From greenlighting new union protections for federal workers to approving last-minute energy rules, Biden administration officials spent the weeks after Trump’s election making moves to complicate the incoming president’s agenda. Some of those efforts began months before the votes were cast, and others took place in the 76 days between Biden’s defeat and Trump’s inauguration.

And while most outgoing administrations take steps to cement their achievements before ceding power, critics say the Biden administration went much further.

“It’s normal, but I would say the level at which they did it is pretty aggressive and probably unprecedented,” Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “They kind of ran as quickly as possible to make financial obligations for the government.”

Those financial obligations, as well as federal workforce protections and eleventh-hour rules, are now the subjects of legal battles that are testing the limits of presidential power.

Telework tantrums

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order requiring federal employees to return to work in person after years of enjoying remote work privileges. 

Some Biden administration moves have made that process more difficult.

“Biden-Harris Administration officials worked with federal labor union allies not only to lock in high telework levels, but to undermine the ability of the incoming Trump administration to unlock them and to manage its own workforce,” House Oversight Committee staff wrote in a congressional report published last month.

Some of those collective bargaining agreements came after Election Day and specifically shielded federal employees from the return-to-work demands that Trump promised to issue once in office.

​​“In the wake of President Trump’s landslide election victory, some Biden-Harris officials collaborated with union allies to further entrench telework guarantees for portions of the federal workforce covered by collective bargaining agreements,” the Oversight Committee staff found.

For example, Biden’s Social Security Administration leader, Martin O’Malley, struck a deal in late November with the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, to lock in telework privileges for more than 40,000 agency employees until 2029. O’Malley’s first move after leaving the Biden administration post was to run unsuccessfully for chair of the Democratic National Committee.

AFGE and the Department of Education entered into a new union deal on Jan. 17, just three days before Biden left office. That agreement extended remote work policies until 2030.

While the Trump administration has said it does not view the union contracts as a barrier to its return-to-work order, AFGE’s president said the union will “use every option available” to defend them. 

“Union contracts are enforceable by law, and the president does not have the authority to make unilateral changes to those agreements,” AFGE President Everett Kelley said earlier this month.

Trump and Elon Musk, the tech billionaire Trump tapped to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, view the return-to-work order as one way to help shrink the size of the federal workforce.

“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Musk said in November.

Trump-proofing the feds

Under Biden, the federal workforce grew dramatically. Biden oversaw a hiring surge at the State Department, for example, that marked the agency’s fastest hiring pace in 20 years.  

Some agencies rushed to pad their ranks as the end of Biden’s presidency approached.

During the final year of the Biden administration, the Environmental Protection Agency sought to surge hiring, hitting its goal of bringing on more than 1,000 new EPA workers in 2024 alone. That was much higher than the 818 new federal workers the EPA hired from 2021 to 2023. 

As many as 200,000 federal workers were hired in just the last year, according to Office of Personnel Management data through May 2024. The Trump administration has already moved to fire federal workers hired during the end of the Biden presidency, as some employment protections don’t take effect until after the first or second year of a federal employee’s tenure.

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Biden sought to insulate the expanding federal workforce from the looming threat of a second Trump presidency. His administration finalized a rule in April 2024 that locked in civil service protections for thousands of key federal workers who Trump, during his first presidency, had sought to reclassify as at-will employees.

Trump signed an executive order in 2020 creating a new classification, known as Schedule F, for federal workers in “confidential, policy-determining, policymaking or policy-advocating” jobs. Although Biden immediately reversed it upon taking office, Schedule F employees would have lost some of the civil service protections that entrench such workers in policy jobs for years.

Preventing Trump from reviving Schedule F was “a key motivation behind the new final rule” from the Biden administration, according to Federal News Network. The rule specifically strengthened protections for the same federal positions Trump was eyeing with his first executive order, which he pledged to issue again if elected.

The Trump administration is already fighting a lawsuit over the second attempt to implement Schedule F, which Trump signed on his first day in office. And because Biden extended protections to those federal workers through the rulemaking process rather than with an executive order, undoing the policy permanently could take the Trump administration years.

Like other outgoing administrations, the Biden administration also engaged in a practice known as “burrowing,” in which political appointees are shifted into permanent career positions before the next president takes office.

A handful of Republican senators wrote to the acting OPM director shortly after the November election, requesting a list of all Biden appointees who had been burrowed into career jobs. The lawmakers pointed to an OPM report from earlier in the year that highlighted seven examples of attempted burrowing — five of which were successful and two that were pending as of June 2024.

“A lot of administrations do this, but I would say the length and breadth of what they were doing is unprecedented,” Stern said of the Biden administration’s burrowing efforts.

A more recent OPM report shows the Biden administration successfully burrowed at least 11 political appointees into career positions between July and September 2024. The personnel office denied four conversion requests, and four requests were pending at that time. 

One of the political appointees was a senior counsel in the office of then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, an Obama alum, before being approved in September 2024 for a career position as a trial attorney in the Office of Solicitor General, which argues cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the government. The conversion came with a nearly $30,000 raise.

By contrast, between July and September 2020, the same time frame at the end of Trump’s first presidency, just four political appointees were successfully burrowed. 

A spokesperson for OPM did not provide the number of political appointees who were shifted into career positions during the final four months of Biden’s presidency.

‘Gold bars off the Titanic’

Trump administration officials have accused their predecessors of rushing to hand out grants and contracts at the end of Biden’s presidency, as Trump was pledging to turn off the spigot of tax dollars once in office.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, for example, said last week that his agency had discovered billions of dollars the Biden administration tried “to obligate … in a rush job” from the EPA’s coffers to outside groups.

“An extremely disturbing video circulated two months ago featuring a Biden EPA political appointee talking about how they were tossing gold bars off the Titanic, rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day,” Zeldin said. “The gold bars were tax dollars, and tossing them off the Titanic meant the Biden administration knew they were wasting it.”

“Fortunately, my awesome team at EPA has found the gold bars,” Zeldin added.  

The push by Biden administration officials to commit money to their chosen projects before the transition of power has significantly complicated Trump’s first month in office. That’s because many types of funding can’t be clawed back once promised.

“Constitutionally speaking, once the government makes a financial obligation, it’s illegal for the government to welch on the obligation,” Stern said.

The earliest stumbles of Trump’s second presidency related to his effort to stop the obligation of tax dollars to outside groups. The Trump White House rescinded a memo in January that had instructed agencies to pause obligations and disbursements so Trump officials could review them. A court had blocked the memo.

But the later attempts to pause new obligations also met roadblocks in court.

Stern said Biden administration officials, through “hundreds and hundreds” of relatively small contracts and grants, rushed to commit what remained of the money Congress appropriated through March 14, when federal funding from the existing federal budget runs dry.

“They were trying to speak for as much of that money as possible in the lame duck so … there was as little flexibility for the Trump administration as possible,” he said.

One of those rushed grants resulted in a little-known green energy charity receiving $50 million despite its close ties to an organization with a history of financial mismanagement. Another saw $635 million pushed out the door a week before the election for electric vehicle charging stations despite the slow progress of efforts to build EV chargers and Trump’s pledge to cut EV programs.

Multiple courts have stymied Trump’s efforts to stop the funding from continuing to flow to programs that don’t align with his agenda.

Midnight rules

Beyond spending, the Biden administration rushed to finalize energy regulations that could tie the hands of the incoming Trump officials who pledged to increase domestic energy production.

Just days after the election, the Biden EPA finalized a rule taxing oil and gas producers for methane emissions. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 mandated the creation of such a tax, but the EPA did not determine the size and scope of the penalty until November 2024.

“It makes you ask honestly just how bad is methane. I mean, if this was so essential to fixing the climate and to fighting climate change … it took you 27 months to come out with the decision?” Daniel Turner, founder and executive director at Power the Future, told the Washington Examiner.

The last-minute methane rule is one of several likely to be targeted by House Republicans, who last week passed a bill, the Midnight Rules Relief Act, giving Congress greater authority to repeal Biden’s final regulations.

Biden also moved just two weeks before the election to ban offshore drilling along swaths of both the East and West coasts. While Trump quickly issued an executive order reversing it, the ban may not be so easily set aside.

Biden used a 1953 law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to declare the coastal areas ineligible for new offshore drilling leases, technically giving his action the backing of Congress.

“The problem is, by the way, the rule was written, presidents are allowed to declare land as protected,” Turner said. “It doesn’t really have a provision to un-protect. It almost seems to be a one-way street.”

Climate change groups have already pledged to fight Trump’s attempts to roll back Biden’s final energy moves.

“Green groups will litigate. A favorable judge will call for a pause,” Turner said. “Everything will get delayed in the courts. And that’s the goal.”

The Biden administration’s use of the sometimes yearslong regulatory process to set policy was intended, Turner said, to complicate a future president’s ability to set his own policy.

“That’s part of the reason why they like to do it through bureaucracy,” Turner said. “Because now, we get to do this through this legal tug of war.”