According to the Associated Press, Donald Trump is expected to return to the White House next January and is poised to push forward the most dramatic overhaul of government staffing in more than a century.

That's because Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F, a controversial, failed attempt at the end of his first term to strip civil service protections from potentially tens of thousands of career federal employees in “politically relevant” positions and effectively make them exempt employees. Trump and many of his former aides have frequently complained that “rogue bureaucrats” limited his policymaking power during his first term in the White House.

Although President Biden quickly repealed Schedule F when he took office in 2021 — before any positions from the federal government's Competitive Service could be converted — that hasn't stopped Trump and his allies from working on the initiative in absentia. Both the Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute, which have organized dueling unofficial transition projects, have advocated reviving Schedule F, even going so far as to compile lists of more than 50,000 current career civil servants who will have their firing protections revoked and who will be with threaten dismissal.

And the America First Policy Institute, that The New York Times The administration, reported last month, has recently gained favor with Trump after Heritage's transition project and Project 2025 policy playbook proved unpopular with voters. It calls for broader changes, such as converting the entire federal workforce into at-will workers and banning collective bargaining in federal agencies as a whole.

Although Biden has sought to introduce new protections against the politicization of the federal workforce through Office of Personnel Management regulations, he defines “policy-related” workers as political appointees and mandates that agencies that remove workers from competitive service provide current workers with civil service protections must enable. But in interviews earlier this year, experts described the effort as a kind of speed limit.

“Of course, any attempt to reinstate Schedule F would be met immediately with an attempt to stop it in court,” said Donald Kettl, a noted government reform expert and author Government Executive in September. “But my conclusion is that it is probably constitutional. If unions and Democrats go against it, they will likely lose. This route would also require finding a plaintiff with standing to sue – someone who can prove they were injured. It would take time to find the right plaintiff and wait for the Trump administration to take action that spells out the issues just right. . . and then it goes through a massive labyrinth of a process. It would likely take at least two years to resolve the constitutional issues. At that point, even if Appendix F loses, the government would have two years to establish a new practice.”

On labor issues, Trump is likely to revive a series of executive orders that make it easier to fire federal workers and significantly restrict union access to the workplace by driving labor officials out of agency offices and restricting access to official time, a practice that Federal employees who serve as union leaders are compensated by the government for time spent on representative activities such as collective bargaining and representing employees at disciplinary hearings and litigation.

Union officials say their members are in a much stronger position than they were at the start of Trump's first term, thanks in part to a series of executive orders from the Biden administration that encourage agencies to work with labor partners and expand the topics covered the unions are allowed to negotiate with management. Over the past four years, many unions have negotiated contracts that run until after the 2028 presidential election, making it more difficult for agencies to unilaterally implement changes in personnel policies in their bargaining units and unions that represent workers in agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency represented, secured “scientific integrity provisions” to protect employees from retaliation for carrying out their work.

But as with Appendix F, they acknowledged that these provisions may not be foolproof in the event of an all-out attack on organized labor in government.

“If they just ignore the rules, there will be nothing that protects anyone — not even just scientists, but anyone,” Nicole Cantello, legislative and policy coordinator for the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents EPA employees, said in the June: “Sure, that could be a concern for any federal employee, that they don't know what (a second Trump administration) would do about the government.”