Trump Administration Live Updates: Schumer Says Enough Democrats Will Vote Today to Avert Government Shutdown

It was a turnabout from just a day earlier, when Mr. Schumer proclaimed that Democrats were “unified” against the legislation, and a remarkable move at a time when many of the party’s members in both chambers and progressive activists have been agitating vocally for senators to block it in defiance of President Trump.

In a speech hours later on the Senate floor, Mr. Schumer announced his plan to vote to move forward with the Republican measure, which would fund the government through Sept. 30. He argued that if Democrats stood in the way, it would lead to a shutdown that would only further empower Mr. Trump and Elon Musk in their bid to defund and dismantle federal programs.

“The Republican bill is a terrible option,” Mr. Schumer said in his evening speech. “It is deeply partisan. It doesn’t address far too many of this country’s needs. But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option.”

In a shutdown, Mr. Schumer said, “the Trump administration would have full authority to deem whole agencies, programs and personnel nonessential, furloughing staff with no promise that they would ever be rehired.”

He also warned that if the government closed, Mr. Trump and Republicans would have no incentive to reopen it, since they could selectively fund “their favorite departments and agencies, while leaving other vital services that they don’t like to languish.”

His announcement came little more than 24 hours before a shutdown deadline. If Congress fails to approve legislation extending federal funding, it will lapse at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday.

In a meeting with reporters after his remarks, Mr. Schumer declined to confirm that he had sufficient Democratic votes to move the legislation past procedural hurdles, saying that senators were making their own decisions. But other Democrats said they were confident that he had the backing to push the measure forward.

Senate Republicans are expected to need the support of at least eight Democrats to steer around a filibuster. Other than Mr. Schumer, only one Democrat, Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, has said he will support the bill.

Mr. Schumer has long seen responsibility for government shutdowns as a political albatross. But many Democrats on Capitol Hill have refused to go along with the stopgap spending measure, regarding it as their only leverage against Mr. Trump. All but one House Democrat voted against the plan on Tuesday, and many of them, along with their colleagues in the Senate, have spent the last few days pressing to hold firm against it to challenge the president.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said on CNN that it would be a “mistake” for Mr. Schumer not to block the bill.

“I hope that individuals that are considering that reconsider it,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “I genuinely do. I don’t think it’s what New Yorkers want.”

In lengthy closed-door group discussions over the past three days, Senate Democrats have agonized over how to handle the spending bill, which would keep government funding largely flat over the next six months.

Many of them described an impossible choice between two evils: supporting a bill that would give the Trump administration wide latitude to continue its unilateral efforts to slash government employees and programs, or a shutdown that would also give Mr. Trump and his team broad leeway to decide what to fund.

Several Democrats — including both centrists and progressives — declared that they could not back legislation that would give that kind of power to the president and Mr. Musk. They groused that Republicans had unilaterally drafted the legislation and refused to consider any changes to win their votes, essentially daring them to take the blame for a politically toxic shutdown.

“What everyone is wrestling with is that either outcome is terrible,” said Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. “This president has put us in a position where, in either direction, lots of people’s constituents are going to get hurt and hurt badly. So people are wrestling with what is the least worst outcome.”

Thursday’s session was particularly emotional, stretching on for two hours and at times growing heated. At one point, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York could be heard through closed doors shouting, “This will not be a normal shutdown!”

Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, who had widely been seen as one of the Democrats who might be willing to join Republicans to overcome a filibuster, announced that he would oppose the measure, adding that his decision was the most difficult call he had made since he was elected five years ago.

“That is a calculation I’ve been struggling with for days — weeks, in fact,” he said. “It’s a tough call, and that’s why we spent a lot of time talking. That’s one of the challenging things on either path: There’s a lot of unknowns out there.”

But he added that Mr. Musk “had been wreaking havoc on our government,” and said that the Republican-written bill, drafted in consultation with the White House, “is designed to give him more influence, more power.”

“This is not the way we should be funding the government,” Mr. Kelly said.

Republicans sought to escalate the pressure on Democrats to relent and end the spending fight, and warned on Thursday that the moment for making a decision was at hand.

“As the expression goes, it’s time for Democrats to fish or cut bait,” said Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader. “Democrats need to decide if they’re going to support funding legislation that came over from the House or if they’re going to shut down the government. So far it looks like they plan to shut it down.”

At the same time, residents of the District of Columbia were protesting on Capitol Hill to demand that Senate Democrats block a spending bill that would amount to a $1 billion budget cut for the District over the next six months. Crowds of school-age children carried signs made with crayons and colored markers, one of which read, “You cut my dad’s job and now you want to cut my school,” punctuated by four sad faces.

Some Democrats said they were still trying to assess whether the best approach to reining in Mr. Trump was defeating the spending plan or allowing it to become law.

“We are intent on stymying and stopping the slide toward Trump’s tyrannical and autocratic power, which is happening in real time and inflicting harm on real people,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who said he would vote to block the spending bill. “I’m respectful of my colleagues who have a different opinion with the same goal, which is to prevent unchecked and unbridled dictatorial power for President Trump and Elon Musk.”

Market watchers have upgraded their forecasts, predicting that the rally has more room to run as a trade war driven by tit-for-tat tariffs between many of the world’s largest economies darkens the economic outlook.

Rounds of U.S. tariffs have been quickly met with levies in retaliation by China, the European Union and Canada, spurring further escalation from the White House. On Thursday, Mr. Trump threatened punishing tariffs on European wine, a move that rattled producers and distributors on both sides of the Atlantic.

“While general uncertainty and deteriorating economic vibes are improving interest in gold, most of gold’s price action is around the uncertainty related to tariffs,” Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, said in a research note.

There are also fears that tariffs may be applied directly to gold imports, leading to stockpiling in the United States. Recent trade statistics have been skewed by a huge flow of gold from vaults in London and refineries in Switzerland to U.S. warehouses.

Central banks around the world have also been big buyers of gold in recent years, a longer-running factor pushing up prices. Diversifying reserves with gold, which is seen as a store of value free from geopolitical influence, is often described as a move to reduce reliance on dollars, U.S. Treasuries and other foreign-currency assets.

Eshe Nelson and Bernhard Warner contributed reporting.

“I am writing heartbroken to inform you that we had federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) in two university residences tonight,” Dr. Armstrong wrote. She added that Columbia made every effort to ensure the safety of its students, faculty and staff.

The search occurred after the Trump administration said that Columbia would have to make major changes in its student discipline and admissions processes before it would begin talks on reinstating $400 million in government grants and contracts that it canceled last week.

The government said it pulled the funding over the university’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment as pro-Palestinian protests spread on campus last year over the war in Gaza. Some of the demonstrations included chants, signs and literature that expressed support for the Hamas-led terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Mahmoud Khalil, who recently completed a graduate program at Columbia and is a permanent resident of the United States, played a prominent role in the pro-Palestinian student movement at the university. The Trump administration has said that Mr. Khalil, who is of Palestinian heritage, is a national security threat. It has also accused him of participating in antisemitic activities, though officials have not accused him of having any contact with Hamas. He is being held in a detention center in Louisiana.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

And Mr. Trump, once a target of prosecution by the Justice Department, is scheduled on Friday to deliver a major law-and-order speech in the agency’s great hall — at least as much an expression of conquest and vindication as it is a friendly first visit to a key cabinet department.

If he no longer owns the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, Mr. Trump is using the speech to show he has taken political possession of more valuable real estate just up the street, in the quavering heart of official Washington.

Mr. Trump told reporters at the White House on Thursday that the speech would include his ideas for the department, “the complete gamut” of policy proposals, and his aides said it would include proposals on immigration.

The speech comes as officials have made plans to use wartime legal authorities to accelerate the deportation of undocumented immigrants, a step that could be announced as soon as Friday, according people familiar with the process. The president could also unveil new steps to combat “weaponization” of the department, even as his officials use its powers to punish his enemies and reward his allies.

Mr. Trump has sought in recent days to demonstrate that he is making good on his campaign promise to crack down on illegal immigration. He is likely to trumpet his efforts ramping up arrests, militarizing the border, turning away migrants and reshaping the system that allows people to seek sanctuary in the United States.

While he has projected confidence, behind the scenes, his advisers have grown increasingly concerned about the pace of deportations and meeting the expectations of voters, and the president, in delivering the most extensive deportation operation in U.S. history.

The president’s aides have already redirected F.B.I., Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other agencies under the Justice Department’s aegis to immigration enforcement, drawing the ire of many agents who believe they are being diverted from their core law enforcement responsibilities.

Using the obscure Alien Enemies Act of 1798 could give Mr. Trump sweeping new authority to remove undocumented immigrants while providing them little to no due process. The move is likely to be contested in court — presenting a major new challenge for Justice Department appellate lawyers already scrambling to defend other Trump edicts.

To accomplish all this, the White House has moved quickly to assert control over a department that Mr. Trump and his allies have long viewed as the center of “deep state” resistance to him.

Emil Bove, a senior department official who was one of Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers, has emerged as the main enforcer of the president’s will, ordering the transfers of top career prosecutors, dismantling key anti-fraud and corruption units, sacking prosecutors who worked on Capitol riot cases and ramming through the requested dismissal of the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York.

In justifying nearly all of his actions, Mr. Bove has not introduced evidence of wrongdoing or incompetence, instead citing broad presidential powers to hire and fire under Article II of the Constitution.

Pam Bondi, the attorney general, has been even more direct, frequently referring to the magnitude of Mr. Trump’s election when rebutting criticism of the department’s moves.

Presidential visits to the department’s headquarters are uncommon but not unheard-of.

The first came in early 1933, with President Herbert Hoover presiding over the dedication of the site of the building, which was to stand roughly halfway between the Capitol and White House.

George W. Bush made two visits as president, as did Barack Obama.

President Bill Clinton delivered an address to Justice Department employees a few months after taking office in 1993, saying he wanted the department “to be free of political controversy and political abuse.”

Later, Mr. Clinton would bow to pressure and ask his attorney general, Janet Reno, to appoint a special counsel to investigate his involvement in an Arkansas real estate deal.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Dr. Oz, 64, a cardiothoracic surgeon who rose to fame through his successful daytime show, appears poised to secure confirmation by the full Senate.

His confirmation hearing is among the last of the Trump nominees whose agencies fall under the jurisdiction of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary. It immediately follows Mr. Trump’s decision on Thursday to withdraw the nomination of Dr. Dave Weldon to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Weldon’s long-held views against certain vaccines weakened his chances for confirmation.

Given that older Americans are advised to receive certain vaccines because they are among the most vulnerable for illnesses like Covid, the flu and pneumonia, it’s possible that Dr. Oz’s positions on immunization will also be of interest to the Senate panel reviewing his qualifications.

In addition, some of the Senate Finance Committee members are likely to grill Dr. Oz about his myriad financial ties, many of which would pose troubling conflicts of interest if he were to lead the agency.

He has made tens of millions of dollars pitching dietary supplements and other products on television and social media, and many of the companies he has connections to could benefit from his confirmation.

In an attempt to mitigate some of his conflicts, in February he announced that, if confirmed, he would sell his interest in more than 70 companies and investment funds, including UnitedHealth Group, HCA Healthcare and Amazon, which now has significant health care ventures. His business and family holdings are valued in the neighborhood of roughly $90-million to $335 million, according to a recent regulatory filing.

Senate Democrats are expected to home in on Dr. Oz’s vocal support of the controversial private insurance plans for older Americans known as Medicare Advantage. The insurers operating these plans have come under intense criticism, accused of overcharging the government and denying patients necessary care. Dr. Oz has also had close ties to companies selling the plans, many of which have also been accused of overly aggressive marketing tactics.

As administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Oz would determine just how closely the agency would monitor the Medicare Advantage industry. He could also encourage people to enroll in private plans instead of the traditional government-run program. Medicare now covers roughly 68 million people, with slightly more than half now receiving insurance through Medicare Advantage plans. Nearly seven million of those on Medicare are under 65.

Little is known about Dr. Oz’s views on Medicaid, the vast state-federal program that provides coverage to 72 million low-income and disabled Americans, some of whom are also on Medicare. Republicans in Congress are eyeing the program to potentially find as much as $880 billion in cuts, which could result in far fewer people being eligible for health coverage and affect how much individual states must contribute.

Senate Democrats also want answers about his recent income tax filings, focusing on whether he paid the required amount for Medicare taxes, according to a memo from committee staff reviewed by The New York Times.

“The Office of Government Ethics has conducted an extensive review of Dr. Oz’s finances as part of the regular vetting process,” Christopher Krepich, his spokesman, said.

The ethics office informed the Senate that “any potential conflicts have been resolved and he is in compliance with the law,” Mr. Krepich added.

But Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat from Massachusetts, sent a 28-page letter to Dr. Oz on Thursday, pointedly demanding that he provide answers about his positions and potential conflicts.

“The agency deserves a leader that is willing to put the interests of patients, providers and taxpayers first — not an individual that seeks to privatize those programs and has spent much of his career profiting from entities that are squeezing every last health care dollar out of patients and taxpayers,” she said.

How the S&P 500 Has Moved at the Start of Each Trump Presidency

Stock prices were once Mr. Trump’s favorite proxy for political success. During his first term, he continually took credit for a booming stock market.

“Whether you like the stock market or not, it’s a leading indicator — the all-time leading indicator,” he told reporters in October 2020.

This time around, investors have been shaken by the Trump administration’s messaging on tariffs. What at first seemed to some like a talking point or a negotiation tactic has started to take effect, in fits and starts, as policy.

Mr. Trump has reiterated his commitment to sweeping tariffs on America’s largest trading partners but has been uneven about imposing them, announcing new levies on some products while delaying or abruptly calling off others.

The market turmoil of the past few weeks is a reflection of the uncertainty surrounding Mr. Trump’s policies, and their potential effects on the broader economy. The worry is that consumers may be hesitant to spend, and businesses to invest, in the face of the uncertainty, driving the economy into a downturn.

And Mr. Trump’s immigration policies and firings of federal employees are also looming.

The Trump administration has seemingly acknowledged that its economic policies could result in near-term pain, while emphasizing their goal of promoting long-term job growth. Asked if he expected a recession this year in an interview that aired on Sunday, Mr. Trump declined to rule out the possibility.

“I hate to predict things like that,” he responded. “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big.”

The president inherited a very different market from the one he took on when he first entered the White House. After two years of tepid growth in the aftermath of a domestic energy crisis, stocks were primed to rise in 2017 on the heels of Mr. Trump’s pro-growth agenda. As his second term began, the stock market had already reached record highs. That meant reaching new heights could prove harder.

Mr. Trump recently hinted that the stock market might no longer be the barometer for success it once was.

“Markets are going to go up, and they’re going to go down,” he told reporters this week. “But you know what? We have to rebuild our country.”

Joe Rennison contributed reporting.

As they cleared the way for passing the spending measure on Tuesday, House Republicans leaders also quietly surrendered their chamber’s ability to undo Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China in an effort to shield their members from having to take a politically tough vote. That switched off the only legislative recourse that Congress has to challenge the tariffs that are all but certain to have a major impact on their constituents.

Republicans have also stood by, many of them cheering, as the administration has upended federal departments and programs funded by Congress and fired thousands of workers with no notice to or consultation with the lawmakers charged with overseeing federal agencies. So far, no congressional committee has held an oversight hearing to scrutinize the moves or demand answers that would typically be expected when an administration undertakes such major changes.

“This is us, in a sense, giving the keys to the president to be able to continue to do the great work that they’re doing,” Representative Michael Cloud, Republican of Texas, said this week. Mr. Cloud, who rarely votes in favor of spending bills, was explaining his support for the stopgap funding measure the House passed this week and is pending in the Senate.

But the sentiment he described encapsulates the overarching attitude of Republicans in Congress at the dawn of Mr. Trump’s second term, as they happily acknowledge they are turning control over to the president, who in turn is benefiting from perhaps the most compliant Congress in history.

“They are actively giving it away,” Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, said of his Republican colleagues’ attitude toward congressional authority. “And they are doing so in an atmosphere where it’s clear this administration is willing to abuse the power they already have.”

In the past, lawmakers of both parties have fiercely protected their turf, pushing back strongly at moments when presidents have attempted to usurp congressional prerogatives.

Members of Congress saw their place in Article I of the Constitution as reflecting their branch’s primary importance in a system of checks balances, and saw the executive branch as meant to administer their designs. Presidents came and went, members would often say, while Congress remained a constant.

When the Reagan administration was suspected of illegally selling arms to Iran and diverting funds to Nicaraguan rebels, Congress in 1987 empowered a bipartisan, bicameral committee to conduct an inquiry. When House Republicans believed the Obama administration was illegally spending money on health care subsidies, they filed suit in 2014 and won a federal ruling that “Congress is the only source for such an appropriation.” Even as recently 2017, when Republicans controlled Congress during Mr. Trump’s first term, a Senate panel investigated whether Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help his campaign, ultimately issuing a report that supported that finding.

With the House and Senate so polarized and legislative success so difficult to achieve in recent years, power has been inexorably gravitating down Capitol Hill toward occupants of the White House, which has been more than willing to try and exercise it with executive orders and other unilateral action.

But Mr. Trump is taking the shift to new levels, in part because of his iron grip on congressional Republicans, which he exercises through a combination of cultivating warm personal relationships with them and the constant threat that they will pay a hefty political price for crossing him.

Republicans dismiss the idea that they are giving the White House free rein. They say that the federal bureaucracy had become such a monolith that only radical action of the level being taken by Mr. Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk could produce meaningful change after decades of resistance and uncooperative agency officials. And they say they will reassert control through upcoming budget and spending deliberations for 2026.

“This is the Super Bowl,” Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News in describing how Congress would work with Mr. Trump to change the way government functions. “This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for our entire careers, and finally, the stars have aligned so we can do that better.”

But Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk and other top administration officials have already made it clear that they have little regard for Congress’s authority, and Mr. Johnson has positioned himself more as a subordinate to the president than the leader of a coequal branch of government with its own power. And once lawmakers have yielded their authority, they are likely to find it hard to claw it back, whether under Mr. Trump or a future president.

For the moment, Republicans do not appear to be concerned with the precedent they are setting. Conservative House G.O.P. lawmakers who typically oppose appropriations bills backed this week’s short-term spending bill precisely because it would hand Mr. Trump much of the authority for funding decisions that Congress would usually reserve for itself.

They said they were reversing themselves in part because the Trump administration had already demonstrated it would disregard congressional instructions to allocate money for programs lawmakers voted to fund. Democrats cited that as a reason to reject the bill, but Republicans said it gave them confidence that the administration would withhold money and reduce spending no matter what Congress said.

“I think the comfort is that you’ve got leaders like Marco Rubio at the State Department who aren’t going to spend the U.S.A.I.D. money,” Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio, an ultraconservative, said, referring to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Mr. Trump has moved to defund the agency, prompting a legal battle over his power to refuse to spend congressionally appropriated funds.

Republicans’ willingness to allow Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk to snatch away Congress’s vaunted power of the purse has inflamed Democrats who argue that the G.O.P. has enabled the power grab with a blank check short-term spending bill.

“House Republicans didn’t merely refuse to address the lawlessness we have seen from Trump and Musk,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. “They would actually empower it with this bill, because House Republicans’ bill fails to include the typical detailed spending directives, the basic guardrails that Congress provides each year in our funding bills.”

Still, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, moved on Thursday to line up the votes to allow the stopgap funding bill to move forward in the Senate, arguing that a shutdown would actually cede even more power to Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk.

Congressional Republicans have also relinquished some of their power on economic issues. On Tuesday they gave up any possibility of holding a House vote this year to overturn tariffs enacted by the president. The power to impose such levies was originally vested with the legislative branch, but lawmakers over time have increasingly delegated it to the executive. Still, under current law, Congress can vote to undo tariffs imposed by the president.

Under language that G.O.P. leaders tucked into a procedural measure this week, that law would effectively be nullified.

“They are abdicating their most important Constitutional obligation: oversight over the executive branch on trade,” said Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee who had led the effort to force a vote on resolutions to end the tariffs. “Republicans have unequivocally showed us who they are — cowards who kowtow to the president on everything including the economy.”

In the past, Congress has typically called Cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking agency officials to the carpet to explain administrative overhauls of far less significance than the chaotic firings, program suspensions and funding cuts the Trump administration is now executing. There is no sign of that yet from the Republican Congress.

Democrats, relegated to the minority in both chambers, have no power to convene oversight hearings and Republicans have quickly rebuffed their appeals and calls to subpoena Mr. Musk. Instead, G.O.P. lawmakers have huddled with Mr. Musk behind closed doors and contented themselves with getting his cellphone number to raise any concerns they may have.

In their latest efforts to force scrutiny of Mr. Musk and the administration, Democrats on both the House Oversight and Ways and Means Committees have pushed “resolutions of inquiry” to require the administration to provide extensive information about Mr. Musk’s activities, including internal communications.

The resolutions carry special status that could force them to the House floor for votes. Republicans are unlikely to support them, but Democrats see them as another opportunity to highlight what Mr. Musk is up to and try to put Republicans on the record defending his work.

China’s trade surplus with the United States has shrunk by almost a third since 2018. But Chinese exports to developing countries have skyrocketed. China now sells 11 times as much to Mexico as China buys from it. Those sales include Chinese auto parts assembled in Mexico in cars destined for dealerships in the United States.

The concern now in Beijing is that Washington’s pressure could force Mexico to close its market to Chinese goods in exchange for a reprieve from American tariffs on trade with Mexico. At stake for Mexico, among other things, are the jobs created by its abundant trade with the United States.

Mr. Trump could then use Mexico as a model to demand other countries take sides in the trade war between the United States and China. That would further limit Chinese access to the huge American market by disrupting other routes to the United States.

Because Mr. Trump renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement during his first term, very few businesspeople or officials in China expected him to start his second term by threatening steep tariffs on Mexico. Several unique characteristics of the trade and legal arrangements that China has with Mexico mean that China’s indirect access to the American market is particularly at risk during the ongoing confrontation between Mr. Trump and Mexico.

Especially worrisome for Chinese officials is an obscure loophole that was baked into the World Trade Organization’s rules when the Geneva-based organization was created in 1995. The loophole allows Mexico — and potentially dozens of low-income and middle-income countries — to legally raise tariffs steeply and suddenly on Chinese goods, while Beijing would have no right to retaliate.

Chinese officials alluded to their nervousness about maintaining access to developing markets during the weeklong annual session of China’s legislature, which ended on Tuesday. Wang Wentao, the commerce minister, noted at a news conference that slightly more than half of China’s international trade was with countries belonging to the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s outreach to less affluent countries across Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America.

“We did not put all our eggs in one basket, which shows the strong resilience of China’s foreign trade,” Mr. Wang said, without mentioning that many of China’s exports to these countries eventually end up in the United States.

He took care to point out that 34 percent of China’s trade was with countries with which it has free trade agreements. That is significant because these agreements, mainly with countries in Southeast Asia, bind signatories not to raise tariffs suddenly.

Mr. Wang called for more such agreements with “willing countries and regions.”

Mexico is not one of the 27 countries that has signed a free-trade agreement with China, so the Mexican government can raise tariffs on Chinese goods.

Mexico is also one of several dozen developing countries that were members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which preceded the creation of the W.T.O. These countries reached a special deal at the founding of the W.T.O., making very few binding commitments to reduce their tariffs. They were instead encouraged to gradually lower tariffs voluntarily.

Mexico has reduced its average tariff to 7 percent, according to the W.T.O. But Mexico’s average “bound” tariff — which it could start charging immediately by simply sending a notification to the W.T.O. — is 36 percent.

If Mexico were to raise its tariffs on China, many other countries with the same W.T.O. deal could face U.S. pressure not to become conduits for Chinese goods. Brazil, for example, applies tariffs of 11 percent on average, but its bound tariff is 31 percent.

W.T.O. rules bar countries from raising tariffs against a single country. While Mr. Trump has ignored the rules, most other countries, including Mexico, China and the members of the European Union, try to avoid doing so except when another country starts a trade war.

But the W.T.O. does allow countries to raise tariffs to their highest bound ceilings provided that the increase applies to all imports of the targeted product from around the world. China exports almost all of the world’s supply in many categories of manufactured goods. That makes it possible for developing countries to raise their applied tariffs in these categories and hit almost exclusively goods from China.

China’s hope is that other large trading nations will refuse to choose between China and the United States.

“I don’t think those close trading partners with China will pick a side, especially those with free trade agreements with China, even if they have high binding tariffs at the W.T.O.,” said Tu Xinquan, the dean of the China Institute for W.T.O. Studies at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. Mao founded the university in 1951 to train and advise China’s trade negotiators.

Unlike leaders in Canada or the European Union, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has said little publicly during the recent trade dispute, even as her government is heavily focused on the issue. Mexico’s ambassador to China, Jesús Seade, helped create the W.T.O. in the early 1990s and played a central role in Mexico’s renegotiation of NAFTA with President Trump in 2018.

China is fortunate that Vietnam, its biggest partner for indirect exports to the United States, trades under different rules than Mexico because it did not join the W.T.O. until 2007. The trade organization has required developing countries that joined after 1995 to accept lower ceilings on their bound tariffs.

Vietnam applies an average tariff of 9 percent, and the average bound tariff it could apply goes up to only 12 percent. Industrialized countries, like Canada, also have low bound tariffs that limit their ability to charge more on goods from China.

China’s economy is highly dependent on a large and ever-widening trade surplus, which reached almost $1 trillion last year. Nearly all of China’s exports are manufactured goods, and its surplus in these goods equaled roughly a tenth of its entire economy last year.

That is a level the United States did not attain even after World War II, when American industry quickly reverted to civilian production and ramped up exports as much of the rest of the world lay in ruins.

China is dependent on rising exports because a housing market crash has left Chinese households reluctant to spend, limiting the economy’s ability to grow in other ways.

Another vulnerability is that much of China’s trade surplus is with developing countries. These countries, in turn, rely on running their own trade surpluses with the United States to pay for the goods they import from China, drawing the ire of Mr. Trump.

The incident put on display the outcry over Mr. Trump’s decision last month to purge the Kennedy Center’s once-bipartisan board of its Biden appointees and have himself elected its chairman. (The president, who broke with tradition during his first term by not attending the Kennedy Center Honors after some of the artists being celebrated criticized him, complained that the center had become too “wokey.”)

Mr. Vance attended Thursday’s performance by the National Symphony Orchestra, one of the Kennedy Center’s flagship groups. The ensemble, under the baton of its music director, Gianandrea Noseda, performed Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 2, with Leonidas Kavakos as the soloist. After an intermission, the orchestra played Stravinsky’s “Petrushka.”

The Vances stayed for the entire concert, audience members said. Ms. Vance was recently appointed by Mr. Trump to serve as a board member at the Kennedy Center, alongside other Trump allies like Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; and Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host.

The concert started about 20 minutes late because of added security measures, audience members said.

Roma Daravi, a spokeswoman for the Kennedy Center, said she had no comment on the episode.

A White House spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.

In February, President Trump ousted the Kennedy Center’s longtime chairman, the financier David M. Rubenstein, the center’s largest donor. His new board of loyalists elected him chairman and fired Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president for more than a decade. At least three other top staff members were also dismissed.

Performers, including the actress Issa Rae and the musician Rhiannon Giddens, have dropped out in protest amid fears that Mr. Trump’s calls to rid the center of “woke” influences, drag shows and “anti-American propaganda” would result in a reshaping of programming. The musical “Hamilton” recently scrapped a planned tour there next year.

While Mr. Trump has not yet articulated his vision for the center, his appointees have provided some hints. Richard Grenell, whom Mr. Trump named as the center’s new president, recently said that the center planned “a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas.”

Agencies were given guidance and a timeline last month to submit outlines for “reductions in force” — a bureaucratic term meaning shrinking of an organization. Many agencies have not yet announced detailed plans. But some plans have trickled out, pointing to a downsizing effort exceeding the number of probationary workers already fired and the number of workers who accepted voluntary resignation offers.

At least some planned cuts could be blocked by the courts. On Thursday night, a federal judge temporarily restrained the government from carrying out any reductions in force across 18 agencies.

And if the layoffs go forward, there are rules governing how government agencies can make them. Part of the process is assigning scores to individual employees based on their length of service, performance and veteran status. Those with the highest scores are supposed to be prioritized for finding other jobs in the agency.

Here is what we know about the reduction in force efforts at various agencies.

Education Department

More than 1,300 workers were fired this week.

This is in addition to the 572 who took resignation packages and 63 probationary workers who have been fired. The reductions have cut the size of the agency, which started the year with 4,133 workers, in half.

Last month, the agency sent an email offering employees a buyout ahead of “very significant” layoffs.

Veterans Affairs Department

The department has planned to cut 80,000 people. That number could include people who are retiring or taking a buyout, however.

In total, the department is looking to shrink its work force from 482,000 to 399,957.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The agency has planned to cut at least 1,000 people. This is in addition to 1,300 workers who have resigned or were laid off.

Together, the reductions would represent nearly 20 percent of NOAA’s approximately 13,000-member work force.

Food and Drug Administration

The agency held a meeting with employees on Thursday but did not say how many cuts they were looking to make, according to two employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Officials presented workers with a list of job categories that were eligible for voluntary separation packages. This included staff focused on laboratory safety, ethics management, records management and the Freedom of Information Act, which enables the public to access government records. Workers were told those jobs could also be targeted for layoffs.

Social Security Administration

The agency has planned cuts of about 7,000 workers, including those opting to retire or resign. The goal is to reduce the work force to 50,000, according to the agency.

NASA

The agency said it would cut jobs by closing specific offices. The Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy; the Office of the Chief Scientist; and the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility were targeted, as well as some other employees in the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity, according to a March 10 memo shared with The Times.

The agency did not provide a total number of cuts.

Defense Department

A recent memo stated that the department hopes to make reductions through voluntary early retirements and resignation incentives, like buyouts. Plans to make additional work force cuts are due to the department’s head of civilian personnel policy by March 20, the memo said.

Housing and Urban Development

The agency previously announced layoff plans for 144 employees in its Office of Field Policy and Management. It has not disclosed other details about future cuts.

Christina Jewett and Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

The government called for the university to formalize its definition of antisemitism, to ban the wearing of masks “intended to conceal identity or intimidate” and to place the school’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership.”

“We expect your immediate compliance,” officials from the General Services Administration, Department of Education and Department of Health and Human Services said in a letter.

They said that since the Trump administration had announced it was cutting the funding, “your counsel has asked to discuss ‘next steps.’” The administration demanded a response to its letter within a week as “a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.”

The Trump administration’s move to cut Columbia’s grants and contracts represented an extraordinary escalation of the government’s targeting of the university.

Columbia, it said, “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment.”

A Columbia spokeswoman said Thursday evening that the school was “reviewing the letter” from the three government agencies, adding, “We are committed at all times to advancing our mission, supporting our students, and addressing all forms of discrimination and hatred on our campus.”

On social media, Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, described the government’s letter as essentially saying, “We’ll destroy Columbia unless you destroy it first.”

Hours earlier, the school announced a range of disciplinary actions against students who occupied a campus building last spring, including expulsions and suspensions.

The punishments levied include “multiyear suspensions, temporary degree revocations and expulsions,” according to a statement. The school did not release the names of students who would be punished, in compliance with federal privacy laws, according to a university spokeswoman. It is unclear how many students have been punished.

The announcement came one day after Gregory J. Wawro, a professor of political science who also serves as the university’s rules administrator, said in a statement that the hearings for students accused of violations “in connection with the April 17-18 encampment on the South Lawn and the occupation of Hamilton Hall” had been completed.

Student defendants were allowed to bring two advisers, including legal counsel, to hearings, which were held over video conference, according to a Columbia employee with knowledge of the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak publicly.

Late Thursday, Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, said that the Department of Homeland Security had searched two dorm rooms after presenting two federal search warrants. In an email to students and staff, and a news release, Dr. Armstrong said that no one was detained and nothing had been taken. She did not say what the target of the warrants was.

Columbia University and the D.H.S. did not immediately respond to requests for comments after working hours.

The Trump administration has placed increasing scrutiny on universities in recent weeks. On Monday, it warned 60 other universities they, too, could face penalties from pending investigations into antisemitism on college campuses.

Last spring, Columbia began to issue suspensions of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had been encamped for more than a week on campus as they protested the university’s investment in Israel, including its dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University.

A protest that had mostly been nonviolent then took a turn, with demonstrators breaking into and seizing Hamilton Hall, an academic building. After about 20 hours, Columbia’s president at the time, Dr. Nemat Shafik, called in the city’s Police Department. Officers in riot gear arrested dozens of people.

A maintenance worker who was trapped in the building was physically injured in the melee.

In all, nearly 50 pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had been inside Hamilton Hall were arrested, along with more than 100 others who were protesting in and around the campus.

Questions about how the university administration was handling discipline have dogged the school since.

In February, the House Committee on Education and Workforce sent a letter to Dr. Armstrong, and Columbia’s board chairs, David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, listing “numerous antisemitic incidents” that it said had taken place in the last two academic years.

Those incidents include the student occupation of Hamilton Hall last April, the protest against a class taught by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the disruption of an Israeli history class.

Representative Tim Walberg, a Republican from Michigan who is the chair of the House committee, said he was glad that there has been forward movement but expressed frustration that the school has not provided the detailed disciplinary records his committee seeks.

“I welcome the news that some lawbreaking individuals are being held accountable,” Mr. Walberg said, “but I remain skeptical about Columbia University’s long-term ability to continue to hold pro-terror supporters accountable given the school’s obfuscation.”

The university said that it began its judicial process last summer, filing its complaints against students with the University Judicial Board, which is an independent panel of faculty, students and staff.

Students notified on Thursday of the sanctions have five business days to file an appeal, on grounds that there was a procedural error, availability of new information or “excessiveness of sanction.” A university appellate board has 10 days to issue a ruling.

Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a group that helped organize the protests and last fall asserted its support for “armed resistance,” said on its Instagram page Thursday that “the university’s extreme repression is a panicked attempt at silencing the movement for Palestinian liberation,” adding that “they have seen our unyielding commitment to Palestine firsthand over the last year, and they are terrified.”

The announcement of sanctions can be seen as a sign that “Columbia has turned the corner,” said Professor Joshua Mitts, a professor in the law school who this semester is teaching a seminar on free speech and civil liberties on campus. He is also the adviser to Law Students Against Antisemitism, a campus group.

Calling the judicial process “fair and transparent,” Mr. Mitts said that the university showed its fidelity to due process, free speech and academic freedom as it sought to upend antisemitism.

“This is Columbia at its best,” he said.