Under the Trump administration, the government is very likely to flip its position in a major case pending in the Supreme Court, on the rights of transgender minors, a reversal that reflects the sharply changing direction of the next administration.

It may also take steps to thwart a ruling on so-called ghost guns. And it could disavow the Biden administration’s positions in an array of cases involving the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, criminal sentencing and employment discrimination.

Such reversals were once rare. The solicitor general, the Justice Department official whose office represents the United States in the Supreme Court, generally tries to protect its reputation for consistency, credibility and independence. Solicitors general of both parties have said they are wary of veering from positions staked out by their predecessors.

Justice Elena Kagan, who was President Barack Obama’s first solicitor general before joining the court, said in 2018 that “a change in position is a really big deal that people should hesitate a long time over.”

Michael R. Dreeben, who worked in the solicitor general’s office for more than 30 years and argued more than 100 cases in the Supreme Court, surveyed the landscape in a 2021 article in The Yale Law Journal.

“The Obama administration swept into office following eight years of Republican rule, and ample areas existed for revision and change,” Mr. Dreeben wrote. “But President Obama’s solicitors general took a highly restrained approach to reversing the positions of their Bush predecessors. During President Obama’s first term in office, no cases featured overt reversals of positions taken in the Supreme Court.”