They vary widely, including law enforcement officers and technical experts at agencies that Congress created to make rules aimed at ensuring the air and water are clean and food, drugs and consumer products are safe.

Mr. Trump and senior advisers on his team came to believe that career officials who raised objections to their policies on legal or practical grounds — including some of their disputed immigration plans — were deliberately sabotaging their agenda.

“The Biden administration can, if they want, make removing intransigent or poorly performing senior bureaucrats harder on themselves,” said Mr. Sherk, who now works at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials.

“This expected move by the Biden administration to forestall accountability within the bureaucracy against poor performers merely reinforces what we already knew — Schedule F rests on a sound legal foundation, is going to succeed spectacularly and the only chance to stop it is to install procedural roadblocks,” he said.

When the House was still controlled by Democrats in the first two years of Mr. Biden’s presidency, it attached a measure strengthening protections for the merit-based civil service system as an amendment to a “must-pass” annual defense bill in 2022.

Other ideas Democrats proposed included making it harder for a president to offer or bestow pardons in situations that raise suspicion of corruption, to refuse to respond to oversight subpoenas and to take outside payments while in office.

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