Live Updates: Trump Administration Offers 2 Million Federal Workers Payouts to Resign

The email, with the subject line “Fork in the Road,” said that the majority of federal agencies would probably be downsized and that a substantial number of employees would be furloughed or reclassified to “at-will status” — essentially making them easier to fire. Most people who have been working remotely will be required to work from their office five days a week, the email said, and some physical offices will be consolidated, causing some people to be relocated.

The message also said that “enhanced standards of conduct” would be applied to ensure that workers were “reliable, loyal, trustworthy” and warned that “at this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency.”

The email amounted to a frontal assault on the federal bureaucracy, which Mr. Trump has long derided as the “deep state” and has sought to bend to his will. In making the move, the president was testing the limits of his power, trying to push past the federal law that governs payouts and rules that have long protected the civil service from political interference and pressure.

The move also risked gutting the staffs of a wide array of federal agencies that Americans depend on, though federal unions immediately condemned the offer, and many federal employees viewed it as a trick.

The message echoed an email that the billionaire Elon Musk, a constant companion to Mr. Trump in recent months, sent to Twitter employees after buying the social media platform in late 2022. Mr. Musk’s email shared the same subject line and offered employees three months of severance.

Mr. Musk, who is leading the Trump administration’s cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency, does not officially work at the Office of Personnel Management. But the agency has hired several of Mr. Musk’s allies in recent weeks, including Amanda Scales, who until this month worked at Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, and is now the O.P.M.’s chief of staff.

In a post on X on Tuesday, Mr. Musk’s America PAC said the move to offer severance packages could lead to billions of dollars in savings. Mr. Musk recirculated the post on his social media platform.

Employees who accept the offer will “promptly have their duties reassigned or eliminated,” according to a guidance memo published by the O.P.M. on Tuesday. Workers will then be placed on paid administrative leave until the end of September, or an earlier resignation date of their choosing.

Employees who resign will not be expected to work, except in rare cases determined by agencies, according to a question-and-answer page on O.P.M.’s website. Agency heads can require some employees to continue working for some time before they are placed on leave.

It is unclear what authority the Trump administration has to offer paid administrative leave to effectively the entire federal civilian work force. Under the law, no employee can be on administrative leave for more than 10 days in a year — let alone more than seven months.

Under the Homeland Security Act, agencies that are downsizing or reorganizing can offer federal workers $25,000 in exchange for their resignation, known as a Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment. In many cases, though, the payments proposed in the O.P.M.’s email Tuesday would far exceed that sum.

Other actions mentioned in the email to federal employees could run afoul of civil service laws, as well as union contracts. Anticipating those limits, the O.P.M. said in the email that the effort to cull the federal work force would be pursued “to the extent permitted under relevant collective-bargaining agreements.”

A spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management said some workers would be exempt from the offer, including military personnel, Postal Service workers, immigration officials and certain national security officials. Agencies can also carve out exceptions for specific positions.

Still, almost every facet of the government could be significantly affected by mass resignations, and a culling of the federal work force would have wide-reaching impacts on the lives of many Americans.

Regular activities like traveling, renewing passports or filing for a tax return could be delayed or disrupted. The operation of national parks and museums, and the administration of benefits like Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ care and food stamps could also be affected. Regulators and inspectors for food, water, drugs and workplace safety could also leave the government.

Among the government employees who could turn in their resignations are skilled researchers and doctors; environmental, nuclear and rocket scientists; and meteorologists at the National Weather Service. Depending on how the Trump administration defines “national security,” officers at law enforcement agencies like the F.B.I. and Drug Enforcement Administration may also resign.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal employees, representing over 800,000 workers, quickly condemned the move.

“There are more Americans than ever who rely on government services,” said Everett Kelley, the president of the union. “Purging the federal government of dedicated career civil servants will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government.”

Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia — a state that hosts a large chunk of the federal work force — denounced the offer, and suggested that the offer of pay was a trick.

“If you accept that offer and resign, he’ll stiff you.” Mr. Kaine, a Democrat, said in a floor speech on Tuesday, referring to Mr. Trump’s past refusals to pay workers.

Mr. Kaine added of Mr. Trump, “He doesn’t have any authority to do this. Do not be fooled by this guy.”

In a memo to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Mr. Duffy instructed the agency to re-evaluate fuel economy rules for new cars and trucks through the end of the decade. The order came as one of Mr. Duffy’s first acts as the head of the Department of Transportation.

The Biden fuel economy standards require American automakers’ passenger cars to average 65 miles per gallon by 2031, up from 48.7 miles last year. The average mileage for light trucks, including pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, would have to reach 45 miles per gallon, up from 35.1 miles per gallon.

Some automakers have criticized the rule as a costly distortion of the market.

“Artificially high fuel economy standards,” the transportation secretary’s memo said, “impose large costs that render many new vehicle models unaffordable for the average American family and small business owner.”

Mr. Duffy, a former Wisconsin representative, was confirmed earlier in the day despite a late wave of opposition from some Democrats upset about the Trump administration’s freeze on federal grants and loans. The final vote was 77 to 22.

In his memo, Mr. Duffy expressed doubts about whether the current fuel economy standards accurately reflect the United States’ abundant oil reserves and refining capabilities. The memo states that these standards may not take into account the vulnerabilities of the U.S. electricity grid or the national security risks of relying on foreign sources for materials, particularly those used in electric vehicle batteries.

Mr. Duffy’s memo directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to review all fuel economy standards for vehicles from the 2022 model year onward.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has revoked the Defense Department-funded personal security detail for retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during President Trump’s first administration.

Donald J. Trump had previously said he deserved to be executed for treason after the general apologized for appearing with Trump in Lafayette Park near the White House after the removal of civilians protesting the murder of George Floyd.

A Pentagon statement said that Hegseth had directed the Defense Department’s inspector general to review whether General Milley should be demoted in retirement.

“We have received the request and we are reviewing it,” Mollie Halpern, a spokeswoman for the acting Defense Department inspector general, said of the referral to examine General Milley’s actions as chairman.

The general retired in 2023, and at a ceremony marking the occasion he reminded troops that they took an oath to the Constitution and not to a “a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.” Senior Pentagon officials late Tuesday sought to cast Mr. Milley as an insubordinate political operator while in the chairman’s job.

“Undermining the chain of command is corrosive to our national security, and restoring accountability is a priority for the Defense Department under President Trump’s leadership,” Joe Kasper, Mr. Hegseth’s chief of staff, said in a statement late Tuesday.

General Milley could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.

Just days before General Milley’s retirement ceremony, Mr. Trump, then still planning a political comeback, suggested that the general had committed treason and should be put to death.

Amid continued threats from Mr. Trump of retribution against his enemies upon returning to office, General Milley received a pre-emptive pardon from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. hours before he left office last week. (In his first week back in the White House, Mr. Trump had the general’s portrait removed from the hallway in the Pentagon outside the chairman’s offices.)

Since General Milley has been pardoned, he cannot be court-martialed. But a finding against him could lead to a decision to reduce his rank, even in retirement.

General Milley and other former Trump administration officials had been assigned government security details because they remained under threat following the U.S. drone strike that killed the powerful Iranian general Qassim Suleimani in early 2020.

Two Republican Senate allies of President Trump urged him on Sunday to rethink his decision to strip security details from the former advisers who have been targeted by Iran, saying the move could chill his current aides from doing their jobs effectively.

Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, spoke after Mr. Trump abruptly halted government security protection for three officials from his first term who were involved in his Iran policy and have remained under threat.

Fox News earlier reported that Mr. Hegseth was moving to revoke General Milley’s security detail and order the inspector general review.

As the newly sworn-in defense secretary, Mr. Hegseth has been a sharp critic of General Milley.

General Milley’s split with Mr. Trump had its roots in his decision to apologize also for inserting himself into politics when he walked alongside Mr. Trump in 2020, through Lafayette Square, for a photo op after the authorities used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear the area of peaceful protesters. “I should not have been there,” he said later. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”

Mr. Trump’s supporters have also attacked General Milley over his contacts with his Chinese counterpart during the first Trump administration, assuring them that the United States was not seeking to strike them, or trigger a military crisis.

General Milley, 66, was promoted to chairman of the Joint Chiefs by Mr. Trump in 2019. At the time, the president was impressed with his military record and his bearing. But he quickly soured on him. A book published by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, “I Alone Can Fix It,” reported that General Milley was worried that President Trump might attempt to stage a coup after he lost the 2020 election. He made efforts to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, and issued a statement condemning the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

Undoing the extension could add to Mr. Trump’s crackdown on not only illegal immigration but also on immigrants whom the Biden administration had authorized to remain in the country. In the past, Mr. Trump has targeted immigrants under Temporary Protected Status, which aids migrants from some of the most unstable countries in the world. Republicans have argued, however, that the measure has strayed far from its original mission of providing temporary shelter from conflict or disaster.

During his first administration, Mr. Trump aimed to stop the protections for migrants from several countries, including Haiti, El Salvador and Sudan. Federal courts stymied some of those efforts.

Ms. Noem’s decision finds fault with the move by Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary under Mr. Biden, to extend the protections for Venezuelans in the final month of Mr. Biden’s term. The agency generally must decide at regular intervals whether the protections should be extended before they expire. The notice argued that Mr. Mayorkas made his move too early and said the extension should not remain in effect “given the exceedingly brief period” since it was issued on Jan. 17.

A Homeland Security Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, argued that the last-minute extension by the Biden administration appeared to be a way to tie the hands of Trump officials.

Venezuelans have poured into the United States in recent years as their country’s economy has collapsed and President Nicolás Maduro’s autocratic government has stifled dissent.

Those who initially received Temporary Protected Status in 2021 will maintain their protections through September, while those who obtained it in 2023 will have them until at least April. Ms. Noem now has until Saturday to make a decision on whether to issue her own extension on the group of Venezuelans who received their status in 2023.

If the administration does not make a decision by Saturday, the protections will extend for six months automatically, the notice said.

Immigrant advocates said the cancellation of the Biden administration’s extension would cause confusion and fear among Venezuelans across the United States.

“By taking this action, Secretary Noem is throwing over 600,000 into a state of ongoing bureaucratic limbo,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “People will no longer have any certainty as to whether they can stay in the country legally through the end of the year.”

He said the decision indicated that the Trump administration could also decide not to make its own extension for Venezuelans who received their status in 2023.

“If the Trump administration moves to terminate T.P.S. for over 600,000 Venezuelans, it could also have significant impacts on the economy, as nearly all of those with status are working here legally,” he added.

When the Biden administration moved to extend the protections this month, it cited “political and economic crises under the inhumane Maduro regime.”

The statement said that “these conditions have contributed to high levels of crime and violence, impacting access to food, medicine, health care, water, electricity and fuel.”

“The rapid escalation of these assaults on the trans community, in just over a week of his presidency, paints a grim picture of what lies ahead,” Erin Reed, a transgender activist and journalist, wrote in a Substack post.

In his first gender-related order, Mr. Trump instructed government agencies to ensure that federally funded institutions recognize people as girls, boys, men or women based solely on their “immutable biological classification.” It included a specific provision requiring the Bureau of Prisons to house transgender women in prisons designated for men and to stop providing prisoners with medical treatments related to gender transitions.

On Monday, Mr. Trump directed the Pentagon to re-evaluate whether transgender troops should be permitted to serve. And on Tuesday evening, he issued an order taking steps to end gender-transition medical treatments for anyone under 19, directing agencies to curtail puberty-suppressing medication, hormone therapy and surgeries.

Court challenges of the first two orders are already underway, and trans advocates said on Tuesday evening that they would challenge the order on medical treatment as well.

“We will not allow this dangerous, sweeping and unconstitutional order to stand,” said Chase Strangio, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who was the first openly trans lawyer to appear before the Supreme Court last year in a case about medical treatments for minors.

Transgender people account for less than 1 percent of the adult population in the United States, according to an estimate from the Williams Institute at U.C.L.A., which performs research on the L.G.B.T.Q. population. Polling shows that Americans have mixed views on the inclusion of transgender girls and women in sports and whether minors should be allowed to obtain medical treatment to transition.

On social media, conservative activists struck a celebratory tone.

“Dear trans activists,” the account called Libs of TikTok posted on X. “You lost. We won.”

In interviews and on social media in recent days, transgender advocates have responded in strong terms. Many suggested that the language of the order aimed at limiting transgender people from military service reflected anti-trans bigotry rather than substantive policy concerns.

“Adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,” the executive order reads.

Nicolas Talbott, 31, of Akron, Ohio, a transgender second lieutenant in the U.S. Army who is a plaintiff in a legal challenge to the order, said that “this time not only are they attacking our ability to do our jobs, now they’re trying to attack our character and the core of our being.”

The language appeared to surprise even some conservative commentators.

“Trump just signed an Executive Order saying transgender individuals are too mentally ill to be soldiers, and too lacking in honor and discipline in their personal lives,” Richard Hanania, a conservative writer and podcaster, wrote in a post on X. “Really.”

Brianna Wu, a transgender woman and a Democratic strategist who has criticized some aspects of the trans rights movement, such as the inclusion of trans women in women’s sports, said the series of orders would push trans people out of public life.

“If you’re asking me if I’m a natal male, I have no issue about admitting biology,” Ms. Wu said in an interview. “The question is not, ‘Are trans women biological men?’ The question is, ‘Do trans women deserve dignity as your fellow citizens?’

“It’s disheartening to see the Trump administration come down so hard on the other side.”

Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, quickly condemned the Trump administration’s offer to roughly 2 million federal employees to resign in exchange for pay, saying in a Senate floor speech that the deal was a trick, that the president didn’t have the authority to make the offer and employees who resign may not be paid.

“If you accept that offer and resign he’ll stiff you just like he stiffed the contractors,” Kaine said, referring to Trump’s past refusals to pay workers.

The most recent order set as official policy that the federal government not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.”

It directed the Department of Health and Human Services to review the terms of insurance coverage under Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act to end some gender-affirming care. It also gave the department 90 days to release a new set of best practices, meant to revise guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which was written to set standards for transgender medical care, and which the order called “junk science.”

It tasked agencies providing federal research or education grants to medical institutions, including medical schools and hospitals, with ensuring that those institutions were not carrying out any gender-related procedures.

And it directed the Federal Employees Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs to exclude similar types of coverage starting in 2026.

Civil rights groups have issued increasingly dire statements criticizing the administration for a stance they say widely demonizes and marginalizes transgender people.

“Access to gender-affirming care enables trans youth to live authentically and is often life-saving,” Fatima Goss Graves, the president of the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement. “The Trump administration’s continued assault on the rights and dignity of trans people is deplorable.”

Demand for gender-affirming medications and hormone therapy among transgender youth has not been studied extensively, but only a small fraction of minors who identify as transgender currently receive gender-transition treatments, according to researchers at the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which conducts demographic studies about the L.G.B.T.Q. population.

The language from the White House surrounding gender-affirming medical treatments and their effects on the body has grown increasingly severe and disdainful since Mr. Trump took office.

On his first day, Mr. Trump signed an order describing transgender identity as an “ideology” from which women required institutional protection and restricted single-sex spaces.

The order directing the Pentagon to evaluate whether transgender troops could serve in the military cast aspersions on the mental and physical health of anyone who has experienced gender dysphoria or has had a gender-related medical procedure. On Tuesday, civil rights groups filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging any ban on transgender service members as unconstitutional.

The order on care for minors, which referred to procedures as “chemical and surgical mutilation,” predicted that “countless children” who received gender-affirming procedures would soon regret the “horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”

Gender-affirming surgeries on minors are exceedingly rare in the United States, a Harvard Chan School of Public Health Study found last year. The study’s lead author, Dannie Dai, said legislation banning gender-affirming care among youth “is not about protecting children, but is rooted in bias and stigma” and “seeks to address a perceived problem that does not actually exist.”

More than two-dozen states have passed some form of restriction on gender-affirming medical procedures, according to data compiled by the Human Rights Campaign. And many states already have laws on their books prohibiting public funds from covering gender-transition treatments for state employees and Medicaid recipients.

While Mr. Trump campaigned on promises to do away with some programs supporting transgender people, he tended to home in on specific cases, such as U.S. prisons offering gender-affirming care to prisoners — something many prisons did, as required by federal law, during Mr. Trump’s first term.

But in excluding transgender people from certain jobs and facilities, and officially recognizing only two genders — male and female — the Trump administration has gone much further in recent days by essentially placing the federal government in opposition to a wide variety of gender-related therapies and to anyone who seeks them. And it has justified those moves with progressively dark — and factually disputed — descriptions of what those procedures entail.

Amy Harmon contributed reporting.

“This is creating chaos,” Gov. Katie Hobbs of Arizona, a Democrat, said in a statement before the court’s intervention.

For much of Tuesday, the lack of detail in the brief memo issued by the White House budget office a day earlier had left local budget offices and elected officials unable to even describe what immediate effect it would have. In Oklahoma, a spokesman for the mayor of Oklahoma City declined to comment, citing the need for greater clarity on what the order actually entailed.

But the memo made clear the political aims of the Trump administration — criticizing the use of federal resources to “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and Green New Deal social engineering policies” — and it was welcomed by some Republican leaders, like Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas.

“The state of Texas fully supports President Trump’s efforts to cut waste, fraud and abuse, and eliminate funding for D.E.I. and radical gender ideology initiatives,” said Andrew Mahaleris, Mr. Abbott’s press secretary. “This pause in funding will bring transparency to federal spending and is long overdue.”

Democratic officials, by contrast, expressed alarm at states losing access on Tuesday to an online portal through which state Medicaid departments receive federal funding, and the possibility of losing funds for emergency services.

In Colorado, the pause in spending could “wreak havoc” on fire and police departments, said Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat. Representative Laura Gillen, Democrat of New York, who represents part of Long Island, said the freeze would jeopardize “the safety of our communities and our law enforcement officers.”

Nonprofit groups in New York said they had already received emails from their federal contacts telling them that their contracts had been paused.

“President Trump is leaving states out in the cold without any guidance or explanation,” said Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat and former vice-presidential candidate. Under a continuing funding freeze, he said, Minnesota would be dealing with a $2 billion hole in the state budget each month.

Even Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, a hard-line conservative Republican and prominent Trump ally, signaled concern about the abrupt freeze, reflecting the extent of the sudden challenge to states.

In a joint statement with top Louisiana officials, Governor Landry asked the Trump administration “to develop a responsible runway to untangle us from any unnecessary and egregious policies without jeopardizing the financial stability of the state.”

In a separate memo issued on Tuesday afternoon, the White House budget office tried to address concerns about the scope of the pause in federal dollars, saying that it applied only to programs “implicated by” President Trump’s recent executive orders, which have sought to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs and climate initiatives, among other things.

That suggested that money could continue flowing to services not related to those orders.

But officials and nonprofits that receive federal grants were left to discover the contours of the cutoff themselves, in some cases finding that a source of key funding had suddenly dried up.

When staff members at a Phoenix charity group for homeless people tried to log into a federal payment system to withdraw $62,000 for their January payroll and other expenses, they found it locked on Tuesday.

“No one could get in,” said Amy Schwabenlender, the chief executive of Keys to Change, which receives a $900,000 annual grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “It’s ridiculous. You’re unraveling things with no notice. You’re stopping things that were running to help people.”

Even as Governor Abbott applauded the president’s order, other officials in Texas were racing to get a handle on all the ways in which federal dollars flowed into local government services, and which of those dollars would be potentially cut off.

The state’s health agencies received nearly $30 billion from the federal government in the last fiscal year, more than half of its funding. By some estimates, more than 20,000 teaching positions across Texas could be lost without Title I, which provides federal funding to schools that have large numbers of low-income students.

“A number of our major city departments are either fully funded or significantly funded with federal grant dollars, that includes our health department and the city’s housing department,” said Christopher Hollins, the Houston controller and a Democrat.

“Will people who get housing vouchers have somewhere to live next month?” Mr. Hollins asked. “We don’t know the answer to that.”

In California, public transit agencies were left wondering what might happen to the huge federal promises for large-scale infrastructure projects.

The Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District is awaiting a $400 million grant from the Federal Highway Administration to complete a seismic retrofit of one of the world’s most recognizable bridges.

“Like every other transportation agency in the country, we’re monitoring this temporary pause,” said Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz, a spokesman for the bridge district.

The San Francisco ferry system and port were also recently told to expect $55 million from the Environmental Protection Agency to complete the country’s first high-speed, zero-emission ferry network — an initiative that could be on the losing end of Mr. Trump’s determination to end “green new deal” projects.

But even that was unclear.

Dr. Theresa Cullen, the director of the Pima County Health Department in Tucson, Ariz., said her agency had already stopped making new purchases. She said the freeze would jeopardize breast cancer screenings; H.I.V. prevention; efforts to track a rash of tuberculosis cases; and the distribution of Narcan, the overdose-reversal drug, to prevent opioid deaths.

“Today they will be OK,” she said. “I don’t know about next week.”

Heather Knight contributed reporting from San Francisco, Emily Cochrane from Nashville and Ernesto Londoño from Minneapolis.

No military personnel are to be involved in processing and detaining “criminal aliens within the U.S.,” the Northern Command said in a statement. But deportation officers will benefit from the sprawling base’s infrastructure and overall security.

The immigration service requested and received “a temporary operations center, staging area, and a temporary holding location for the receiving, holding, and processing of illegal aliens,” according to the Northern Command.

It was not immediately clear how many migrants the immigration service plans to process or hold at the military base.

Responsibility for operating the detention facility at the base falls to senior immigration service leaders, special agents and analysts, as well as personnel from other parts of the Department of Homeland as well as other federal law enforcement agencies, the Northern Command said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Monday, his first full official day on the job, that “whatever is needed at the border will be provided.” He did not rule out Mr. Trump invoking the Insurrection Act, a law more than 200 years old, to allow the use of the armed forces for law enforcement duty, which is otherwise barred.

About 1,600 Marines and Army soldiers have arrived near the Mexican border in California and Texas in the past week, joining 2,500 Army reservists called to active duty who were already there. More troops are expected to deploy to the border in the coming days, Pentagon officials say.

Although Elon Musk is leading the new Department of Government Efficiency and has no official role in the Office of Personnel Management, an email today that offered federal workers the option to resign had a striking resemblance to an email he sent Twitter employees after buying the platform in late 2022. The two emails even shared the same subject line: “Fork in the road.”

The email that Musk sent to Twitter employees in November 2022 encouraged employees to quit with severance if they didn’t want to sign up for an “extremely hardcore” version of the company. His email linked to a Google form that required employees to opt in to keep their jobs, creating chaos across the company, as some employees wondered if the email was a joke or a phishing attempt.

The email from the Trump administration today required that federal workers explicitly ask to resign.

But on Tuesday, the earliest sketches of a new playbook emerged, as Democrats across the ideological spectrum accused Mr. Trump of preying on the nation’s most vulnerable citizens by denying government aid for struggling families and the elderly and defunding police departments, transportation systems and hospitals.

“Donald Trump’s administration is lying to you,” Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon in Chicago. “What the president is trying to do is illegal.”

Democratic governors, attorneys general and mayors raised alarms about halting funding to programs that would be harmed, including child-care centers and food assistance, and pointed angrily to the sudden failure of the online portal through which state Medicaid departments receive federal funding.

“I will not stand by while the president attempts to disrupt vital programs that feed our kids, provide medical care to our families and support housing and education in our communities,” said Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, who helped organize a lawsuit to block the order that was quickly joined by two dozen Democratic attorneys general.

By early evening, a federal judge in Washington temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s order freezing the disbursement of the federal funds. By then, Democrats in Washington and in city halls across the country had heard from constituents up in arms about the sudden loss of promised federal funding — concerns that their leaders eagerly relayed.

“When I get emails from young people in college saying they can’t access their portal to their financial aid — come on, man, that’s exhausting,” said Mayor Randall Woodfin of Birmingham, Ala. “This moment is going to require more of an organized effort from everybody.”

In the Senate, Democrats who had approved Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees to lead the Treasury and homeland security departments said they would now vote against any subsequent nominees.

Even Democrats, like Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, who are predisposed to seek bipartisan cooperation and who rarely channel the type of emotional response Mr. Trump has sparked among the party’s grass roots, said that the administration’s attempt to halt funding represented an alarming development that would have to be addressed before other business could take place.

“President Trump has tried to defy Congress’s constitutional appropriations role,” Mr. Coons said. “He cannot defy our advice-and-consent role.”

Still, a sudden surge of opposition in reaction to the order to freeze federal funds reduced the number of Democratic votes confirming Sean Duffy as Mr. Trump’s transportation secretary. All Senate Democrats had voted to advance his nomination, but 22 voted against him in the final round.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader, summoned Democratic House members to an “emergency” meeting set for Wednesday afternoon to detail their “counteroffensive” strategy.

A memo circulated by the House Democratic leaders on Tuesday morning described the pause, ordered by the White House Office of Management and Budget, as an “illegal scheme to choke off virtually all federal funding for basic services” and urged their members to highlight the impact.

Still, the newly vocal opposition was not enough for some in the party’s liberal grass roots. Indivisible, a progressive organization that started during Mr. Trump’s first administration, called on Democratic senators to grind all business to a halt, and attacked Mr. Jeffries for moving too slowly.

“It’s not a policy memo — it’s a revolution,” said Ezra Levin, the group’s co-founder. “Don’t let it be a quiet one.”

Lisa Lerer reported from New York and Reid J. Epstein from Washington.

The sense of crisis among aid groups worldwide is surging, as American officials tell groups they must obey an almost universal stop-work order issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio after Mr. Trump’s directive.

The officials say the groups must freeze nearly all programs that have received any of the $70 billion of annual aid budget approved by Congress through bipartisan negotiations. They include programs that provide medicine, shelter and clean water in dire conditions and often make the difference between life and death.

Uncertain of whether they can pay salaries or get any future funding, groups around the world said they are starting to lay off employees or furlough them. In the United States alone, tens of thousands of employees, many of whom live in the Washington area and rely on contract work with U.S. agencies, could lose their jobs. Some have already been laid off.

Leaders of aid groups say they have never seen such an expansive and damaging directive, even during periods of aid reassessment by earlier administrations. Many of them are scrambling to contact lawmakers and other U.S. officials to get urgent messages to Mr. Rubio. They said some programs will be hard to restart after a temporary shutdown, and many could disappear.

The State Department said the move was aimed at ensuring that all foreign aid programs “are efficient and consistent with U.S. foreign policy under the America First agenda.” On Tuesday, as the outcry from aid groups grew, Mr. Rubio issued a memo saying “life-saving humanitarian assistance” — including the provision of medicine, medical services, food and shelter — could continue temporarily, and that groups could apply for other waivers. None of that can include abortions, transgender surgeries or diversity work, he wrote.

The crisis had deepened on Monday evening, when Jason Gray, the acting head of the United States Agency for International Development, put about 60 top officials on paid leave. He wrote in an email that those officials had taken actions “designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders.” On Tuesday, office workers removed photographs of leaders from the walls. Hundreds of contractors have also been fired or put on leave.

Mr. Rubio said in a cable to U.S. missions abroad that the halt would last at least through a 90-day assessment period. But U.S. officials have already told some aid groups that certain programs, including ones that promote diversity, women’s reproductive rights and climate resilience, will be permanently cut.

U.S. agencies will need to break contracts during the halt, and they will likely need to pay fees. Among the U.S.A.I.D. employees put on paid leave are three lawyers, including the lead ethics lawyer, according to one person briefed on the situation.

The executive order halting foreign aid was the president’s first major foreign policy action, and many aid groups are only now understanding its broad scope. Foreign assistance money generally supports humanitarian, development and security programs, and it makes up less than 1 percent of the government budget.

Two Democratic members of the House, Gregory Meeks of New York and Lois Frankel of Florida, sent Mr. Rubio a letter on Saturday saying that lives were being “placed at risk” because of the aid halt. “Congress has appropriated and cleared these funds for use, and it is our constitutional duty to make sure these funds are spent as directed,” they wrote.

The stop order applies to most military and security assistance programs, including in Ukraine, Taiwan and Jordan. Much of that aid is disbursed by the State Department. Military aid to Israel and Egypt is exempted, as is emergency food assistance.

Mr. Trump’s decision to halt foreign aid could cause long-term damage to U.S. strategic interests, critics of the action say. Policymakers from both parties have long regarded foreign aid as a potent form of American power, a way to increase U.S. influence overseas using a tiny budget compared with military spending. Many development programs support democracy, education and civil rights efforts.

In recent years, China has tried to win more global influence with development projects, and it could gain ground as the United States retreats.

“This 90-day stop-work is a gift to our enemies and competitors — with effects that go beyond the immediate harms to people,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, the assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. in the Biden administration.

“It trashes our alliances with scores of countries built over half a century, trashes our world-leading expertise and capacity and threatens our security,” he said.

Dr. Gawande noted that U.S.A.I.D. has the largest footprint abroad after the military, employing hundreds of thousands of contractors, who will now be dismissed or put on leave.

Some former officials say a goal of the action could be to dismantle U.S.A.I.D. and move its work to the State Department — while keeping the total aid amount paltry. The Trump appointee at the State Department overseeing foreign aid is Pete Marocco, a divisive figure in the first Trump administration who worked at the Pentagon, State Department and U.S.A.I.D. At the aid agency, employees filed a 13-page dissent memo, accusing him of mismanagement. Senior State Department officials can exercise authority over U.S.A.I.D., though the agency usually operates autonomously.

Some of U.S.A.I.D.’s critical work is listed on its website. One document says that during the civil war in Sudan, a United Nations agency relied on U.S. government support to screen about 5.1 million children age 5 and under for malnutrition, and it provided about 288,000 children with lifesaving treatment last year between January and October.

Smaller groups will struggle to survive. China Labor Watch, a New York-based group with overseas offices that aims to end forced labor and trafficking of Chinese workers, is shutting down programs that rely on $900,000 of annual aid from the State Department, said Li Qiang, the organization’s founder. Seven staff employees will be placed on unpaid leave and could depart for good, Mr. Li said, adding that employees who lose their work visas might have to return to China, where they could be scrutinized by security officers.

Groups worldwide that have relied on U.S. funding are now “victims of this disruption, leading to distrust in the U.S. government,” he said.

He continued: “This will further isolate the U.S. internationally. Damaging national credibility and alienating allies for short-term gains will have lasting repercussions.”

The clampdown also cripples the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, the celebrated program started by President George W. Bush that is credited with saving more than 25 million lives. A shutdown of the program would likely cost millions of lives in the coming years, health experts said. The program’s work involves more than 250,000 health workers in 54 countries.

“When the funding stops before the epidemic is under control, you erode the investments you’ve made in the past,” said Dr. Linda-Gail Bekker, who heads the Desmond Tutu H.I.V. Center at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Simultaneously, Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization has prompted that group to tighten its belt, curtailing travel and limiting operations on the ground.

On Sunday night, employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were instructed to immediately stop communicating with W.H.O. staff. and other international partners.

The blackout means American officials are likely to lose access to information about human outbreaks, including of mpox, polio and the emerging mosquito-borne disease Oropouche, and animal diseases, like swine flu, that could devastate the nation’s agricultural industry, Dr. Gawande said.

U.S.A.I.D. has helped to contain 11 serious outbreaks of Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers in the last four years. One such disease, Marburg, is smoldering even now in Tanzania, with 15 confirmed cases and eight probable cases. Ten people have died.

“This is a disease with no test, no treatment and no vaccine that’s been approved,” Dr. Gawande said.

On Monday, Trump administration officials instructed organizations abroad to stop distributing H.I.V. medications that were purchased with U.S. aid money, even if the drugs are already in clinics.

Separately, officials worldwide were told that PEPFAR’s data systems would be shut down on Monday evening and that they should “prioritize copying key documents and data,” according to an email viewed by The New York Times. The system was maintained by a contractor forced to stop work because of the aid freeze.

About 90 percent of Dr. Bekker’s work in South Africa is funded by PEPFAR and the National Institutes of Health. Her team has helped to test H.I.V. medications and preventive drugs, and vaccines for Covid and human papillomavirus, or HPV, all of which are used in the United States.

Shutting down PEPFAR, which accounts for 20 percent of South Africa’s H.I.V. budget, would add more than a half million new H.I.V. infections and more than 600,000 related deaths in the country over the next decade, Dr. Bekker and her colleagues have estimated. The effect is likely to be far worse in poorer countries, like Mozambique, where PEPFAR funds the bulk of H.I.V. programs.

Abruptly halting treatment can endanger patients’ lives, but it can also increase spread of the virus and lead to resistance to the available drugs.

The Trump administration’s actions will cause long-lasting harm, including to Americans, said Asia Russell, executive director of the advocacy group Health Gap.

“If you’re trying to achieve a review of all foreign assistance, including PEPFAR, you can do that without attacking the programs through stopping them,” Ms. Russell said.

“It’s extraordinarily dangerous and perhaps deadly to do it this way,” she said, “but it’s also wasteful and inefficient.”

A spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management confirmed that the agency sent an email on Tuesday to federal civilian workers offering them the option to resign. Workers have until Feb. 6 to accept the offer. They would continue to receive full pay and benefits through Sept. 30.

The spokesperson said some workers would be exempt, including military members, Postal Service workers, immigration officials and certain national security officials. Agencies can also carve out exceptions for specific positions.

In an order released on Tuesday, the White House took steps meant to limit gender-affirming medical treatments for anyone younger than 19. Among other actions, the order threatened to pull federal funding from any medical institution that provides such treatments.

The directive came one day after the White House marginalized transgender members of the military in an order directing the Pentagon to assess whether transgender service members were physically and mentally combat-ready.

The suit was separate from another case filed in Providence, R.I., after the ruling by attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia, which also seeks to thwart Mr. Trump’s effort to freeze funding pending his administration’s review of whether the spending comported with his priorities.

Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s president and chief executive, praised the initial ruling. “We are grateful for this administrative stay to allow our clients time to sort through the chaos created by the Trump administration’s hasty and ill-advised actions” she said in a statement.

The White House press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This ruling marks the second time that a federal judge has intervened to pause Mr. Trump’s expansive interpretation of his own powers in order to let a legal challenge proceed. On Thursday, Judge John C. Coughenour of the Western District of Washington issued a temporary restraining order that blocked an attempt by Mr. Trump to end automatic citizenship for babies born on American soil.

The funding freeze, announced on Monday night in a two-page memo from Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, directs federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance,” specifically citing “D.E.I., woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal.” The meaning of the directive was unclear, and plunged state agencies, city governments and nonprofit organizations into confusion.

Judge AliKhan’s stay came as access to federal money for programs large and small was interrupted, causing chaos across the country. State health agencies said they had been locked out of their Medicaid reimbursement portals. State officials said funding for preschools, community health centers, food for low-income families, housing assistance and disaster relief was at risk. Universities were freezing new research grants.

With even Republican states pleading for guidance, the White House and its budget office tried on Tuesday afternoon to dial back perceptions about the order’s scope, saying the funding pause did “not apply across-the-board” and was limited to programs implicated by the president’s executive orders, including those on D.E.I. efforts and funding for nongovernmental organizations “that undermine the national interest.”

A question-and-answer document released by the budget office as a follow-up said that “mandatory programs like Medicaid” would “continue without pause.”