With Donald Trump now less than three months away from retaking the White House, an office he won in part by pointing to his record as a businessman, thousands of federal workers in the Washington D.C. region and across the country this week once again adjusted to a new status — as his future employees. And he has signaled many of them could soon be on the chopping block.

Trump, in his formal campaign platform, called to redistribute workers out of the Washington area and implement large-scale cuts to the federal government, which he has long derided as harboring members of the “deep state.” Before leaving office in 2020, he issued an executive order that made tens of thousands of employees subject to firing with little due process if they were found to have resisted the administration’s policies — a move unwound by the Biden administration that Trump’s allies have vowed to restore. His calls for cuts have been amplified by surrogates such as billionaire Elon Musk, who insists such moves are necessary to cut down on waste and inefficiency.

“I think you can’t overstate the effect on the workforce,” Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who presides over a district with tens of thousands of federal workers, said in an interview. “This is going to be the Trump administration we experienced before on steroids.”

The District, Maryland and Virginia are home to about 373,000 federal employees, accounting for roughly 15% of the region’s total workforce. It’s a group accustomed to the disruptions that transitions of power bring to the nation’s capital. But if Trump were to impose the cuts and geographic relocations he has promised, federal workers and others said, that could upend the economic and social fabric that has long shaped the D.C. region.

At least half of the country believes that the government is doing too much that should be left to individuals or the private sector, according to 2023 Gallup polling. On average, the percentage of Americans who saw the government as overreaching exceeded the percentage who saw it as not doing enough by 10 percentage points — 53% to 43% — during President Joe Biden’s first three years in office, continuing a longtime pattern of increased concerns about federal power under Democratic leadership.

The federal workforce grew under Trump during his first term after he added thousands of employees to the Defense Department, the Defense Health Agency and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

While Trump’s transition team did not answer questions about his plans for federal workers, he made clear while campaigning that he is prepared to build on controversial actions taken in his first term against the career employees who have for more than a century operated as the backbone of the federal government. Musk, one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, has proposed instituting a government efficiency commission to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget, a sum far larger than the budgets of the Departments of Defense, Education and Homeland Security combined.

“The mood is not good,” one U.S. Environmental Protection Agency employee, one of several government workers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation and because they were not authorized to speak with the media, said on a lunch break Wednesday. “But I would say the mood is better this time around than in 2016 because it’s less shocking. People are kind of resigned.”

The woman, 37, said she and her co-workers are focused on how to make sure the new administration does not walk back environmental regulations achieved under Biden — an effort that she expects will face pushback from a president-elect who has said he would end “frivolous litigation from the environmental extremists.”

Federal employees are also preparing for changes outlined in Project 2025, a comprehensive plan for a Republican administration written by officials who served in Trump’s first administration. While Trump repeatedly disavowed the blueprint on the campaign trail, experts consider at least some of it likely to come to fruition. Pitched in part by supporters as a vehicle for increasing accountability, tenets of the controversial proposal involve infusing the nonpartisan civil service with Trump loyalists and eliminating the Education Department.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union representing federal employees, with 800,000 members, on Wednesday sounded a defiant tone, vowing to “not stand by and let any political leader — regardless of their political affiliation — run roughshod over the Constitution and our laws.”

The policy known as “Schedule F,” which would strip job protections from many career federal employees in policy roles, is one of several plans by Trump or his Republican allies in Congress to target the workforce — from weakening union protections to requiring that employees return to the offices they largely vacated during the coronavirus pandemic.

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has called for President Joe Biden to mandate that federal workers return to their offices, a move she sees as critical to the vibrancy and economic health of downtown. The Biden White House has stopped short of a requirement but urged its federal employees to work in person.

Before Trump left office in 2020, only the White House budget office had time to scan its rolls to determine who would fit in the new job category known as Schedule F. But the results from just that office alarmed employees across the government: About 90% of the staff members at the Office of Management and Budget were eligible for reclassification.

Biden killed Schedule F with his own executive order in his first days in office, and Democrats tried to pass legislation to block it permanently. But that effort failed in a divided Congress. Instead, the Biden administration this spring instituted a regulation that would make it more burdensome for Trump to reinstate the policy. But the president-elect is expected in a matter of months to roll back the Biden regulation. No one was ever terminated under the rule.

Paul Perez, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the union representing Border Patrol agents, said he is not concerned that Border Patrol agents could be listed under Schedule F. On the campaign trail last month, Trump suggested he would hire an additional 10,000 Border Patrol agents and give them $10,000 signing and retention bonuses. Perez welcomed those proposals, saying, “We’ve had a retention problem for years.”

“We’re excited about having someone we believe is a strong advocate for border security,” Perez said. “We believe that protecting this country has always been his primary mission.”

As part of the Trump coalition’s laser focus on immigration, an organization funded by the Heritage Foundation compiled an online “watch list” of federal employees it claims cannot be trusted to secure the U.S. border. The group unveiled the “DHS Bureaucrat Watch List” during the final weeks of the presidential campaign, threatening to fire 51 federal policy experts and high-ranking leaders, the majority of whom are career civil servants at the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies.

The group identified them largely using public social media comments, prior work experience and campaign finance records.

Doreen Greenwald, a former revenue officer at the Internal Revenue Service who is now president of the National Treasury Employees Union, on Wednesday denied claims by Trump and his allies that career employees have thwarted any presidential agenda, because their job is to help carry out the policies of the party in power.

“The deep state has never existed,” said Greenwald, whose union represents about 150,000 civil servants across about 35 agencies, including the IRS. “Federal employees want to be respected for the work they do and they are focused on what they were hired to do to accomplish a mission. They embrace any new administration.”

Part of Trump’s plan, as outlined in his campaign platform Agenda47, has included moving up to 100,000 federal government positions “out of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America” — a move decried by local leaders who fear it would crater the regional economy.

The first Trump administration moved the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, and relocated the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to the Kansas City region.

Virginia, Maryland and D.C. are among the top four jurisdictions in the country for federal civilian employees: The District has the largest number (160,692), followed by California (142,038), Virginia (140,397) and Maryland (138,942), according to a congressional Research Service report released in September.

Changes to the federal government’s local footprint would create collateral damage, as direct employment or procurement spending account for a percentage of the region’s economy “somewhere in the high 30” range, said Terry Clower, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University.

“It is a clarion call for us in this region to really embrace the notion of, how do we grow our economy with a base of federal employment but much less reliance on the federal sector for our economic success?” he said.

He warned that without swift and serious adjustments, the places most central to life in the region — Metro, schools, businesses — could suffer if cuts come.

Some people who have dedicated much of their careers to the federal government, and to the District, are for the first time seriously considering leaving.

One woman, whose work as a consultant for climate and education policy groups is funded by government grants, said she and her husband, a State Department employee, started talking about moving away from D.C. this spring, when Biden’s campaign was sputtering.

They stopped the conversation when Harris took over the ticket. They liked their life in the District, where they own a home, and they thought the vice president could win.

On Wednesday morning, after the couple dropped their children off at school, her husband turned to her and said, “Well, do we need to start talking about moving again?”

He said he was worried about Schedule F and being forced to take actions that would go against his morals.

“We just renovated our house,” she recalled replying, “but yes.”

They discussed relocating to a francophone part of Africa, because her husband speaks French. Then they spent the day searching online for new jobs.