Live Updates: Tariff Retaliation Begins as Trump Acknowledges ‘Pain’ Is Possible

President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said that she would unveil the first steps of her government’s so-called Plan B action on Monday, and pushed back against Mr. Trump’s contention that the tariffs were a necessary response to the flow of migrants and drugs, including fentanyl, into the United States. “If they want to act, they should not set their sights on Mexico, but on their own country, where they have done nothing to stop the illegal sale of this and other drugs,” she said.

Mr. Trump’s tariff announcement also included a 10 percent levy on products from China, whose commerce ministry said it would take “corresponding countermeasures” and file a legal case against the United States at the World Trade Organization.

While Canada’s government detailed the steps it would take, individual provinces were also moved to act. Ontario and Nova Scotia announced that they would pull American beer, wine and spirits from their government-owned liquor stores.

British Columbia’s premier announced that the province will stop sales of alcohol produced in “red states,” a reference to those with strong Republican support. (Mr. Trudeau indicated that Canada would tax Florida orange juice, Tennessee whiskey and Kentucky peanut butter — products from states that Mr. Trump carried in November’s election.)

In his announcement late Saturday, Mr. Trudeau sought to address U.S. citizens directly on the economic repercussions of the nascent trade war. “This is a choice that, yes, will harm Canadians, but beyond that, it will have real consequences for you, the American people,” Mr. Trudeau said in a somber televised address from Ottawa on Saturday. “As I have consistently said, tariffs against Canada will put your jobs at risk, potentially shutting down American auto assembly plants and other manufacturing facilities.”

On Sunday, Mr. Trump wrote on social media, “WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN? YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!)”

Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, echoed Mr. Trudeau’s regret over having to retaliate, telling George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC’s “This Week,” on Sunday that Canadians were “perplexed” by Mr. Trump’s actions.

“We are actually interested in being and continuing to be your best customer, we buy more from you than any other country on the planet,” she said.

Few, if any, parts of Canada’s economy will be left unaffected by the tariffs, but none are likely to experience more potential turmoil than its auto industry. The sector employs about 125,000 Canadians and produces some 3,300 cars a day, more than 90 percent of which go to American buyers, and its complicated supply chains can mean repeated trips across borders — sometimes including Mexico.

Industry analysts have warned that the tariffs could have paralyzing consequences for carmakers.

“Nobody can absorb this kind of cost, not the automakers, not the suppliers, not consumers,” said Linda Hasenfratz, the executive chairwoman of Linamar, an Ontario-based company that is one of the 10 largest part-makers based in North America. “Demand will collapse and vehicle production will grind to a halt, putting millions of workers out of work, the vast majority of which are in the U.S.”

Federal employees were told Sunday afternoon not to obey memos and presidential directives ordering a pause on funds to states, citing a court order issued Friday, according to a copy of the notice reviewed by The New York Times. “Federal agencies cannot pause, freeze, impede, cancel or terminate any awards or obligations on the basis of the OMB memo,” the notice read. The notice refers to an Office of Management and Budget memo that ordered a freeze on as much as $3 trillion in federal money while the government conducts an ideological review.

The notice goes further than the court order, which mandated that federal funds need to keep flowing to the 22 states, plus the District of Columbia, that brought the lawsuit. The instruction to disregard the OMB memo “applies to all awards or obligations,” the notice reads, not just those to states involved in the lawsuit. The moratorium, however, is not absolute. The notice added agencies could exercise their own authority to pause funds, provided they are doing so on their own and not at the direction of the executive office.

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“Just as a starting point, Mexico has to retaliate,” said Kenneth Smith Ramos, a former Mexican government negotiator who put together the retaliation list in 2018, when the country squared off with the first Trump administration over tariffs.

“But you need to do it in a way that causes economic harm in the U.S., with precision shots on certain products that also cause political turbulence,” Mr. Smith Ramos added.

That could mean new tariffs on Kentucky bourbon, high-fructose corn syrup, pork or other products coming predominantly from states that supported President Trump in the November election.

Conditions have changed since the last time Mexico and the United States were mired in a trade crisis, during Mr. Trump’s first term. Since then, Mexico has eclipsed China as the largest trading partner in goods with the United States. Mexico also emerged as the top market worldwide for U.S. food and agriculture exports, with those imports surging 7 percent from the previous year to more than $29 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But if agriculture is one area where Mexico could find numerous ways to retaliate, other parts of the economy, like automobile manufacturing or energy, expose the country’s deep vulnerabilities to Mr. Trump’s heavy-handed tactics.

In those sectors, Mexico’s reliance on the United States has actually increased in recent years, giving its negotiators less maneuvering room. But Mr. Trump’s tariffs could still resonate in the United States if they result in higher prices for cars or refined fuels like diesel.

Mexico also has some other tools at its disposal.

The authorities could allow the country’s currency, the peso, to weaken against the dollar, effectively making its exports more competitive despite Mr. Trump’s tariffs. The peso fell 2.5 percent in trading on Sunday to 21.21 to the dollar, its lowest level since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine rattled markets in 2022.

A 17 percent slide in value of the peso over the past year, combined with the tariffs imposed on Canada and China, among Mexico’s main competitors in the U.S. market, will ease the blow from the tariffs in Mexico, said Alberto Ramos, head of the Latin American research team at Goldman Sachs.

But the real risk to Mexico’s economy is whether the trade war will be resolved quickly or extend over a long period of time. If the tensions go unresolved, that could lead to factory closures, job losses and a recession, economists warn.

Raine Mahdi, chief executive of Zipfox, a San Diego-based company that links factories in Mexico with American companies seeking alternatives from Asia, said he viewed the tariffs as a negotiating tactic aimed at winning concessions from Mexico in areas like migration and the drug trade.

“All Mexico really needs to do, and they will, is show some genuine honest effort in those areas,” Mr. Mahdi said. “That’s all this is about.”

Still, politics might get in the way of hammering out a deal. The Trump administration’s assertion that Mexico’s government has an “intolerable alliance” with drug cartels has already hit a nerve in Mexico’s political establishment, producing a stern rebuke from Ms. Sheinbaum.

In a video responding to the U.S. tariffs, the Mexican president on Sunday called Mr. Trump’s claim that the Mexican government had an alliance with criminal groups “terribly irresponsible.” She said she was preparing to announce retaliatory measures on Monday morning.

“If they want to act, they should not set their sights on Mexico, but on their own country, where they have done nothing to stop the illegal sale of this and other drugs,” Ms. Sheinbaum said, referring to fentanyl.

As tensions simmer, these are the areas of Mexico’s economy which will shape the country’s response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

Agriculture

Mexican farmers, who supply 63 percent of U.S. vegetable imports and 47 percent of its fruit and nut imports, could come under intense pressure if the tariff dispute intensifies. Products like avocados, which have experienced skyrocketing demand from American consumers, will likely get more expensive.

But as Mexico has increased its agricultural exports to the United States, it also grown into the most important market for U.S. food and agricultural exports, ahead of both Canada and China.

That could allow Mexico to target certain products from the United States with tariffs. In 2018, Mexican negotiators strategically placed tariffs on products from states and regions with strong ties to the first Trump administration, including apples, bourbon, cheese, cranberries, pork and potatoes.

Canada, which Mr. Trump also hit with 25 percent tariffs, has already announced retaliatory levies on selected U.S. goods this time around. The country’s response is focused on maximizing the effect in Republican-controlled states, in a bid to get representatives from those states to ask the president to call off U.S. tariffs and de-escalate.

That tactic, along with similar tariffs on U.S. products from Canada, seemed to work when officials from Mexico, Canada and the United States returned to the negotiating table. Scrapping the tariffs imposed at the time, they renegotiated the trade treaty intertwining the three countries and hammered out the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which Mr. Trump signed in 2020.

The fate of that treaty, known as the U.S.M.C.A., is now up in the air, as Mr. Trump and his advisers argue that its terms were not restrictive enough to prevent American manufacturers from moving factories outside the United States.

When it comes to agriculture, experts say Mexico could also have the potential to pivot, albeit slowly, to other markets. Even as Mexico has relied on the United States, Mexico has increasingly sought to expand trade with countries in Asia and Latin America.

Mexico has also strengthened ties with the European Union, which is the second-largest market for Mexican exports after the United States, and imports products like tequila and beer, coffee, fruit juice, avocados and berries.

In addition to tariffs, Mexico could eliminate preferences for imported grains and vegetable oils from the United States, potentially opting to import such products from Latin American agricultural powerhouses like Brazil or Argentina. But that could require major changes to infrastructure like ports and railways, something hard to do in the near term.

Automobiles

The new tariffs have the potential to wreak havoc on Mexico’s automobile industry, a linchpin of the country’s economy employing more than one million people and accounting for about 5 percent of gross domestic product.

Vehicles and auto parts are Mexico’s largest export to the United States, worth $157 billion in 2023. As vehicle production has waned over the years in Canada, it has increased in Mexico, exposing car manufacturers from around the world, and their many thousands of Mexican employees, to disruptions.

About 27 percent of Nissan’s sales in the United States were sourced from Mexico in 2024, while Stellantis sourced 23 percent and General Motors sourced 22 percent, according a report by S&P Global, a provider of financial information and credit ratings.

As supply chains have increasingly grown more complex and intertwined, Mexico appears to have relatively little leverage to respond with measures targeting U.S. car manufacturers since many of these companies already operate in Mexico and are grappling themselves with how to react.

But Mexico could provide a concession by doing more to curb imports of Chinese vehicles, which are quickly making inroads in an important market for U.S. and European car manufacturers.

Uncertainty over one of the main engines of Mexico’s economy could produce factory closures and job losses at home. And in the United States, the tariffs on vehicles could place greater strain on vehicle affordability when car prices are approaching historic highs.

For American consumers, the 25 percent import tax would add $6,250 to the average $25,000 landed cost (which includes the vehicle price, transportation and duties) of a vehicle from Mexico, S&P estimated.

Energy

Another weak spot for Mexico is energy. After a costly bet on fossil fuels and years of underinvestment in its own energy production, Mexico faces both declining oil output and a dearth of renewable energy resources to bolster its grid.

Laying bare this dilemma, Mexico relies on imports of U.S. natural gas for a staggering 70 percent of its domestic natural gas consumption.

The country’s fast-growing, low-cost industrial base is especially dependent on these energy imports to power factories, warehouses and data centers. That reliance could prevent Mexico from placing its own tariffs on imported U.S. energy.

Mexico also exports roughly 700,000 barrels of crude oil a day to the United States, cargoes that will now face a 25 percent import tax. (By contrast, tariffs of just 10 percent will be placed on Canadian energy exports to the United States.)

In turn, Mexico also imports large amounts of refined fuels like gasoline and diesel from the United States. Ms. Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had sought to curb this dependence by building huge new refineries in Mexico.

But immense cost overruns and delays have kept Pemex, Mexico’s debt-laden national oil company, from reducing this dependence on fuel imports from the United States. That leaves Mexico with less leverage as it prepares to respond to the Trump administration’s measures.

Annie Correal contributed reporting from Mexico City.

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In the oil industry, where roughly 60 percent of U.S. imports come from Canada, a group representing producers called for crude oil, refined products and petrochemicals to be exempt from the tariffs.

“American refiners depend on crude oil from Canada and Mexico to produce the affordable, reliable fuels consumers count on every day,” Chet Thompson, chief executive of American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, said in a statement. While Mr. Trump’s 10 percent tariff on Canadian energy is lower than tariffs on other Canadian goods, the tax still threatens to disrupt the industry.

Retailers stressed how the sweeping tariffs could add to inflationary pressures. David French, an executive at the National Retail Federation, said in a statement on Saturday that the Trump administration and all parties involved should avoid shifting the costs “onto the backs of American families, workers and small businesses.” Michael Hanson, an executive at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, said that broad-based tariffs undermine efforts to lower inflation.

The U.S. home-building industry also came out strongly against Mr. Trump’s tariffs. More than 70 percent of the imports of two essential materials that homebuilders rely on — softwood lumber and gypsum, which is used for drywall — come from Canada and Mexico, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

Carl Harris, chairman of the home builders association, said in a statement on Saturday that the group “urges the administration to reconsider this action on tariffs and we will continue to work with policymakers to eliminate barriers that make housing more costly and prevent builders from boosting housing production.”

Canada plans to retaliate with tariffs of its own against the United States, and the Mexican government has signaled its intention to do the same. The Canadian government on Sunday published a list of hundreds of American goods imported into Canada that it will slap with a 25 percent tariff on Tuesday. A joint statement from three groups representing alcohol producers in the United States, Mexico and Canada — including the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States — raised alarm about “a cycle of retaliatory tariffs that negatively impacts our shared industry,” which the groups described as “highly interconnected.”

John Murphy, a senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that the imposition of sweeping tariffs “will only raise prices for American families and upend supply chains.”

Beyond consumer prices, some trade groups flagged the potential for tariffs to destabilize industries and threaten jobs.

The tariffs could have “significant economic consequences, disrupting the movement of essential machines, products and materials that keep American manufacturers running,” Matt Seaholm, chief executive of the Plastics Industry Association, said in a statement on Saturday. The group represents equipment suppliers, processors and others in the plastics supply chain.

Concerns from business groups about how the American work force might be affected echoed reaction from some of the country’s biggest labor unions. Shawn Fain, the president of the United Automobile Workers union, said he backed the use of tariffs to protect American jobs — but not as leverage on the noneconomic issues that the Trump administration has raised in its trade war with Canada and Mexico.

“We do not support using factory workers as pawns in a fight over immigration or drug policy,” Mr. Fain said in a statement on Saturday night.

Brian Bryant, the international president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said in a statement, alongside the union’s Canadian vice president, that the union supported tariffs when used properly, but that Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on goods imported from Canada would result in job losses and higher prices.

Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, also called President Trump’s claim that the Mexican government had an alliance with criminal groups “terribly irresponsible” and pointed to the problem of guns flowing into her country from the United States, and said her country did not want “confrontation.”

She added, “If the United States wants to fight criminal groups and wants us to do it together, we must work in an integrated manner, but always under the principles of shared responsibility and mutual trust.”

In a video responding to President Trump’s order imposing tariffs starting Tuesday, President Claudia Sheinbaum said that she would unveil the first steps of her government’s so-called Plan B action on Monday. She previously promised retaliatory “tariff and nontariff measures”and said that she had a range of responses prepared depending how he acted.

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The goods will be hit with tariffs on Tuesday just after midnight, which is when the U.S. tariffs go into effect. They will be imposed on poultry, tomatoes and honey as well as peanut butter and other standard consumer goods that Canada gets from the United States. The Canadian tariffs also include liquor — a key import, which several of Canada’s provinces that control alcohol distribution have already said they plan to remove from shelves altogether in coming days.

Other goods to be hit by the Canadian retaliation plan include household items such as furniture, mattresses, dishwashers and refrigerators.

Canadian officials have said that the goods have been selected with an eye to maximizing the effect of their retaliation in Republican-controlled states, in a bid to get representatives from those states to weigh in with Mr. Trump and ask him to call off U.S. tariffs and de-escalate.

But it is far from clear that the strategy will work.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump doubled down on his choice to slap hefty tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports, hurting the economies of the United States’ two top trading partners and likely driving up prices at home.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, in an emotional address on Saturday night, during which he laid out his government’s retaliation plan while making plain that Canada was entering this trade war with deep regret and reluctance, said that more measures beyond the $106 billion Canada has detailed were to come.

The major decision Canada will need to make is whether to limit or impose export taxes on energy products, the most sensitive type of good the U.S. imports from Canada, for which Mr. Trump specifically carved out a lower tariff of 10 percent.

Canada exports 80 percent of its oil to the United States; more than half of the oil the U.S. imports is Canadian. Canada also exports natural gas, vital hydroelectric power to the East Coast, mostly from Quebec, as well as uranium used in the U.S. to make nuclear power.

While the State Department said Secretary Marco Rubio told President José Raúl Mulino of Panama that the United States would take measures to respond to what he said was Chinese influence over the Panama Canal, Mulino repeatedly emphasized in his remarks after their meeting that there was not a risk of the United States intervening in any way to take control of the canal. “The Panama Canal will remain under our control and during my meeting with Mr. Rubio, I did not feel that that was threatened.”

Mulino also said he had spoken with Rubio about the ports at either end of the Panama Canal, which have been a pronounced point of tension. CK Hutchison Holdings, a Hong Kong-based conglomerate, has operated the ports for decades, and last week the Panamanian comptroller’s office announced that an audit had begun of Panama Ports Company, a CK Hutchison Ports Holding subsidiary. Mulino said on that he had explained to Rubio that an audit was underway, and afterward Panama could “come to our own legal conclusions and act in accordance.”

In an interview with The New York Times, President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, says Canada is “improving” its management of the northern border, but the president “doesn’t feel like they’ve done enough, and that’ll be his call.” The executive order imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods cites a crisis at the U.S.-Canada border as the reason, saying that Canada is a major source of irregular migrants and fentanyl coming into the United States. (Data shows that about 1 percent of irregular migrants and 1 percent of fentanyl come to the U.S. from Canada.)

The Canadians “have taken steps, but they haven’t taken enough steps,” Homan added, saying that he was not part of the conversations underpinning Trump’s tariff decisions. “I don’t want to get ahead of the president,” he said.

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“The best metric will be Americans stop dying from made-in-China, distributed-by-Mexico-and-Canada fentanyl, and we will track those metrics very carefully,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the tariffs announcement. “We’ll be able to see how much is being recovered at the border.”

Fentanyl is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in recent years in a still-raging opioid crisis. The Trump administration can continue to seize fentanyl at the border, and use that to measure whether Canada and Mexico are following the conditions of the executive order.

But drug policy experts said that cutting off fentanyl trafficking — and reducing U.S. fentanyl deaths as drastically as federal officials appear to suggest they want in exchange for relief from Mr. Trump’s tariffs — would be nearly impossible.

Dr. Rahul Gupta, the director of the White House’s drug control office under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said that the federal government typically cannot seize more than 10 percent of the total volume of fentanyl crossing the border. Drug traffickers, he noted, would simply change their shipping methods to avoid interception, or turn to other drugs.

“If we make that the sole exclusive goal at the border, the bad guys will adapt, as they have the last two-and-a-half decades, and they’ll start producing something else,” Dr. Gupta said. “And the deaths will not stop.”

“We can’t seize our way out of this epidemic,” Dr. Gupta said.

While fentanyl and other drugs continue to ravage many communities, drug overdose deaths have been declining rapidly over the past year. Roughly 90,000 Americans died of drug overdoses between August 2023 and August 2024, according to the most recent full-year count from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That amounted to a more than 20 percent decrease. Nearly 60,000 of those deaths were from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

Nabarun Dasgupta, a drug policy researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that states report drug overdose deaths at different rates, with monthslong lags, a problem compounded by shortages of medical examiners and coroners. That would significantly hamper the Trump administration’s efforts to quickly identify declines in fentanyl deaths and use them in its trade policy.

The Trump administration’s focus on fentanyl may also miss a critical feature of the nation’s drug overdose crisis: Tens of thousands of Americans are still dying from the use of other drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamine. Many states have seen surges in the distribution of xylazine, a dangerous animal sedative, and nitazines, a synthetic drug even more potent than fentanyl that can be hard to detect in autopsies. Drug users are often addicted to multiple substances, a phenomenon known as polysubstance use.

Still, Dr. Gupta said that the Trump administration could choose to take credit for the ongoing decline in overdose deaths, and use that trend to declare victory against Mexico, China and Canada. “They can take the easy win,” he said.

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On his first day back in office, Mr. Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border. On Saturday, he said he would expand the scope of the emergency and hit the country’s three largest trading partners with tariffs because they had “failed” to do more to stop the flow of migrants or illegal fentanyl into the United States.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump had threatened to use the law to impose steep tariffs on other countries like Colombia, which eventually agreed to allow U.S. military planes to fly deportees into the country after Mr. Trump said he would seek tariffs on all Colombian imports.

“This is a very broad tool that affords the president a lot of latitude to impose potentially really substantial economic costs on partners,” said Philip Luck, the economics program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former deputy chief economist at the State Department during the Biden administration. “This is a pretty big stick you can use.”

What is IEEPA?

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 gives the president broad powers to regulate various financial transactions upon declaring a national emergency. Under the law, presidents can take a wide variety of economic actions “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy or economy” of the country.

Presidents have frequently used the law to impose sanctions, justify export controls, and restrict certain transactions and outbound investment, said Kelly Ann Shaw, a partner at Hogan Lovells and a former economic adviser to the Trump administration.

But legal experts have questioned presidents’ ability to use IEEPA to impose tariffs and said that the Trump administration’s use of the law could lead to court challenges. No president has previously used IEEPA to put tariffs on imported goods, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report.

Instead, presidents have imposed tariffs in response to national security threats using Section 232 of a 1962 trade law. That legal provision differs from IEEPA in part because it requires an investigation and report that has to be issued within 270 days. The provision also focuses on certain imports that “threaten to impair” U.S. national security.

Congress initially passed IEEPA in an attempt to restrict the emergency economic powers granted to the president under the Trading with the Enemy Act, a 1917 law that gave the president expansive authority to regulate international transactions during wartime. President Richard M. Nixon used the precursor statute to briefly impose a 10 percent universal tariff in 1971.

Some scholars have questioned whether IEEPA grants the president “unchecked executive authority in the economic realm,” according to the C.R.S. report. Others argue that IEEPA is an effective foreign policy tool that allows the president to rapidly carry out the will of Congress.

How has Mr. Trump used the law before?

During his first term, Mr. Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico using his authorities under IEEPA. In May 2019, he said he would use the law to impose a 5 percent tariff on all goods imported from Mexico, gradually increasing the tariff to 25 percent unless Mexico took effective actions to alleviate “the illegal migration crisis.”

In June 2019, Mr. Trump backed down from the threat after the United States reached an agreement with Mexico to stem the flow of migrants to the southwestern border.

Mr. Trump did use the authority, though, to impose sanctions against other countries. Mr. Trump used IEEPA to penalize Venezuela’s state-owned oil company in an effort to impair the government of President Nicolás Maduro by cutting off its main source of cash. He also used the law to impose sanctions on Iran in retaliation for what the administration said were aggressive acts by Tehran.

In June 2020, Mr. Trump also invoked the law to authorize sanctions on top officials at the International Criminal Court after the court opened an investigation into potential war crimes by American troops in Afghanistan. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. later revoked that executive order.

How have other presidents invoked IEEPA?

Presidents have used the law to address a variety of national security issues. In April 2015, President Barack Obama used IEEPA to authorize sanctions against foreign-based hackers targeting the United States. In September 2001, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush used IEEPA to impede the financial support network for terrorist organizations by authorizing the United States to block the assets of foreign individuals who commit acts of terrorism.

As of Jan. 15, presidents had declared 69 national emergencies invoking IEEPA, according to the C.R.S. report. Historically, these national emergencies have often lasted nearly a decade. Thirty-nine of the national emergencies were still in effect, according to the report.

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The employees working for Mr. Musk’s task force who clashed with John Voorhees, U.S.A.I.D.’s director of security, and his deputy were seeking to enter a secure area of the agency’s offices to get at classified material, two U.S. officials with knowledge of the incident said. It is not clear exactly what exchange took place between them and Mr. Voorhees, who could not immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Hopson also could not be immediately reached.

Mr. Voorhees and his deputy are the latest senior officials at the agency to be put on administrative leave. Last week, Trump administration appointees suspended about 60 senior officials and fired hundreds of contractors. There has been talk among current and former agency employees and lawmakers that U.S.A.I.D., which receives its funding from Congress, could be subsumed within the State Department in a drastically reduced form as President Trump continues to slash foreign aid.

Mr. Musk has posted a series of messages in recent days expressing fury at the aid agency and voicing conspiracy theories about it.

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Mr. Musk wrote on Sunday in a social media post that many aid workers saw as confirmation the agency would soon be absorbed into the State Department and that some viewed as a potential threat to their personal safety. “Time for it to die.”

Multiple people who identified themselves as representatives of Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency were on site at U.S.A.I.D. last week, demanding access to the agency’s financial and personnel records, according to two U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the activity and the agency’s inner workings.

The cost-cutting effort led by Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, is not a department but rather a task force that nevertheless has been granted unusual power. An executive order signed by President Trump gives its workers unfettered access to government agencies. But in theory, the employees would still need to get proper security clearances to access classified material.

Katie Miller, an employee of the Musk initiative, responded on Sunday to the reports of security officials being put on leave. “No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances,” she said on X, the social media platform owned by Mr. Musk. The clash involving Mr. Voorhees was first reported by CNN on Sunday.

More employees from the agency were put on paid leave over the weekend, but exact numbers are unclear, the officials said. A sense of despair was settling in among employees remaining at U.S.A.I.D. as they learned of the new suspensions and braced for the potential of even more sweeping layoffs and a crippling of the agency.

In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday, Democratic senators who sit on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressed concern about the upheaval and the attempt by Musk representatives to access classified areas and material, and demanded updates.

“Congress has also made clear that any attempt to reorganize or redesign USAID requires advance consultation with, and notification to, Congress,” the senators wrote.

They continued: “The potential access of sensitive, even classified, files, which may include the personally identifiable information (PII) of Americans working with USAID, and this incident as a whole, raises deep concerns about the protection and safeguarding of matters related to U.S. national security.”

Employees of U.S.A.I.D.’s Washington, D.C., headquarters have been told to attend a Tuesday staff meeting at which they are expecting to be informed of a significant reduction in the work force, according to two people apprised of the plans, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak about the matter. Staffers of U.S.A.I.D. have been given strict instructions not to speak publicly about the staffing cuts or other changes underway at the agency.

The expected staff reductions follow a week of turmoil at the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance.

U.S.A.I.D., which spent about $38.1 billion on health services, disaster relief, anti-poverty efforts and other foreign assistance programs in fiscal year 2023, makes up less than 1 percent of the federal budget. It takes foreign policy guidance from the State Department, but has otherwise operated independently.

The U.S.A.I.D. website went dark on Saturday — a possible indication of a looming loss of the agency’s autonomy that employees anticipated Mr. Trump would soon make official with an executive order. Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

The State Department website has a page with archived posts from the aid agency.

Lawmakers and aid workers also learned that at least some of the signs at the agency’s headquarters had been removed.

Pete Marocco, a divisive figure from the first Trump administration, has taken charge of foreign aid at the State Department under Mr. Rubio. He has been a leading figure in driving the halt to foreign aid, the firing and suspension of the U.S.A.I.D. employees, and the efforts of Mr. Musk’s representatives to get access to classified material at the agency, the officials said.

The State Department and U.S.A.I.D. did not respond to requests for comment.

The changes underway have jarred nonprofit organizations that are supported by U.S.A.I.D. Those groups were already reeling from the Trump administration’s decision to freeze nearly all foreign aid programs, a move that was slightly modified by a subsequent vague waiver for programs that administer lifesaving humanitarian aid.

“An abrupt collapse of the agency would put the rights of millions of people around the world at greater risk as a result,” Paul O’Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, said in a statement. “What dismantling U.S.A.I.D. doesn’t do is make anyone safer or more prosperous. Congress should immediately step in to challenge this.”

Many foreign policy veterans struggled to understand the seeming animus Mr. Musk has displayed toward the agency, especially given the small fraction of the federal budget it constitutes.

U.S.A.I.D. funds democracy-promotion programs around the world, including in European countries where right-wing populist movements are thriving. Mr. Musk has become an ally of those movements, some of whose leaders have specifically targeted the agency’s pro-democracy programs in recent years.

Supporters of Viktor Orban, the right-wing leader of Hungary and a darling of pro-Trump conservatives in the United States, have personally criticized Samantha Power, who led U.S.A.I.D. during the Biden administration, for trying to import American values into their country.

After Ms. Power visited Budapest in early 2023, where she promoted the agency’s civil society efforts in the country, an article in a Budapest-based publication called Hungarian Conservative criticized her visit as part of a larger pattern of “American empire building under the guise of providing aid and spreading democracy.”

“Besides carrying out noble humanitarian tasks, U.S.A.I.D. is also an indirect instrument of power of the current American government,” the publication wrote.

Last week, Balazs Orban, a Hungarian parliamentarian who is not related to Viktor Orban, wrote on social media: “One of the largest Hungarian opposition media outlets is upset by Trump’s executive order halting U.S. foreign aid for 90 days, as Hungary’s ‘independent’ press stands to lose millions of forints in funding. Makes you wonder how independent one can be when relying on another government’s funding…”

Mr. Musk replied to the post, declaring, “The US radical-left has been using US taxpayer money to fund radical-left political parties & media around the world!”

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia ordered U.S.A.I.D. to cease its work inside Russia in 2012 after public protests against his leadership that he blamed on American influence, singling out U.S. funding for pro-democracy and civil society groups in his country.

Theodore Schleifer, Nicholas Nehamas and Stephanie Nolen contributed reporting.

Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, is speaking after his meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “There is no question that the Canal is operated by Panama and will continue to be so,” he said. “I don’t think there was any discrepancy on that.”

“I don’t think there is any real threat against the treaties, or of the use of force — you can rest assured,” said Mulino, referring to the treaties that turned control of the Panama Canal over from the United States to Panama. “Panama’s sovereignty is not in question,” he said.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Panama’s president and foreign minister in meetings today that President Trump had made a “preliminary determination that the current position of influence and control of the Chinese Communist Party over the Panama Canal area is a threat to the canal” and represents a violation of a treaty related to the canal, the State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, said in a statement.

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“The U.A.W. supports aggressive tariff action to protect American manufacturing jobs as a good first step to undoing decades of anti-worker trade policy,” Mr. Fain said in statement Saturday night.

But he also said that he opposed using tariffs as leverage on the noneconomic issues that the Trump administration has raised in its trade war with Canada and Mexico.

“We do not support using factory workers as pawns in a fight over immigration or drug policy,” the union president said.

Mr. Fain campaigned energetically for former Vice President Kamala Harris during last year’s presidential campaign and frequently criticized Mr. Trump, who responded in kind to Mr. Fain.

In his latest statement, Mr. Fain also said the Trump administration had been hostile to unions and workers.

“Trump’s anti-worker policy at home, including dissolving collective bargaining agreements and gutting the National Labor Relations Board, leaves American workers facing worsening wages and working conditions even while the administration takes aggressive tariff action,” he said.

Separately, the head of Unifor, a Canadian union that represents workers in the automotive and other industries, said that the 25 percent tariffs Mr. Trump has announced could cause a broad swath of the North American auto industry to shut down.

“Things could grind to a halt pretty quickly if we’re in a place where parts cannot be produced because of these tariffs,” Lana Payne, the Unifor president, told CBC, the Canadian news organization. Because the auto industry is so integrated across the United States, Canada and Mexico, “we could face an entire shutdown of the auto sector within a week or two.”

Ms. Payne called on Canada to respond not just with retaliatory tariffs, but limits or bans on exports to the United States of rare earth minerals and other critical raw materials that Canada produces. “Obviously, we do not have an ally in the United States anymore,” she said.

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Canada has published a detailed list of all U.S. goods imported into Canada that will be subject to a 25 percent tariff as of Tuesday, in retaliation to President Trump’s blanket 25 percent tariff on all Canadian goods imported into the United States. The list includes hundreds of goods.

Honey, tomatoes, whiskey and other liquors, peanut butter, garments and accessories, porcelain goods such as toilets and bath tubs, as well as refrigerators and dish washers are among the long list of U.S. goods that Canada will slap a 25 percent tariff on.

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Mr. Dennehy, through a representative in New York, declined to comment.

The email, viewed by The New York Times, came after the Justice Department ordered the F.B.I. on Friday to collect the names of bureau personnel who helped investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, raising the possibility that Mr. Trump’s political appointees plan to purge career bureau officials, including rank-and-file field agents. That number could reach 6,000 — or about a sixth of the bureau’s 38,000 employees, according to the F.B.I.

At least nine high-ranking officials have been forced out since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, plunging the bureau into confusion. Mr. Dennehy wrote that those removals had spread “fear and angst within the F.B.I. ranks.”

That sense of dread was stoked by a remarkable questionnaire sent to bureau employees, asking them to describe what, if any, role they had in investigating and prosecuting Jan. 6 rioters.

The form requires the employees to say if they collected evidence, provided support services, interviewed witnesses, executed search warrants or testified at trial — basic activities of F.B.I. employees during the normal and lawful course of their duties. They have until 3 p.m. Monday to complete the forms.

Mr. Dennehy urged his employees to remain calm and not to make any rushed decisions about their careers as he committed to providing assistance to them no matter what happened. He also suggested he had no intention of stepping down.

“Time for me to dig in,” he wrote.

In an extraordinary gesture, Mr. Dennehy, a former Marine, praised the two top acting officials at the F.B.I., Brian Driscoll and Robert C. Kissane, for “fighting” for the bureau’s employees. Both resisted efforts to immediately oust career employees, and they pushed for a formal review process to delay or mitigate the disruption, according to people familiar with the situation.

“They are warriors,” he said of those who pushed back on broad dismissals of F.B.I. personnel across the bureau, according to people directly familiar with the matter.

Such is the uncertainty at the F.B.I. that some bureau leaders have felt compelled to email colleagues to say they have not been removed.

“I know a lot of you have seen or heard reports that F.B.I. executives have been asked to resign or be fired,” the top agent in Seattle wrote on Friday in a message viewed by The Times. “To clarify my own status, as of this writing I have not been fired or asked to resign, nor have I received any indication I might be.”

On Saturday, the F.B.I. issued an unusual statement reassuring the work force that Mr. Driscoll was still the acting director. And Mr. Dennehy, in his email, also pushed back on rumors that anyone had been removed outside the small group of officials already known to have been ousted.

Mr. Dennehy’s office has roughly 1,100 agents and about 500 task officers, who are police investigators and law enforcement officers from other federal agencies assigned to work with the F.B.I. The number of agents in New York at times makes up as much as 10 percent of the agent population nationwide. There are also about 1,000 civilian employees, including analysts, technicians and other support staff.

One executive whose job appeared to be in peril, Spencer Evans, the top agent in Las Vegas, informed his staff on Thursday that he would be dismissed “from the rolls of the F.B.I.” as soon as Monday morning.

“I was given no rationale for this decision, which, as you might imagine, has come as a shock,” he wrote in an email viewed by The Times.

Another was the head of the New Orleans field office, who was asked to return to headquarters after his name surfaced as someone the administration might want to remove, according to current and former F.B.I. officials.

That agent was on vacation when a terrorist drove through a crowd on New Year’s Day and drew criticism for being away during Mardi Gras. On Jan. 6, 2021, he was also a top supervisor in the Washington field office and helped to direct the bureau’s response to the attack on the Capitol.

The Society of Former Special Agents of the F.B.I., which represents thousands of retirees, called the forced resignations “illegal actions” that violated civil service laws and the due process rights of employees. The Justice Department has not accused any of those targeted with improper conduct, and has based most of the personnel actions on the president’s discretion under the Constitution.

In his message to employees, Mr. Dennehy described those who had left as “extraordinary individuals,” saying, “I mourn the forced retirements.”

Mr. Dennehy likened the current situation to his days as a Marine in the early 1990s, when he dug a small foxhole five feet deep and hunkered down for safety.

“It sucked,” he wrote. “But it worked.”

The streets of Panama City and the area around the canal — which was once under American control — are covered in Panamanian flags as Secretary of State Marco Rubio meets with Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino. It is Rubio’s first meeting with a foreign head of state and the first stop on his trip through Central America and the Caribbean.

Rubio’s visit has Panama on edge. He is expected to raise President Trump’s claims that Chinese companies are affecting American access to the Panama Canal. Mulino has said he will not discuss the canal with Rubio, and has repeatedly said the canal belongs to Panama and that China plays no role in its operations.

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It was a position in line with what almost all Democrats said as they tried to drive home to voters that Mr. Trump, who campaigned on lowering costs, was doing the opposite.

Some Republicans over the weekend did cheer Mr. Trump’s policy — “Ohio is open for business and will roll out the red carpet for any company manufacturing in America!” Senator Bernie Moreno wrote on X — but Mr. Paul’s statement indicated that at least some Republicans know tariffs could lead to costs that will be passed onto American consumers, even if they’re unlikely to say so and get crosswise of Mr. Trump.

Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, who represents a district won by Kamala Harris last year and remains one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the House, was among the few who expressed skepticism of the policy. Mr. Bacon said he was confused about using tariffs to negotiate a better trade deal with Canada. “We already had a trade agreement and it was a good trade agreement,” he said on CNN. “It’s hard for me to square that circle. We’ll see what the impacts are over the next couple of weeks, maybe it’s a chance to maybe rethink we’re at, at that point.”

Mr. Bacon did not criticize Mr. Trump outright, but he tried to offer some carefully worded advice. “I would suggest focusing on China and Russia,” he said. “They are our adversaries and China does do illegal trade practices. And that’s where I would put my emphasis.”

Republican leaders, however, were falling in line. “I support what the president’s doing,” Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, said Sunday on Fox News. “We need to get rid of the fentanyl. We need to tell China as well as Mexico as well as Canada to get the, to get the fentanyl out of our country.”

The Trump administration has said one of the driving forces behind the steep tariffs is to stem the flow of drugs, particularly fentanyl, into the country.

Democrats, in contrast, spent the weekend hammering the message that Mr. Trump was responsible for making life in America more expensive.

“In one reckless move, the president just raised the price you pay for gas, the truck you drive to work, a computer for your small business and everything at the grocery store, from avocados to tequila,” said Representative Gabe Vasquez, Democrat of New Mexico.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and minority leader, said that “it would be nice if Donald Trump could start focusing on getting the prices down instead of making them go up.”

Some congressional lawmakers said there would be direct effects on specific industries in their states. Representative Joe Courtney, Democrat of Connecticut, said the tariffs would increase costs for U.S. shipbuilders in his state and slow production at a time when the Navy has been making a demand for a large naval fleet.

Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, said that her state’s farming and manufacturing sectors would be “crushed” by the tariffs.

In Texas, which counts on Mexico as its largest trading partner, Representative Jasmine Crockett said residents will be hit from all sides.

“A trade war with Mexico will hit Texas farmers, ranchers, producers, manufacturers, and other business owners especially hard, hiking their costs and weakening demand for the goods they produce,” she said. “We’ll pay more for nearly everything we buy, and have a harder time selling the things we produce.”

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But no companies involved in the auto industry earn profits that would allow them to simply eat the cost of a 25 percent tariff.

“Nobody can absorb this kind of cost, not the automakers, not the suppliers, not consumers,” said Linda Hasenfratz, the executive chairwoman of Linamar, an Ontario-based company that is one of the 10 largest part-makers based in North America. “Demand will collapse and vehicle production will grind to a halt, putting millions of workers out of work, the vast majority of which are in the U.S.”

She predicted that automobile production could come to a halt within a week of tariffs going into effect.

“You can’t make a car unless you have every part and this industry is so integrated across the three countries,” Ms. Hasenfratz said. I suspect every vehicle will be affected.”

Ms. Hasenfratz’s forecast is shared widely by others in the industry.

“Tariffs on vehicles and parts will reduce North American vehicle production, increase vehicle prices and lead to job losses at manufacturing facilities across the continent,” said Brian Kingston, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, a group that represents the Canadian subsidiaries of General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

In Canada, the integration dates back to 1965 when the country entered into an auto trade agreement with the United States.

Ontario, the province that is home to Canada’s auto industry, eventually outstripped Michigan as an auto producer. But in recent years it has seen investment in new plants shift to Mexico and the southern United States.

Toyota and Honda have replaced Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the owner of Chrysler, as the biggest vehicle makers in Canada. GM closed its main assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario, for a period before reopening it on a smaller scale. Ford idled its only Canadian assembly plant in Oakville, Ontario last May.

Among the biggest concerns raised by the tariffs is the future of previously announced automotive investments in Canada, which mix new construction with revamps of existing plants.

In 2023 Volkswagen announced it would build a battery plant in St. Thomas, Ontario, a project valued at 7 billion Canadian dollars, about $5 billion. While the factory site has been cleared, little construction has taken place.

Last spring, Honda said that it would spend $11 billion to make batteries and electric vehicles in a new operation next to its factory north of Toronto in Alliston, Ontario. Another multibillion dollar battery plant being built by Stellantis and LG in Windsor, Ontario, is only partly complete and operating.

After abandoning a plan to make electric vehicles on its now-idle assembly line in Oakville, Ontario, Ford said that it would start making large pickup trucks there next year. And Stellantis stopped production in December 2023 at a factory near Toronto that once made muscle cars and a sedan and has been retooling it for a new line of vehicles.