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Pentagon officials are having informal discussions about how the Defense Department would respond if Donald Trump is issuing orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and to furlough large swathes of nonpolitical personnel, defense officials told CNN.

Trump has hinted he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations, and has indicated he wants to stock the federal government with loyalists and “remove corrupt actors” from the US national security establishment.

Officials are now playing out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.

“We’re all preparing and planning for the worst case scenario, but the reality is we don’t know how this will play out yet,” a defense official said.

Trump’s election also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an illegal order, particularly if his political appointees within the department did not push back.

“The troops are bound by law not to obey illegal orders,” another defense official said. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they see that as abandoning their people?”

At this point, it’s unclear who Trump will pick to lead the Pentagon, though officials believe Trump and his team will try to avoid the kind of “hostile” relationship he had with the military during his last administration, a former defense official who served under the Pentagon. trump card

“The relationship between the White House and the DoD has been very, very bad, and so … I know that’s the most important way to select the people that they put in the DoD this time,” the former official said.

Defense officials are also scrambling to identify civilian employees who could be affected if Trump reinstates Program Fan executive order he first issued in 2020 that, if passed, would have reclassified huge swaths of nonpolitical, career federal employees in the US government to make them easier to fire.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Tuesday that “I have every confidence that our leaders will continue to do the right thing no matter what. I also believe that our Congress will continue to do the right things to support our military.”

First and foremost for many defense officials is how Trump plans to contain American military power at home.

Trump said last month that the military should be used to manage what he called “the enemy within” and “radical left lunatics”.

“I think it should be very easy to handle, if necessary, by the National Guard or, if it’s really necessary, by the military, because I can’t let that happen,” he added, referring to to potential election day protests.

Several former senior military officials who served under Trump have sounded the alarm in recent years about his authoritarian impulses, including former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley and retired Gen. John Kelly, the former chief of staff of Trump in the White House. Kelly said before the election that Trump “fits the broad definition of a fascist” and that he spoke of loyalty to Hitler’s Nazi generals.

The Pentagon can’t do much to preemptively protect the force from a potential abuse of power by a commander-in-chief. Defense Department lawyers can and do make recommendations to military leaders about the legality of orders, but there is no real legal guarantee that would prevent Trump from sending American soldiers onto the streets of the US.

A former senior Defense Department official who served under Trump said he believed it was likely that additional active-duty forces would be tasked with assisting Customs and Border Protection on the southern border.

There are already thousands of forces at the border, including active duty, National Guard and Reserves. The Biden administration sent 1,500 active duty forces last year, and later sent a few hundred more.

But it’s also possible, the former official said, that forces could be sent to US cities if asked to help the mass deportation plan Trump mentioned repeatedly on the route.

Domestic law enforcement agencies “don’t have the manpower, they don’t have the helicopters, the trucks, the expeditionary capabilities” that the military brings, he said. But he emphasized that the decision to send active forces to America’s streets cannot be taken lightly.

“You can never water it down, you can never say with a straight face that it’s no big deal. It is a big deal,” said the former senior official. “But that’s the only way to tackle problems at scale.”

Separately, a military official told CNN he could envision a Trump administration ordering several thousand more troops to support the border mission, but warned it could affect the military’s readiness to deal with foreign threats.

The president’s powers are especially broad if he chooses to invoke the Insurrection Act, which states that in certain limited circumstances involved in the defense of constitutional rights, a president can unilaterally deploy troops domestically.

A separate law — the Posse Comitatus Act — seeks to limit the use of the military to enforce laws unless authorized by Congress. But the law has exceptions for rebellion and terrorism, which ultimately give the president wide latitude in deciding whether and when to invoke the Insurrection Act.

trump card according to reports considered invoking the Act in 2020 to quell protests following the death of George Floyd.

“If the city or state refuses to take the necessary steps to defend the life and property of their residence, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” he said at the time.

One video posted last year, Trump said that if elected, he would “immediately reissue my 2020 Executive Order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats … we will purge all corrupt actors from our national security and intelligence apparatus and are many of them. .”

The Pentagon is already preparing for the policy change.

“My email has been flooded on this topic,” one defense official said of Schedule F. “It’s definitely going to be a busy few months.”

After Trump first issued Schedule F at the end of his last term, the Pentagon and other federal agencies were tasked with making lists of employees who would be moved into that category. At the time, defense officials tried to include as few civilian employees as possible to limit the impact on the workforce, sources said. The department makes similar lists now.

The Office of Personnel and Management issued a rule in April that sought to strengthen the guardrails that protect federal employees. But “there are still ways a new administration could address these protections,” a defense official said, even if it could take months to do so.

Austin has repeatedly warned of the risk of political abuse of the military. In July, he said in a memo that it was “necessary to ensure the integrity and continuity of the civilian workforce by ensuring that career civilian DoD employees, like their counterparts in uniform, are protected from other illegal political violations and inadequate”.

He added that career civil servants have a duty to “maintain strict political neutrality, focused on loyalty to the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

And on Wednesday, he wrote in a message to the force that the US military would obey only lawful orders.

“As it always has done, the US military will be prepared to carry out the policy choices of its next commander-in-chief and obey all lawful orders in its civilian chain of command,” he wrote. “You are the United States military – the best fighting force on Earth – and you will continue to defend our country, our Constitution and the rights of all our citizens.”

CNN’s Oren Liebermann contributed reporting.