Live Updates: Trump Order Seeks Power Over Agencies Congress Made Independent

“This is a power move over independent agencies, a structure of administration that Congress has used for various functions going back to the 1880s,” said Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University and the author of a casebook on separation-of-powers law.

The order follows Mr. Trump’s summary firings of leaders of independent agencies in defiance of statutes that bar their removal without cause before their terms are up. Collectively, the moves constitute a major front in the president’s assault on the basic shape of the American government and his effort to seize some of Congress’s constitutional power over it.

The directive applies to various executive branch agencies that Congress established and empowered to regulate aspects of the economy, structuring them to be run by officials the president would appoint to fixed terms but whose day-to-day actions he would not directly control.

Those agencies include the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. Still, the order applies only partly to one particularly powerful agency, the Federal Reserve, covering issues related to its supervision and regulation of Wall Street, but exempting its decisions related to monetary policy, like raising and lowering interest rates.

Mr. Trump’s order builds on a series of directives that trace back to one issued in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan that also required agencies to submit proposed rules to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget. That order, however, did not apply to agencies Congress set up to be independent of the White House.

Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University, said there should be no legal controversy over the order’s requirement that independent agencies consult with the White House about their regulatory plans. Under the Constitution, he noted, the president “may require the opinion, in writing” of senior officials related to the duties of their offices.

But, Professor Strauss said, other aspects suggest that Mr. Trump views himself as having the power to direct agency actions — equivalent to how he can give the military orders as commander in chief — even if Congress has said otherwise. That, Professor Strauss argued, crosses a line in what has long been the mainstream understanding of the Constitution.

The order declared that the White House’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell T. Vought, can withhold funding for any projects or initiatives that conflict with Mr. Trump’s policies and priorities.

Specifically, it said, Mr. Vought will have the power to “adjust such agencies’ apportionments by activity, function, project, or object, as necessary and appropriate, to advance the president’s policies and priorities,” including by prohibiting them from expending funds on matters Mr. Trump does not like.

That power for Mr. Vought to restrict agencies’ ability to spend funds that Congress has appropriated for them to use, the order says, is limited: He can do that only “so long as such restrictions are consistent with law.” But another section of the order says the agencies must accept the views of Mr. Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi on what the law means.

“No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the president or the attorney general’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation” without permission, it said.

Mr. Trump has taken the position that a 1974 law, the Impoundment Control Act, is unconstitutional. Under that law, Congress restricted presidents’ ability to refuse to spend money that lawmakers had appropriated for programs that the president did not like.

The Justice Department has sought to establish that only the solicitor general may speak for the executive branch before the Supreme Court. But Congress has also by statute given certain agencies independent litigating authority. The Trump administration apparently seeks to definitively end agencies’ ability to decide what positions to take even in lower court.

Since returning to office, Mr. Trump had already challenged a key legal plank of independent agencies by summarily firing the heads of several such organizations. That is in violation of statutes enacted by Congress that protect them from arbitrary termination and say that such officials may be removed before their terms are up only for a good cause, like misconduct.

For example, he ousted a member of the N.L.R.B. The move disregarded a provision in the law that created the agency that says, “Any member of the board may be removed by the president, upon notice and hearing, for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.”

He also dismissed a government lawyer who led an independent watchdog agency that protects whistle-blowers, despite a similar statute. A judge ordered the official temporarily reinstated, and the Trump administration has appealed to the Supreme Court.

Last week, Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general at the Justice Department, in a letter to Congress, wrote that the department would not defend the constitutionality of statutes that limit dismissing members of independent agencies before their terms were up.

Ms. Harris wrote that the Constitution should not be interpreted as allowing Congress to enact a law “which prevents the president from adequately supervising principal officers in the executive branch who execute the laws on the president’s behalf.” She added that the Trump administration would try to get the Supreme Court to overturn a 1935 precedent to the contrary.

Ending the independence of such agencies and consolidating power over them in the White House has long been an aim of the conservative legal movement, which sees that goal as a means toward reducing regulations and rules the government has imposed on powerful business interests.

But the movement has lacked the votes to persuade Congress to simply rescind the statutes and abolish or curtail such agencies. Instead, since the Reagan administration, conservative lawyers have developed and pushed an ideology called the unitary executive theory, under which the Constitution should be reinterpreted as not allowing Congress to create any pockets of independence within the government from direct presidential control.

Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court — five of whose nine members served as executive branch lawyers in the Reagan or George W. Bush administrations — have already been chipping away at the powers of regulatory agencies. The agencies include those Congress established as independent and those, like the Environmental Protection Agency, that lawmakers set up to be subject to presidential supervision.

During the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump and some of his closest advisers made clear that if he won, they would push that agenda. In a video on his campaign website, Mr. Trump pledged to bring independent agencies “back under presidential authority, as the Constitution demands.”

And Mr. Vought, who also led the Office of Management and Budget in Mr. Trump’s first administration, told The New York Times in an interview in 2023 that independent agencies were in their cross hairs.

“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Mr. Vought said.

Colby Smith contributed reporting from New York.

He offered an negotiating strategy, musing that an official could say, “I’ll give you three, I don’t want to pay you five. It’s too high. I’ll give you three.”

“But they don’t do that,” he said. “If a guy sends in a bill for 5,000, they pay 5,000. They expect to be cut. Everybody expects to be cut. When you send in a bill, you expect to be cut.”

The comments echo Mr. Trump’s long history as a real-estate developer, when he would brag about his negotiating prowess. He also was accused of not paying contractors and lawyers, as was his longtime lawyer and mentor, Roy M. Cohn.

Mr. Trump appeared in Tuesday night’s interview alongside Elon Musk, who is leading an effort to carry out a radical and swift overhaul of the government. Mr. Musk has said he has identified contracts, among other costs, that were bloated or did not fit with Mr. Trump’s agenda.

The president has long been frustrated by the sclerotic pace and rules of the federal government. But negotiating smaller contracts in the way that Mr. Trump was used to in his private business would be challenging to put in place on a larger scale.

He singled out legal fees as an example, he claimed, of a service in which people performing it expect to have their bills cut.

“You offer people a much lower number because you know they actually put fat. I’m not even saying — it’s like a way of business,” Mr. Trump said. “They put more on because they expect to be negotiated. When you send in a bill to the government, there’s nobody to negotiate.”

But in case after case, federal judges have begged to differ.

The work of Mr. Musk, who Mr. Trump has said is the leader of the operation tasked with making “large scale” reductions across every department, has been largely shrouded in secrecy. Team members have spent weeks burrowing into multiple federal agencies, demanding access to data for undisclosed purposes.

Anxious career employees have received little direct information, leaving them reliant on office rumors and news reports for updates. The identities of the members of Mr. Musk’s team, too, have been closely held.

Court filings in the torrent of lawsuits challenging the incursions have offered a crucial, though limited, window. As some of the only firsthand accounts of what Mr. Musk’s associates are doing across a number of departments, they paint a picture of a tightly managed process in which small groups of government employees have swept in and out of agencies, grabbing up data in apparent pursuit of larger political projects.

The filings have also offered revelations about what information security and ethics trainings those employees have undergone. But many questions remain, frustrating the judges trying the cases.

In at least one filing, the government has shown an effort to wall off Mr. Musk, in particular, from scrutiny by asserting that he is not, in fact, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency nor an employee of the office.

Lawyers defending the Trump administration in lawsuits have sought to document the efforts by Mr. Musk’s team as routine. The government has repeatedly filed affidavits by the civil servants working with Mr. Musk’s associates stating that everyone from the Musk unit has been given appropriate training and agreed to security measures meant to prevent illegal disclosures of privileged data. (In a case involving the Musk team’s work at the Education Department, however, an employee acknowledged that another operative had not completed trainings as of last Sunday.)

And like Mr. Musk, lawyers representing the government have repeatedly asserted that all efforts associated with the operation are aimed at auditing government books for signs of “waste, fraud and abuse.” The office did not respond to a message seeking comment.

In case after case, judges have strained to establish even basic facts about the staff members who have descended on federal agencies. Attempts to press for specifics, such as how many associates of Mr. Musk have been detailed to specific agencies, whether they have arrived as employees of those agencies or as representatives from the White House, and what grounds they have for demanding entry into agencies’ systems, have been largely unsuccessful.

In a lawsuit brought against the Education Department that challenges the Musk team’s review of sensitive student data, like tax information and Social Security numbers, a government employee named Adam Ramada identified himself as a member of Mr. Musk’s team. Mr. Ramada said he had been detailed to the department to audit its federal student loan portfolio starting on Jan. 28. He did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Reporting by The New York Times and other outlets has suggested that more than a dozen people associated with Mr. Musk have been added to the department’s employee directory and have pursued a variety of projects, including building A.I. tools to replace older customer care platforms the government previously paid contractors to manage.

But in a sworn declaration, Mr. Ramada stated that he was working with two unnamed government employees from other agencies as part of a six-person team. He said those six people had not yet examined any tax data but planned to scrutinize the costs of “student loan repayment plans, awards or debt discharges.” Student debt forgiveness was one of the main priorities of the Education Department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In an earlier case, Mr. Ramada had said in a filing that he was also detailed to the Labor Department, where he was part of a three-person team focused on “obtaining accurate and complete data to inform policy decisions.”

Additionally, it was only through court filings that the Treasury Department acknowledged that another associate of Mr. Musk, Marko Elez, had briefly been provided direct access to the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems and source code.

And, in an extraordinary declaration in a separate case on Monday, the director of the White House Office of Administration stated that Mr. Musk was in fact neither the legal head of the Department of Government Efficiency nor an employee. The statement, made by Joshua Fisher, drew a technical distinction aimed at insulating Mr. Musk from some legal challenges even as Mr. Musk has both publicly and privately asserted himself as the clear leader of the effort.

While the deluge of lawsuits challenging Mr. Musk’s authority has at times provided some clarity, many of the filings appear to obfuscate basic details about the larger goals at play and the people responsible for carrying them out. Most members of the small task forces described in the filings as being in place at various agencies remain anonymous.

For example, a filing by an official describing the Musk team’s presence at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau stated that only one unnamed person from the operation had been detailed to the bureau as part of a “core team” of six people to help with the general tech modernization goals laid out in Mr. Trump’s executive order establishing the office.

But days earlier, Adam Martinez, who made that declaration, appeared to have told employees in an email that at least three Musk team members were already on site at the bureau and required prompt access to data, including human resources and financial systems, according to reporting by Wired.

On Monday, while considering whether to temporarily block Mr. Musk’s team from embedding in more than half a dozen federal agencies for two weeks, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan asked government lawyers directly whether the Musk-led operation had recommended layoffs at those agencies in the weeks ahead.

“DOGE’s actions in this case — in this arena — have been very unpredictable and scattershot, and I have no idea whether that is by design or simply by virtue of the scope of their remit,” Judge Chutkan said. “But that’s why I’m asking you: Have there been terminations, will there be terminations, when are they going to be and where are they going to be?”

A lawyer representing the government responded, “Obviously, I can’t commit to ‘no one will get fired the next few weeks’ if someone assaults their co-workers tomorrow.”

Judge Chutkan declined on Tuesday to issue an emergency restraining order in that case, finding that it was too unclear what role Mr. Musk’s operatives had played and what downstream effects their work so far could have on the coalition of states that sued.

The presence of Mr. Musk’s teams at different agencies has often been a precursor to major cuts and staff reductions that appear to be informed more by Mr. Trump’s political agenda than by conventional definitions of “fraud” or “waste.” Those have included a wide variety of humanitarian aid programs, grants for institutions conducting medical research across the United States and a spate of haphazard layoffs.

In court, government lawyers have described personnel moves as a part of the natural turnover when the government changes hands.

“My head is not buried in the sand,” Simon Jerome, a lawyer from the Justice Department, told the judge in the education case. “I understand sort of the tenor of the conversations and the disruption — and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way — I just mean that there’s certainly been a lot of turmoil. But I would resist the idea that the degree of public hubbub around the change in presidential administrations, or decisions that a new administration makes, makes it unusual.”

But the judge’s order on Tuesday went beyond an emergency measure, stopping the enforcement of Mr. Trump’s order “pending further order of this court.” Each of the plaintiffs had been housed in women’s facilities and was being given hormones for gender dysphoria. Under the president’s order, they were to be moved into men’s units and their treatments discontinued.

Judge Lamberth wrote that in court documents and during a hearing before him, the government had “pointed to speculative action” that the Bureau of Prisons might take to allay his Eighth Amendment concerns. But the judge said that he had received no further information from the government since he issued that earlier order, on Feb. 4.

Judge Lamberth was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan.

The injunction is among the first to be issued in the barrage of legal challenges seeking to stop President Trump’s measures on immigration, government spending, birthright citizenship and government recognition of transgender people.

The administration has also moved to ban trans women and girls from competing in women’s sports, to bar trans people from serving openly in the military and to no longer reflect the gender identities of trans people on passports.

In a similar lawsuit filed in Massachusetts, a transgender plaintiff was granted a temporary restraining order that applied only to her.

Mr. Trump’s order, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” directed officials to amend “as necessary” the current regulations on housing assignments for prisoners. Critics have argued that the privacy and safety of female inmates is put at risk when transgender women are housed in women’s prisons.

In his order, Judge Lamberth wrote that the plaintiffs had argued that they would face an elevated risk of physical and sexual violence if they were transferred to a male prison, that it would exacerbate their diagnosed mental health conditions and that the withholding of their hormone therapy would likely cause them severe harm.

“Importantly,” he wrote, “the defendants did not substantially dispute those facts.”

Shaila Dewan contributed reporting.

One of the officials said that the Pentagon was asked to provide Mr. Musk’s team with a list of those employees by the end of the day on Tuesday.

The hardest-hit part of the Pentagon’s work force, one official said, would most likely be new employees who are young and eager to contribute to the department’s mission whom military leaders would want to keep in government.

The official added that he feared the Defense Department would lose a generation of talent as a result of mass layoffs.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the request, which was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

On Tuesday evening, a Pentagon spokesman referred questions about Mr. Musk’s actions to the Office of Personnel Management, which serves as the federal government’s chief human resources agency. In response to a question about how many employees might be laid off as a result of the Musk team’s request, a spokesman said he did not have any information to provide.

The length of a probationary trial period can vary and supervisors are supposed to use that time to verify an employee’s fitness for federal service, according to the personnel office’s website.

“Removing probationary employees based on conduct and performance issues is less cumbersome as they are not entitled to most of the procedures and appeal rights granted to employees who have completed probationary period,” according to the personnel office.

Exactly how the Pentagon could lay off thousands of junior employees without harming national security is unclear.

President Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, said recently that any actions that Mr. Musk’s team would take in relation to the Pentagon would not harm the armed forces’ ability to wage combat operations.

Speaking to reporters on an American military base at Stuttgart, Germany, last week, Mr. Hegseth said he would welcome Mr. Musk and his team to the Pentagon. Mr. Hegseth called him “a great patriot.”

“There are waste, redundancies and head counts in headquarters that need to be addressed,” Mr. Hegseth said, noting that climate change was one area he thought was unnecessary for the Pentagon to be involved in.

“There’s plenty of places where we want the keen eye of DOGE, but we’ll do it in coordination,” the secretary said, referring to the Musk project. “We’re not going to do things that are to the detriment of American operational or tactical capabilities.”

Mr. Hegseth did not directly respond to a question asking how he might supervise or limit Mr. Musk’s team at the Pentagon. Mr. Musk, a billionaire tech entrepreneur, currently has lucrative business contracts with the Defense Department.

Mr. Trump has said he would personally ensure Mr. Musk did not have undue conflicts of interest, without offering details of how he would do so.

As far as Mr. Trump is concerned, Russia is not responsible for the war that has devastated its neighbor. Instead, he suggests that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s invasion of it. To listen to Mr. Trump talk with reporters on Tuesday about the conflict was to hear a version of reality that would be unrecognizable on the ground in Ukraine and certainly would never have been heard from any other American president of either party.

In Mr. Trump’s telling, Ukrainian leaders were at fault for the war for not agreeing to surrender territory and therefore, he suggested, they do not deserve a seat at the table for the peace talks that he has just initiated with Mr. Putin. “You should have never started it,” Mr. Trump said, referring to Ukrainian leaders who, in fact, did not start it. “You could have made a deal.”

Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, he went on: “You have a leadership now that’s allowed a war to go on that should have never even happened.” By contrast, Mr. Trump uttered not one word of reproach for Mr. Putin or for Russia, which first invaded Ukraine in 2014, waged a low-intensity war against it through all four years of Mr. Trump’s first term and then invaded it in 2022 aiming to take over the whole country.

Mr. Trump is in the middle of executing one of the most jaw-dropping pivots in American foreign policy in generations, a 180-degree turn that will force friends and foes to recalibrate in fundamental ways. Ever since the end of World War II, a long parade of American presidents saw first the Soviet Union and then, after a brief and illusory interregnum, its successor Russia as a force to be wary of, at the very least. Mr. Trump gives every appearance of viewing it as a collaborator in future joint ventures.

He makes clear that the United States is done isolating Mr. Putin for his unprovoked aggression against a weaker neighbor and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people. Instead, Mr. Trump, who has always had a perplexing fondness for Mr. Putin, wants to readmit Russia to the international club and make it one of America’s top friends.

“It’s a disgraceful reversal of 80 years of American foreign policy,” said Kori Schake, who is the director of foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and was a national security aide to President George W. Bush.

“Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. refused to legitimate Soviet conquest of the Baltic States, and it gave heart to people fighting for their freedom,” she continued. “Now we’re legitimating aggression to create spheres of influence. Every American president of the last 80 years would oppose President Trump’s statement.”

In Mr. Trump’s circle, the pivot is a necessary corrective to years of misguided policy. He and his allies see the cost of defending Europe as too high, given other needs. Coming to some kind of accommodation with Moscow, in this view, would allow the United States to bring home more troops or shift national security resources toward China, which they see as “the biggest threat,” as Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it last month.

The U.S. reversal has certainly been pronounced over the past week. Just days after Vice President JD Vance excoriated European allies, saying “the threat from within” was more worrisome than Russia, Mr. Rubio met with Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, and talked up “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians” if they could simply dispose of the Ukraine war.

No Ukrainian leaders were in the room for the meeting, held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, much less other Europeans, although Mr. Rubio called several foreign ministers afterward to brief them. Instead, by all appearances, this was a meeting of two big powers dividing up areas of dominance, a modern-day Congress of Vienna or Yalta Conference.

Mr. Trump has long seen Mr. Putin as a compatriot, a strong and “very savvy” player whose effort to bully Ukraine into making territorial concessions was nothing short of “genius.” Mr. Putin, in his eyes, is someone worthy of admiration and respect, unlike the leaders of traditional U.S. allies like Germany, Canada or France, for whom he exhibits scorn.

Indeed, Mr. Trump has spent the first month of his second term stiffing the allies, not only leaving them out of the emerging Ukraine talks but threatening tariffs against them, demanding they increase their military spending and asserting claims over some of their territory. His billionaire patron Elon Musk has publicly backed the far-right Alternative for Germany party.

“For now, the Europeans see this as Trump normalizing Russia relations while treating his allies, the Europeans, as untrusted,” said Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, an international consulting firm. “Supporting the AfD, who the German leaders consider a neo-Nazi party, makes Trump look like an adversary to Europe’s largest economy. It’s an extraordinary change.”

Mr. Trump vowed during the campaign that he could end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, which he has failed to do, and in fact said he would bring peace to Ukraine even before his inauguration, which he also failed to do. After a nearly 90-minute phone call with Mr. Putin last week, Mr. Trump assigned Mr. Rubio and two other advisers, Michael Waltz and Steve Witkoff, to pursue negotiations.

The concessions that Mr. Trump and his team have floated sound like a Kremlin wish list: Russia gets to keep all of the Ukrainian territory it illegally seized by force. The United States will not provide Ukraine with security guarantees, much less allow it into NATO. Sanctions will be lifted. The president has even suggested that Russia be readmitted to the Group of 7 major powers after it was expelled for its original 2014 incursion into Ukraine.

What would Mr. Putin have to give up for a deal? He would have to stop killing Ukrainians while he pockets his victory. Mr. Trump has not highlighted other concessions he would insist on. Nor has he said how Mr. Putin could be trusted to keep an agreement given that he violated a 1994 pact guaranteeing Ukrainian sovereignty and two cease-fire deals negotiated in Minsk, Belarus, in 2014 and 2015.

Mr. Trump’s evident faith in his ability to seal a deal with Mr. Putin mystifies veteran national security officials who have dealt with Russia over the years.

“We should be talking to them in the same way that we talked to Soviet leaders throughout the Cold War,” said Celeste A. Wallander, who dealt with Russia and Ukraine issues as assistant secretary of defense under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Which is you don’t trust them.”

“When you do negotiations,” she continued, “you do them with the presumption that they will violate them. You try to find overlapping interests, but recognize that our interests are fundamentally in conflict and we’re trying to manage a dangerous adversary, not become best friends.”

Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Mr. Trump made it sound as if he did consider Russia to be a friend — but not Ukraine. “Russia wants to do something,” he said. “They want to stop the savage barbarianism.”

Mr. Trump expressed dismay about the killing and destruction wrought by what he called a “senseless war,” comparing scenes from the front to the Battle of Gettysburg with “body parts all over the field.” Ukraine, he said, was “being wiped out” and the war had to end. But he did not say who was wiping out Ukraine, leaving it clear he faulted its own leaders and dismissing their insistence to be part of any negotiations.

“I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Mr. Trump said. “Well, they’ve had a seat for three years. And a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily. Just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without, I think, without the loss of much land, very little land. Without the loss of any lives. And without the loss of cities that are just laying on their sides.”

He repeated his claim that the invasion would not have happened had he been president, ignoring the fact that Russian-sponsored forces had waged war inside Ukraine all four years of his first term. “I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land,” he said without explaining why he did not try to negotiate peace when he was in office.

As he often does, Mr. Trump flavored his comments with multiple false claims. Among them, he said that the United States has contributed three times as much aid to Ukraine since the war started as Europe has. In fact, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Europe has allocated $138 billion compared with $119 billion from the United States.

He also denigrated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, saying more than once that “he’s down at 4 percent in approval rating.” In fact, Mr. Zelensky’s approval rating has fallen from its once-stratospheric heights, but only to around 50 percent — not that different from Mr. Trump’s own.

Mr. Trump also agreed with a Russian talking point that Ukraine should have new elections to play a part in negotiations. “Yeah, I would say that when they want a seat at the table, you could say the people have to — wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have to say, like, you know, it’s been a long time since we had an election?” he said. “That’s not a Russia thing. That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries also.”

What other countries he did not say. Nor did he say anything about the need for elections in Russia, where any voting is controlled by the Kremlin and its allies.

Mr. Trump’s remarks were not scripted and came in response to questions by reporters. But they reflected how he sees the situation and foreshadowed the next few months. They also sent fresh shock waves through Europe, which is coming to grips with the fact that its chief ally in the new cold war no longer sees itself that way.

“Some of the most shameful comments uttered by a president in my lifetime,” Ian Bond, deputy director of the Center for European Reform in London, wrote online. “Trump is siding with the aggressor, blaming the victim. In the Kremlin they must be jumping for joy.”

As commerce secretary, Mr. Lutnick will take on a broad portfolio that includes defending U.S. business interests worldwide and overseeing restrictions on technology exports to countries like China.

At his confirmation hearing last month, Mr. Lutnick said he would take a tough stance on the department’s oversight of technology sales to China and back up U.S. export controls with the threat of tariffs. He said the recent artificial intelligence technology released by the Chinese start-up DeepSeek had been underpinned by Meta’s open platform and chips sold by the U.S. company Nvidia.

“We need to stop helping them,” Mr. Lutnick said of China, adding, “I’m going to be very strong on that.”

As the United States resumes economic negotiations with the country, Mr. Lutnick is expected to play a central role. Mr. Trump said the new commerce secretary would oversee the work of the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which is traditionally the hub of trade policy.

Mr. Lutnick will assume that responsibility as Mr. Trump has already taken steps to upend the global trading system. The president has threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico, imposed tariffs on China and initiated a process to begin imposing so-called reciprocal tariffs on all U.S. trading partners. The Commerce Department will work with other federal agencies to determine tariff rates for other countries.

Mr. Lutnick will also be responsible for overseeing and potentially overhauling programs that were top priorities for the Biden administration. Those include subsidies to U.S. chip manufacturers under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act and an effort to provide broadband internet access to at least 6.25 million households and locations across the country.

Mr. Lutnick, who is a wealthy investor, has a network of ties that could raise concerns about potential conflicts of interest as he leads the way on government policies that could significantly affect businesses and markets, potentially enriching former customers or partners.

For instance, he has financial interests in the mining industry in Greenland through Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor has invested in Critical Metals, a company that has proposed mining metals and minerals in Greenland as soon as 2026. Mr. Trump has repeatedly proposed purchasing Greenland, which is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Demark.

A financial disclosure filing that Mr. Lutnick submitted last month showed executive positions he has held or holds in more than 800 individual firms. It also revealed that he received more than $350 million in income, distributions and bonuses in the past two years from his network of financial services and real estate firms.

Mr. Lutnick, who worked on Wall Street for decades, gained national attention when many of the employees at Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage firm where he was the president and chief executive, died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

He now faces two more votes: one to block a filibuster on Thursday, and, if he prevails, a floor vote on his confirmation following soon after.

Mr. Patel, 44, has made attacking the F.B.I. a personal brand — in a book called “Government Gangsters,” in television and on podcast interviews. He has leveraged unflinching fealty to the president into a nomination for one of the most powerful posts in the country, despite his lack of law enforcement experience compared with those who have held the job before him.

Despite these concerns, Senate Republicans — who were less than enthusiastic about his selection after President Trump announced his plan to put him in the post in November — have fallen into line as they have with the president’s other nominations.

A few hours before the vote on Tuesday, Mr. Patel made a brief appearance at Justice Department headquarters, located across the street from the F.B.I. Officials would not say whom he had visited or why.

If confirmed, Mr. Patel, a Long Island native, will face a bureau roiled by conflict and uncertainty.

In recent weeks, Trump appointees at the Justice Department have ordered the F.B.I. to supply the names of bureau personnel who helped investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, raising the possibility that the administration plans to purge career bureau officials, including rank-and-file field agents.

At least nine high-ranking officials have been forced out since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, plunging the bureau into confusion and prompting the head of the bureau’s New York City office to say that all of these actions have spread “fear and angst within the F.B.I. ranks.”

Judge Contreras noted that Mr. Trump could remove members of the panel only if they had neglected their duty or engaged in malfeasance, acts that he said Ms. Harris had not been shown to have committed. Ms. Harris had “demonstrated that she is likely to show her termination as a member of the M.S.P.B. was unlawful,” Judge Contreras added.

Federal workers who are laid off or punished in other ways typically appeal to the merit board, and are sent to administrative judges for initial hearings. Appeals are directed to the merit board for a final decision, which can then serve as precedent.

The firing of Ms. Harris, which she said she learned of in a one-sentence email last week, appeared to be an attempt to reshape the composition of the panel in a way that could have favored Republicans, giving them power over a little-known but critical government organ that protects federal workers from unfair punishment. If Mr. Trump successfully replaces Ms. Harris with a loyalist, the merit board could rule more favorably on the mass agency layoffs his administration has already begun ordering.

Ms. Harris said in a short phone call on Tuesday afternoon that she had raced back to the merit board’s offices within a half-hour of the judge’s ruling.

“There’s never been anyone happier to be back at work than me,” Ms. Harris said.

Her lawyer, Michael Kator, said on Tuesday that Ms. Harris would now need to wait for the judge to potentially grant a so-called preliminary injunction, which would allow Ms. Harris to keep her job until the case is resolved or a higher court reverses the decision.

“It’s an important first step,” he said. “But obviously it’s only the first step.”

Most foreign carmakers already have factories in the United States. Still, 25 percent tariffs would have a significant impact on the price of vehicles that are imported, like the Volkswagen ID.Buzz electric van, BMW Mini or any Porsche.

Around one-fifth of new cars sold in the United States last year, or 2.9 million vehicles, were imported, according to JATO, a research firm. That figure includes vehicles made in Mexico and Canada, as well as Europe and Asia.

In Panama, the migrants have been locked in a soaring, glass-paneled downtown hotel, the Decapolis Hotel Panama. Reporters from The New York Times managed to speak to several people there — including some from Iran and China — who said they had left their countries for the United States because their lives were in danger.

Around 150 migrants who had not agreed to be deported would be relocated from the hotel to a camp near the jungle known as the Darién Gap, according to Panama’s security minister, Frank Ábrego. He said at a news conference on Tuesday that the migrants would remain at the camp, San Vicente, until they were offered asylum in a third country “where they felt safe.”

Mr. Ábrego said that no one had applied for asylum in Panama.

Panamanian authorities have not permitted the deportees to leave the hotel, and a lawyer seeking to represent several migrants, Jenny Soto Fernández, told The Times that officials had blocked her from entering the building at least four times.

In an interview, Ms. Soto said that several migrants from Iran had asked for her help in applying for refugee status in Panama. “I have all the legal documents ready,” she said, adding that she was “still not able to get to” the people.

Mr. Ábrego said at the news conference that his government was keeping the migrants in the hotel in an effort to “guarantee security and peace for Panamanian citizens.”

Last week, Panama’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Ruiz-Hernández, described the migrants as “having no criminal records.”

Mr. Ábrego said that, of the more than 170 migrants who had signed orders authorizing their deportation, around 20 were expected to depart for their home countries in the next week. He said one deportee in the group, from Ireland, had already returned home.

Questions at Tuesday’s news conference focused largely on the accounts of migrants in the hotel that were gathered by The Times.

Asked by reporters about a deportee’s suicide attempt, which was recounted to Times reporters by several people, Mr. Ábrego said he had no prior knowledge of it. He said a migrant who was said to have broken a leg trying to escape from the hotel had twisted an ankle on a staircase.

Mr. Ábrego repeatedly pointed to the United Nations agencies that are charged with responding to the needs of the migrants deported to Panama under Panama’s agreements with the United States: the International Organization for Migration, or I.O.M., and U.N.H.C.R., or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, also known as the U.N. Refugee Agency.

The security minister said the deportees were only in temporary custody of Panamanian officials. “Custody sounds bad,” he said. “They’re under our protection.”

Annie Correal reported from Mexico City and Julie Turkewitz from Bogotá, Colombia. Alex E. Hernández contributed reporting from Panama City.

Mr. LaCivita is working for the Democratic Party of Albania ahead of the country’s parliamentary elections in May, when it will try to overtake the governing left-wing Socialist Party. In text messages to The New York Times, Mr. LaCivita characterized his work as an extension of his assistance to Mr. Trump.

“I’m exporting MAGA — Make Albania Great Again!” Mr. LaCivita wrote.

The leader of the Democratic Party of Albania is Sali Berisha, a former president and prime minister who is facing corruption charges in Albania in connection with a property deal. The Biden administration imposed sanctions on Mr. Berisha in 2021 for “significant corruption,” according to a statement from former Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who accused him of misappropriating public funds and using his power to enrich his allies and family.

Mr. LaCivita argued that the accusations against Mr. Berisha were politically motivated, and suggested the Albanian politician’s experience aligned with that of Mr. Trump.

“It’s a natural fit — beating a Socialist who’s a pawn and puppet of the Soros family,” Mr. LaCivita said, evoking unsubstantiated claims by Mr. Berisha that the Democratic megadonor George Soros was behind the sanctions. Mr. Berisha has indicated that he intends to ask the Trump administration to reconsider the State Department’s sanctions.

Mr. Berisha has used his party’s hiring of Mr. LaCivita to link himself to Mr. Trump, though the U.S. president has not signaled support for a preferred party in the parliamentary elections. Mr. Berisha also has sought to distinguish himself from the governing party by vowing that if the opposition wins, it will not renew Albania’s agreement to accept migrants from Italy.

Strategists for winning presidential campaigns have long marketed their services abroad. There is often high demand for consultants with ties to the new U.S. president from foreign politicians seeking to portray themselves as the favored candidate of Washington, which can be an advantage in many parts of the world.

But Mr. LaCivita, who appeared this month with Mr. Berisha at a news conference in Albania, said he would not approach the Trump administration on behalf of Mr. Berisha or his party.

“I don’t lobby,” Mr. LaCivita said. “I do campaigns, and that’s what I am doing — pretty straightforward.”

After Mr. Trump was elected in November, Mr. LaCivita became involved in a variety of enterprises. He accepted a position on the board of advisers of the government relations firm Michael Best Strategies, which lobbies for corporate clients including T-Mobile and the cryptocurrency company Ripple Labs, though he did not register to lobby himself.

Mr. LaCivita also joined the global advisory council of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. And he teamed with other Trump-linked consultants, including Paul Manafort, who served as chairman of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, to pitch political consulting services to far-right politicians around the world.

Mr. LaCivita would not say whether other consultants were involved in the Albania work, and several of them did not respond to requests for comment. He also would not say whether he had signed on any other foreign clients, but suggested that he had been traveling widely.