Even as Donald Trump seeks to disavow Project 2025, he and the rightwing effort’s authors have voiced similarly hostile plans for the US’s 2 million-plus federal employees – to replace many of them with political appointees.

These plans are stirring alarm among federal employees, with many warning that “politicizing” the civil service will hurt not just them, but also millions of Americans across the US by undermining how well the US government provides services and enforces regulations that protect the public.

Speaking about federal employees last month, the former president said: “They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.”

Project 2025, which is backed by the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank, has proposed to “dismantle the administrative state”, while Trump’s official “Agenda 47” calls for “cleaning out the Deep State” and “on Day One” issuing an “executive order restoring the president’s authority to fire rogue bureaucrats”.

That executive order would set up a system, known as Schedule F, that would revamp the federal bureaucracy so that far more jobs could be filled with political appointees rather than through traditional merit rules. Trump’s supporters say Schedule F would cover about 50,000 federal employees, but unions representing federal workers say it would cover many times that. Currently, approximately 4,000 federal positions are subject to presidential appointment. Trump’s allies are said to have compiled a list of 20,000 loyalists who could quickly move into federal jobs in a new Trump administration.

Jacqueline Simon, policy director of the 750,000-member American Federation of Government Employees, said: “The question is: do you want people with the skills, expertise and credentials to perform their jobs or do you want people who love Donald Trump? If that’s what the main factor is to get a job, you won’t have the same food safety, workplace safety, consumer product safety, mine safety, and clean air and water.”

Donald Moynihan, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, said Trump and his allies’ plans to increasingly politicize the federal civil service are the “most important topic that the fewest number of people understand in the run-up to” the November election. In the final months of his presidency, Trump issued an order setting up Schedule F, but Joe Biden vacated it, and now Trump and his advisers are raring to restore it.

Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said many of her union’s 150,000 members worry about these efforts. “This focus on the federal workforce is awful,” she said. “It really looks to destroy what has been in place for decades, which is to make sure that you have the best and brightest with the skills necessary to deliver the mission for each federal agency.”

Brian Kelly was an emergency EPA responder to the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that spilled hazardous chemicals. Kelly voiced concern about how an emergency responder’s job might become more difficult – and how it might become harder to serve the public – if that job were covered by Schedule F.

“If you’re Schedule F and you’re not following the political narrative, you could be fired,” said Kelly, speaking as vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704, based in Chicago. “If you can inject political or egotistical opinions into an emergency where you’re an EPA scientist collecting data, taking samples, advising about evacuation of the area, whether it’s clean or not – if you inject political biases that have no basis in science, that will endanger the public.” Kelly said that if a federal employee is classified as Schedule F (and thus is an at-will worker), and doesn’t follow the orders of their political superiors, perhaps to protect a politician, they can quickly be terminated.

Bringing back Schedule F would in some ways undermine the Pendleton Act, a landmark federal law that was passed in 1883 to replace the old, derided spoils system with merit hiring that focused on competence and professionalism. The Pendleton Act sought to fix a widely criticized system in which every new president brought in a whole new wave of employees, a system that spurred corruption and inefficiency and compelled workers to focus on pleasing their political bosses rather than serving the public. One factor that helped win passage of the Pendleton Act was that the man who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881 was seething after being turned down for a spoils system position.

Trump’s plans to overhaul civil service rules clash with the findings of what the US public wants, according to public opinion polls. The Partnership for Public Service conducted a poll of 800 adults last March that found that Americans, by 87% to 7%, believe that “having a nonpartisan civil service is important for having a strong American democracy”. (Republicans agreed 87% to 6%.) Ninety-five per cent agreed that “civil servants should be hired and promoted based on their merit, rather than their political beliefs”, while 90% agreed that “civil servants should serve the people more than any individual president”.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, estimated that Schedule F would cover not 50,000 federal employees, but 500,000 nationwide. He predicted that a new Trump administration would take an expansive view of Schedule F, which would cover federal positions loosely seen as having a say in policy. “These people could be replaced at any time,” Kelley said. “Your performance would be based on your loyalty to the president and not on your skills and ability to get the job done for the American people.”

Moynihan said Schedule F would have two big effects. “One is it will reduce the capacity and performance of the federal government,” he said. “Second, it will enable democratic backsliding or anti-democratic behavior to become more common. Schedule F would be a bad idea under any president, Democrat or Republican, but I think it would be an especially bad thing under a president who has shown authoritarian tendencies. Much of Trump’s disdain for the deep state is he wants to do things that are often skirting the law or illegal.”

Mandate for Leadership, the Project 2025 policy blueprint for a new Trump administration, is highly critical of today’s federal civil service, saying: “The specific deficiencies of the federal bureaucracy – size, levels of organization, inefficiency, expense, and lack of responsiveness to political leadership – are rooted in the progressive ideology that unelected experts can and should be trusted to promote the general welfare.” Project 2025 calls for implementing Schedule F in several, but not all, agencies, while Trump’s Agenda 47 calls for it to be invoked it across the government.

The Heritage Foundation didn’t respond to the Guardian’s questions about how the project would affect the federal civil service.

Donald Kettl, a professor of public management at the University of Texas, said there is a widespread misconception that almost all of the nation’s 2.4 million federal employees work in or near Washington DC. He noted that 85% aren’t based in Washington and that seven of the 10 states with the highest percentage of federal employees per capita are red states, with, for instance, their air traffic controllers, park rangers and social security office workers.

“People miss the fact that these bureaucrats may be the parents sitting next to them at their kids’ soccer games or the people they go to church with on Sunday,” Kettl said.

Kettl said that while a new Trump administration might seek to reclassify a huge number of federal employees as exempt from the traditional merit system, there is no way Trump would fire 50,000, no less 500,000, federal employees, and then hire that many. It would be far too cumbersome, he said, although he said that if 500,000 were classified as political, at-will employees under Schedule F, those workers would worry that they could be fired if they displeased the political appointees above them.

“It reminds me of the bad old days of King Henry VIII,” Kettl said. “One of the ways he exacted loyalty was he executed a few people at the Tower of London to make the point that this could happen to you if you’re not careful.”

The University of Michigan’s Moynihan said studies have found that the average job tenure for political appointees is just 18 months. Moynihan said Schedule F “would speed up the revolving door between industry and government”. When one recruits political loyalists, he said, “they’re not going to stay in government very long. They’ll look for opportunities and then return to the private sector and then try to exploit that by seeking contracts with the government.”

Jacob Morrison, who has worked for seven years as a project manager with the army corps of engineers in Huntsville, Alabama, said he was worried that his job would get converted into a political position if Schedule F is brought back. “I consider all this an attack on people who dedicate their lives to civil service,” Morrison said. “If we were motivated by greed or politics, we would not stay in the civil service in the first place.”

Like many federal employees, Morrison is worried not just about Schedule F, but also about Project 2025’s recommendations to greatly increase the privatization of federal operations, to abolish government-employee unions and to end collective bargaining for many federal employees. If implemented, all those plans would hurt federal employees in many ways and could result in large-scale layoffs in Huntsville, where there are more than 21,000 federal employees, and in other communities across the US with many federal workers.

Cheryl Monroe, a Detroit-based chemist with the Food and Drug Administration, says Schedule F’s effects could be “devastating”. “I fear that we’ll be forced to give politically motivated findings rather than scientific findings – people need their jobs, people need their paychecks,” she said. “I can see this happening. I’m told: ‘Here’s this product. It was manufactured by Company X, which is a big supporter of the president. Whatever you find, let me see your findings first before you send them or publicize them. Let’s make sure that everything is looking good for Company X.’”

Noting that her agency inspects toothpaste, food and medications, Monroe said: “We need people in place based on merit and professionalism, not on the political situation. Or else this can cost lives.”

Kettl warned that the more politicized the federal civil service becomes, the harder it will become for the government to attract top-level scientists and professionals.

“It’s very hard to get political loyalty at the same time you get high levels of expertise,” he said. “Experts want to work at a place where people aren’t going to mess with them. They want to do the best scientific analysis, provide the best customer service. But if there’s too much hassle, well, the very best will have opportunities elsewhere.”