Mr. Trump said removing “poorly performing employees” who fell under civil service protections had become too difficult, so reclassifying them was a way to get better results from the bureaucracy.

Known as Schedule F, the order was aimed at positions that create policy. Trump officials said those jobs ought to be responsive to the president.

The National Treasury Employees Union, a major public-sector labor union that sued to block Schedule F, said it could have swept up “tens of thousands of frontline federal employees.”

Mr. Biden revoked Schedule F when he took office, derailing the lawsuit.

Mr. Trump has been eyeing a revival should he win the White House in November.

The new rule, finalized Thursday by the Office of Personnel Management, will make it tougher for Mr. Trump or another administration, but not impossible, to surmount.

To overcome a regulation, a president must either go through the rulemaking process again, which can take months or years, or persuade Congress to pass legislation.

James Sherk, who led the Trump administration’s civil service efforts, said the new regulations will be a speed bump but not a roadblock. He said the chief wrinkle is that writing the rules could give Mr. Trump’s opponents more room for court challenges to a policy.

Mr. Sherk said federal employees have long leaned to the left but appear to have skewed hard left since the Obama years, based on campaign donation data.

“In most agencies, the career employees are more liberal than 90% of Americans,” he said.

He released a report, “Tales From the Swamp,” highlighting areas where Trump plans were thwarted by the liberal ideological bent of bureaucrats.

Among them:

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