Agency Changes Impacting Casework in 2025-2026
BY ANNE MEEKER
With the incoming Administration and leadership in both chambers signaling a willingness to undertake sweeping changes to the federal agencies, casework teams should prepare for significant increases in casework.
This can be stressful, especially for teams already hearing from constituents worried about open cases in areas like immigration or student loan forgiveness. But although policy changes are out of your hands as caseworkers, what your team can control is how you respond to constituents. Preparing in advance can help you be ready to respond to spikes in demand.
In last week’s newsletter, we wrapped up resources for casework teams to audit and strengthen internal processes. Today, we’ll look at the incoming Administration’s signaled priorities and how they might impact casework.
This list is by no means comprehensive, and focuses on actions with strong and consistent signaling from the incoming administration, and/or actions that could be implemented with executive or administrative action.
We suggest using these signals as a way to assess your team’s readiness to absorb issue-specific demand: for example, if you are in a district with a large immigrant population and only have one person trained as an immigration caseworker (and that person is already close to capacity), that may be a signal to consider hiring additional support or cross-training other team members to help handle a spike in immigration-related casework.
Immigration
President-elect Trump has indicated that changes to immigration policy are a top priority. Offices across the country are already receiving outreach from constituents with open immigration applications concerned about the impact of the expected changes to their cases (and some Members have suggested that those without green cards should preemptively open a case).
Deportations
One of the highest-profile campaign promises from the incoming Trump administration is to prioritize deportations of undocumented immigrants. This could include an emergency declaration and the potential use of the military to assist in deportation operations. Related issues that could show up in casework may include ICE policy on deporting from sensitive locations, detention facilities, and stay-of-removal cases.
Continued restrictions on asylum and parole programs
The Trump Administration may continue or expand President Biden’s restrictions on asylum seekers. This may also include discontinuing use of the CPB One app.
Decreased refugee and asylum programs
In President Trump’s first term in office, the US decreased its target refugee resettlement number to 15,000/year (down from 100,000/year under President Obama, and 125,000 under President Biden). The President-elect has indicated support for further reducing these annual caps.
Rollback TPS
President-elect Trump has discussed ending Temporary Protected Status for roughly 1 million immigrants from countries including Haiti, Venezuela, El Salvador, Lebanon, Ukraine, and others.
Legal aid and advocacy organizations
Local and national groups are preparing to support an increase in legal cases related to deportations and other immigration proceedings.
Federal employment
Uptick in federal retirements
Efforts to shrink the federal workforce (including by eliminating telework) could mean buyouts, early retirement, and reductions-in-force (AKA layoffs). This may result in constituents seeking assistance with federal benefits, or for constituents laid off, support with Unemployment Insurance. OPM has made recent progress on its backlog of pending claims, but may struggle to keep pace.
OIG, OSC, MSPB
Efforts to reform the federal civil service to make it easier to fire federal employees could lead to additional outreach from federal employees seeking support on pending claims related to firing and disciplinary processes. It may be helpful to refresh materials pointing people toward options for reporting perceived wrongdoing like agency OIGs, the Office of Special Counsel, and reviewing what the Merit Systems Protection Board does.
Whistleblower support
Speaking of reporting wrongdoing, it is also worth refreshing your team’s SOPs for handling whistleblower outreach. The House Office of the Whistleblower Ombuds has wonderful curriculum materials about legal rights and responsibilities, as well as best practices.
Department of Veterans Affairs
Increase privatization
The 2018 MISSION Act, signed into law by President Trump, expanded veterans’ access to private care. The incoming VA Secretary has indicated interest in further allowing veterans to see providers in the private sector. This could mean casework related to care coverage, provider access, and reimbursement.
Streamlining VA firings
A signature VA policy under President Trump was the 2017 VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act, intended to streamline the process of firing underperforming VA employees. Following several legal challenges, the VA is not currently using the authority in this legislation, but additional legislation and a change in VA leadership could revive this effort. This could bring casework around whistleblower protection and employment disputes.
Possible consolidation of underutilized facilities
The MISSION Act created a commission to explore consolidating or closing underutilized VA facilities, but the Senate did not consider nominees for the commission in 2022, effectively halting this effort. An incoming Administration could try to revive the MISSION Act authority to push for a smaller physical footprint for the VA.
Social Security and Medicare
New Social Security Commissioner
Martin O’Malley resigned as Social Security commissioner, leaving a vacancy for President-elect Trump to fill. SSA has made progress toward modernizing, especially for disability programs, but O’Malley warned that SSA’s relatively low administrative budget will make additional reforms difficult. Staff cuts could lead to additional casework from constituents who are unable to resolve issues through normal customer service channels.
Unclear on Medicare drug price negotiation
The DOJ under the Biden Administration is defending plans to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices against a handful of lawsuits. The incoming administration will have to decide if it wants to continue those lawsuits or drop the policy. Depending on how these cases are resolved, there may be casework related to retroactive application of lower drug costs.
Education
Slow or halt loan forgiveness efforts in court
The Trump Administration will decide whether and how to continue several open court cases related to student loan forgiveness. While the Administration cannot unilaterally discontinue a program approved by Congress, it can roll back or phase out other programs previously created by executive action or the federal rulemaking process. This creates significant uncertainty for federal borrowers covered under existing programs — which may show up in casework related to loan payment programs, monthly borrowing amounts, and interactions with loan servicers.
IRS
Scale back Direct File
One particular target for clawing back funding may be the Direct File program, which has been under scrutiny for several years. Any rollback to Direct File would likely impact the 2026 tax year, with 2025 continuing as planned.
Other agencies/casework issues
Government shutdowns?
Unlikely in the next year: with united Republican control of the White House, House, and Senate, there is less need for bipartisan dealmaking to pass a funding bill. Speaker Johnson has said the House will likely pass a Continuing Resolution before December 20 that will move the deadline for the appropriations process to March 2025.
Disaster relief?
Critics of the incoming Trump Administration have raised alarm that disaster declarations may be more politicized in coming years, citing two examples from President Trump’s first term in office where disaster relief funding to states with Democratic governors was delayed (although academic scholarship on county-level disaster declarations finds that these decisions are more political in an election year).
Looking Ahead
Our nonpartisan team remains committed to supporting caseworkers as a vital link between the Executive branch, Legislative branch, and the people they both serve. We will continue to keep caseworkers updated on casework-relevant agency updates throughout the transition and into 2025.
