden with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo)

President Donald Trump signed a memo on Friday that would nullify the collective bargaining agreements put in place by former President Joe Biden before leaving office, according to a report.

The memo will instruct federal agencies to reject the last-minute collective bargaining agreements issued by the Biden administration—a move that White House officials claim was intended to “constrain” the Trump administration’s efforts to reform the government, Fox News reported.

The memo prohibits agencies from establishing new collective bargaining agreements during the final 30 days of a president’s term and instructs agency heads to reject any agreements approved by Biden during that time.

Fox added that the White House said collective bargaining agreements enacted before that time period will remain in effect while the Trump administration “negotiates a better deal for the American people.”

In December 2024, Martin O’Malley, Biden’s Social Security Administration Commissioner, reached an in-office work agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees for the agency’s 42,000 employees.

The White House told Fox News Digital that the new policy “ensures the American people get the policies they voted for, instead of being stuck with the wasteful and ineffective Biden policies rejected at the ballot box.”

“The outgoing Biden administration negotiated lame-duck, multi-year collective bargaining agreements — during the week before the inauguration — in an attempt to tie the incoming Trump administration’s hands,” says a White House fact sheet on the memo sent to Fox News.

The White House cited the Biden administration’s Department of Education agreement, which barred the return of remote employees, along with similar agreements from the Biden Small Business Administration and the Federal Trade Commission.

“These CBAs attempt to prevent President Trump from implementing his promises to the American people, such as returning Federal employees to the office to make government operate more efficiently,” the fact sheet says, according to Fox. “President Biden’s term of office ended on January 20th. Under this memorandum, he and future Presidents cannot govern agencies after leaving office by locking in last-minute CBAs.”

The president’s new memo is designed to ensure that federal agencies follow the same rules as private sector unions and employers.

This initiative follows a directive from the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which instructed agency and department heads to inform employees about a new return-to-office order. Under the order, employees are required to work full-time in the office unless they have a qualifying disability or medical condition.

In addition, OPM emailed the entire federal workforce this week, offering those who do not wish to return to the office the option to resign with full pay and benefits until September 30. Employees have until February 6 to make their decision.

Notably, the option is not available to postal workers, military immigration officials, certain national security personnel, or any positions that agencies choose to exempt.

“We’re talking about a friendly takeover, a friendly transition as they like to say, this is a friendly transition, and it is,” Trump said at a press conference days before being inaugurated. “But there are two events that took place that I think are very terrible.”

“One is that if people don’t come back to work, come back into the office, they’re going to be dismissed, and somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that. So that for five years, people don’t have to come back into the office,” Trump added. “It involved 49,000 people for five years. They don’t have to go. They just signed this thing. It’s ridiculous. So it was like a gift to a union, and we’re going to obviously be in court to stop it.”

The AFGE, the largest federal employee union, has vowed to fight Trump’s order, Fox Business added.