MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Now that Donald Trump is returning to the White House, what happens to key policies championed by President Biden? NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid has been looking into how the Biden White House tried to Trump-proof some of its priorities. And she's with us now to tell us more about her reporting. Good morning.

ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: Good morning.

MARTIN: So, Asma, what policies were you looking at?

KHALID: So, I want to be clear from the outset here that this is not an exhaustive list, but I think the three that I looked at tell us something about the different ways that Biden and Trump look at the world. So let's start with this first one. This was the support for the war in Ukraine. We don't know for certain what Trump would do, but he has long campaigned on the idea of American isolationism, and he criticized the scale of the United States' financial support. This is now more than $150 billion. But Biden has pledged that U.S. support for Ukraine would not waiver. And so, in the last several months, his White House has made what amounts to, I would say, contingency plans.

MARTIN: Say more about that.

KHALID: OK. So one big thing is that Biden has said he would make sure all remaining funds for Ukraine will be allocated by the end of his term, leaving no money for the next president's discretion. And then also this summer, NATO took on a larger role in coordinating military support and training for Ukraine.

KHALID: And then I think one really interesting thing is that just last month, the G7 announced a new plan to provide additional support for Ukraine via a $50 billion loan. The United States is going to provide a good chunk of that, and the goal is to get that money out the door, as much of it as possible, ahead of Inauguration Day.

MARTIN: Interesting. So what about policies here at home?

KHALID: One specific issue I looked at is protecting the traditionally nonpartisan civil service. I mean, think of all the people who make government work, like the people who check the safety of medical devices. These are not political appointees. They are civil service.

MARTIN: So say more about that. I mean, this is obviously something that people in the Washington, D.C., area are very familiar with. But if you're not, why do they need protections?

KHALID: During the final weeks of Trump's first term in 2020, he issued an executive order creating a new class of federal workers known as Schedule F. These people would be exempt from the country's traditional merit-based civil service program. And Democrats saw this as a deliberate attempt to hire and fire people not based on their expertise but on their political loyalty. So when Biden came in, one of the first things he did was rescind that executive order.

MARTIN: And wouldn't Trump just put it back into place?

KHALID: Well, the Biden administration has made it much harder to do that. This past spring, they issued a rule to make it very difficult to overhaul the federal workforce for ideological reasons. And, Michel, this is key because once a rule is on the books, a president cannot just come in and change the existing rule via executive order. So a new Trump administration would have to propose a new rule, and that is a tedious regulatory process that could take months, maybe even years, get held up in courts. So, you know, it is still possible for the Trump administration to repeal the rule, but it is more difficult.

MARTIN: Interesting. So what else did you look at?

KHALID: You know, Biden's really proud of that big climate bill passed back in 2022, known as the Inflation Reduction Act. Republicans have already talked about rescinding elements of the law, say, the tax credits for people who want to purchase electric vehicles. And, you know, there's not a whole lot that Biden White House could preemptively do to protect this, but they have been trying to tout the bill's popularity, particularly in spurring some manufacturing projects in Republican congressional districts in the hopes that maybe that could make rolling back these policies politically unpopular, but we'll have to see what happens.

MARTIN: So, Asma, you really did a great job of making some complicated things simple when explaining all that.

KHALID: Thank you.

MARTIN: That's NPR's Asma Khalid. Thank you.

KHALID: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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