Trump has a plan to reclassify 50,000 career bureaucrats as "Schedule F" political appointees.
Of course, that's the short term "republican makes it into office" solution. Past that, to other presidents, I don't know. In my personal opinion, I think they're banking on never having to get there.
I think their logic is basically "these people function ~identically to if they were democratic political appointees, so we might as well get the benefits of them being political appointees when we're in office". Whether that's actually accurate can be debated, but it's not just "let's not worry about ever losing ever again".
https://www.semafor.com/article/07/05/2024/trump-disavows-pr...