Live Updates: Trump Will Lift Sanctions on Syria and Meet With Its Leader

Those savings had actually disappeared days or weeks before, when federal agencies reversed cancellations they had made at the behest of Mr. Musk’s group. One revived contract, which DOGE said was worth $108 million, was restored by the Department of Veterans Affairs after eight days. Mr. Musk’s group still listed it as “terminated” for two months after that.

The presence of revived contracts on DOGE’s list of “terminations” was the latest in a series of data errors that have inflated its success at saving money. In the past, the group has deleted other errors from its “Wall of Receipts” site after new reports found that they were double-counting the same cancellations or claiming credit for killing contracts that had ended decades before.

On Sunday night, Mr. Musk’s group also added more than 800 new terminated contracts and raised its overall savings estimate — across all government activity, not only contracts — to $170 billion from $165 billion. The group did not delete all of the resurrected contracts identified by The Times. It left 12 on the site, still claiming that terminating those had saved taxpayers $121 million.

Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said the webpage would continue to be updated. He defended Mr. Musk’s group in a statement: “DOGE is working at record speed to cut waste, fraud and abuse, producing historic savings for the American people.”

“There is a dark problem on Harvard’s campus, and by prioritizing appeasement over accountability, institutional leaders have forfeited the school’s claim to taxpayer support,” the task force said.

The task force did not detail which grants were being canceled, though it said eight federal agencies were involved in cutting off money. The officials said the $450 million in cuts were on top of $2.2 billion the administration had already frozen.

A Harvard spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.

The government has been at odds with Harvard since late March, when the task force said it would review about $9 billion in federal money designated for the university and its affiliates. Harvard later rejected a list of intrusive demands from the federal government and filed a lawsuit to challenge the suspension of the $2.2 billion in multiyear grants.

Last week, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, told Harvard not to apply for future federal grants. In a response on Monday, Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, said the university and the Trump administration shared “common ground on a number of critical issues, including the importance of ending antisemitism and other bigotry on campus.”

But, he warned, shared ambitions were “undermined and threatened by the federal government’s overreach into the constitutional freedoms of private universities and its continuing disregard of Harvard’s compliance with the law.”

The Trump administration’s battle with Harvard has become the focal point of its efforts to realign what it views as the liberal tilt of elite universities. The result has been a widening effort to open a series of investigations after the college refused to comply with President Trump’s demands.

In late April, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened an investigation into whether Harvard and its affiliates had discriminated against white, Asian, male and heterosexual applicants and training program participants. The Washington Free Beacon first reported that investigation on Monday.

The university is also under scrutiny from the Education Department and the Health and Human Services Department, which are investigating the use of racial preferences at the Harvard Law Review.

The Trump administration has accused Harvard of failing to report large foreign donations to the federal government as required by law.

The Education Department has accused Harvard of submitting incomplete financial disclosures about its foreign ties and ordered the university to provide a trove of related documents. The Department of Homeland Security has threatened to block Harvard from enrolling international students unless the school hands over detailed records about the student body.

Harvard has disputed the notion that the university had not been complying with the law.

Mr. Trump has also threatened to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status, a move that the school argued had no legal basis.

Now 89, King Salman has largely retreated from public life over the past year. He was treated for a lung inflammation in October and underwent a colonoscopy and additional medical tests in May 2022, according to official royal court statements.

Since then, the king has taken on a more limited public role. He last chaired a cabinet session on March 12, according to the state news agency. On March 30, he was photographed performing Eid al-Fitr prayers at al-Salam Palace in Jeddah, alongside other members of the royal family.

During Mr. Trump’s previous visit to Riyadh in 2017, King Salman personally greeted him and the first lady, Melania Trump, on the tarmac after Air Force One landed. Both leaders also delivered keynote addresses at the Arab Islamic American Summit held during that trip.

Since ascending the throne in 2015, King Salman has met with all sitting U.S. presidents — Barack Obama, Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. — during their official visits to the kingdom.

During Mr. Trump’s first visit, Prince Mohammed was serving as deputy crown prince. At the time, the heir apparent was his older cousin, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. A month after that visit, Prince Mohammed bin Salman was elevated to the crown prince role by his father, King Salman, who swept aside his son’s older rival, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and profoundly reordered the kingdom’s inner power structure.

In both of his terms, Mr. Trump has touted close personal relationships with Gulf leaders, including Prince Mohammed. During a meeting inside the royal court on Tuesday, Mr. Trump referred to the crown prince as a friend and said they had built a strong rapport, according to a White House pool report.

“I really believe we like each other a lot,” Mr. Trump said.

The move would signal a sharp escalation in the administration’s effort to enact a crucial element of President Trump’s agenda and would be a noticeable shift in the typical work of the Justice Department, particularly the F.B.I. Diverting Justice Department resources to focus solely on immigration also raises questions about whether such a change would affect other priorities, like investigating financial crimes or corruption.

Already, federal agents in the Justice Department have been assisting immigration agents in American cities.

The new effort would significantly expand on that work, adding more personnel, the people said. Law enforcement officials have been told that in every city subject to the new decree, F.B.I. agents should account for 45 percent of the Justice Department contingent, they said.

The proposal comes as the Trump administration has dialed back numerous types of white-collar crime investigations, including foreign corruption, adherence to anti-money-laundering rules in the cryptocurrency industry and illicit foreign lobbying of U.S. officials.

The plan would affect 25 U.S. cities and their suburbs. For example, in the New York City area, 193 federal agents from Justice Department agencies would be assigned to work on immigration cases, and 86 of those would be F.B.I. agents, the people said.

New York is the F.B.I.’s largest field office, with nearly 1,000 agents when fully staffed. But current and former officials said siphoning roughly 8 percent of the work force to handle immigration cases would disrupt other bureau investigations and potentially affect white-collar cases.

That percentage would be even higher in Los Angeles, which has a smaller number of F.B.I. agents, and where the administration proposed assigning 207 Justice Department agents to immigration work for the rest of the year.

“This Department of Justice will continue to support immigration enforcement operations,” a department spokesman said. A spokesman for the F.B.I., Ben Williamson, said the agency was committed to offering that support and declined to comment further.

The directive envisions an F.B.I. that plays an increasing role in the Trump administration’s deportation efforts. The F.B.I. has already been assigned other tasks related to immigration enforcement, including investigating the whereabouts and conditions of immigrant children.

F.B.I. managers have been asked to establish plans for meeting the Justice Department goals, and delivering answers this week, the people said. The immigration work by agents is expected to run seven days a week.

Immigration enforcement has long been the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, where Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents conduct such work. But in Mr. Trump’s second term, the White House has marshaled other law enforcement agencies toward those efforts.

Federal agents from across the government have been deployed to assist ICE operations. In most circumstances, the federal agents act as “force multipliers,” securing the scene for immigration enforcement officers targeting undocumented immigrants. Immigration arrests in communities require extensive resources, and ICE has a limited number of officers.

Mr. Trump has requested more resources toward enforcement. On Friday, he called for D.H.S. to receive 20,000 more officers to aid in its crackdown.

Separately, a Justice Department memo issued Monday laid out the administration’s priorities for pursuing fraud and other types of white-collar crime. The memo echoes an earlier directive about cryptocurrency-related investigations but offers one significant new addition, suggesting that prosecutors should shut down such cases quickly if they are not producing good evidence.

In order to “maximize efficiency” in white-collar investigations, wrote Matthew Galeotti, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, “prosecutors must move expeditiously to investigate cases and make charging decisions.”

“That means,” he added, “that my office will work closely with the relevant sections to track investigations and ensure that they do not linger and are swiftly concluded.”

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

The U.S. president made the surprise announcement to end sanctions as he addressed a business forum in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where the crowd erupted in cheers and gave him a standing ovation.

The decision is a sea change for Syria, breaking the economic stranglehold on a country seen as critical to the stability of the Middle East.

“There is a new government that will, hopefully, succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace,” Mr. Trump said. “That’s what we want to see in Syria.”

Across Syria, people poured into the streets of major cities to cheer the news they hope will alleviate the crushing poverty that the majority of the population faces.

Syria’s foreign minister, Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani, hailed the move as “a new beginning on the path to reconstruction” and praised Saudi Arabia as the “voice of reason and wisdom” in the region. He did not mention the United States directly.

Since Mr. al-Assad’s ouster, critics and supporters of the new Syrian leadership have argued that the fall of the regime should bring an end to sanctions, many of which were put in place in response to a brutal crackdown on an uprising that began in 2011 and descended into a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and razed sections of several cities to the ground.

“The sanctions were implemented as a response to crimes committed by the previous regime against the people,” Mr. al-Shara told The New York Times in an interview last month.

Mr. Trump said he had come to the decision after speaking with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who backed the anti-Assad insurgency, and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

The Saudi prince said this week he would work to increase Riyadh’s total pledged investment in the United States during the Trump presidency to $1 trillion from $600 billion, as Mr. Trump requested.

“I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions on Syria,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday, speaking in front of giant projections of the U.S. and Saudi flags to an audience seated beneath a massive chandelier. “Oh, what I do for the crown prince,” he added, drawing laughter from the enthusiastic crowd.

Mr. Trump, who has cultivated diplomatic and business relationships with the kingdom, landed in Riyadh to a lavish welcome. The Saudis rolled out an honor guard, a team of Arabian horses and a crowd of royals and business leaders to greet him.

The cozy relations between Mr. Trump and the kingdom offered Gulf leaders an opportunity to push for the lifting of sanctions on Syria, which many of them see as critical to stemming economic collapse and preventing fresh conflict that could spread beyond its borders.

“The Syrian economy is in pieces, but the region stands poised, if not desperate, to help get it back on its feet,” Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, wrote in an email. “With U.S. sanctions out the way, Syria will for the first time in decades be able to look ahead toward recovery, rebuilding and reintegration into the world.”

In the Syrian capital, Damascus, people honked horns, blared sirens and waved Syrian and Saudi flags. Some gathered in groups to chant revolutionary slogans against Mr. al-Assad. And they expressed joy that their country might soon be able to reintegrate into the global financial system and begin to rebuild.

“Things will get cheaper,” said Intisar Al-Moussa, 49, a local government employee. “We’ll be able to buy our kids the things they want and give them a good education. We’ll be like other countries.”

She had come to the square with her sister, brother, mother and other relatives to celebrate and said the announcement had changed her idea of Mr. Trump.

“We didn’t like Trump much before, but now we love him because he stood with us,” she said.

She had another wish, too: “We hope that our salaries will go up a bit.”

It was not yet clear how extensive of a meeting the U.S. president might have on Wednesday with Mr. al-Shara.

A White House official said Mr. Trump agreed to “say hello” to the Syrian leader while both were in Saudi Arabia, according to the press pool traveling with the U.S. president.

In his speech on Tuesday, Mr. Trump railed against Iran, one of the chief international allies of the ousted Assad regime. He called it “the biggest and most destructive” force threatening the stability and prosperity of the Middle East, and vowed it would never have a nuclear weapon.

If Mr. al-Shara does get a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Trump, he will have a rare opportunity to make his case to a world leader with the power to drastically shape Syria’s future. It would also be a stunning turnaround for the man who once led a branch of Al Qaeda but broke ties with the jihadist group, seeking to moderate his image in the hope of gaining broader traction.

In the months since a rebel coalition seized control of Damascus and toppled Mr. al-Assad, the United States has kept in place a multilayered sanctions regime that, with the war, has pushed the country to the brink of economic collapse.

Critics of U.S. sanctions argued that lifting them could allow a flow of international aid and investment needed to help the country recover from the war.

European leaders, eager to foster stability and prevent new waves of migration to their shores, have also pushed for more economic engagement.

Yet, even as Europe began lifting some sanctions, few businesses or regional governments had been willing to invest in the country under the burden of U.S. sanctions — and without knowing if it would raise the ire of Mr. Trump.

The Trump administration had for months kept its distance from Mr. al-Shara’s fledgling administration. Some U.S. officials have expressed deep skepticism of Mr. al-Shara’s motives and his promises to protect religious minorities, pointing to his Islamist orientation and history with Al Qaeda.

The American administration had also issued demands related to counterterrorism and other issues that it said must be met for sanctions relief to be considered.

The Syrian government has said that some of the demands, such as a ban on foreign fighters in Syria’s government and armed forces, have to be negotiated. But at the same time, it has made moves toward meeting other demands.

Syria recently brought a team of forensic experts from Qatar to search for the remains of Americans killed by the Islamic State.

And Syrian officials have told American intermediaries that they have sought to avoid conflict with all neighboring countries, including Israel, and welcomed American investment.

For months, regional and European leaders had struggled to get attention from the Trump administration on the sanctions issue.

But the tide had begun to shift recently. Mr. Trump hinted before his Middle East trip that he would reconsider the issue.

Last week, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, offered a diplomatic boost to Mr. al-Shara, as the first European leader to host the Syrian president in his capital, vowing to gradually lift European Union sanctions on Syria — provided that the new leaders keep the country on a course toward stability.

“I told the Syrian president that if he continued to follow his path, we would continue on ours,” Mr. Macron said.

“Lavender in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is associated with blossoming wildflowers that carpet the kingdom’s desert landscapes in the spring and is a symbol of Saudi generosity,” the report said.

In spring, Saudi Arabia’s rugged dunes are covered in lavender, basil and Germander, a flowering shrub that grows across the Arabian Peninsula, also known by the Arabic name “Aihan.”

The color of the carpet is also a nod to how the blooms transform an otherwise harsh desert landscape, the report said, symbolizing the growth that Prince Mohammed has promised to generate through his blueprint to diversify the economy of the oil-dependent kingdom, called “Vision 2030.”

The carpet features a border of the traditional Al Sadu textile design created by Bedouin women. The geometric patterns, tightly woven on a hand loom, were included on a list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity compiled by the United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO, in 2020.

Saudi Arabia first rolled out a lavender carpet in 2021, for Sheikh Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, a key Saudi partner in the Gulf, according to the Saudi Press Agency. The carpet is also used for state receptions and other official occasions.

Defense contractors, bankers and artificial intelligence entrepreneurs milled about on lavender carpets, trying on virtual reality goggles and gawking at architectural models of the kingdom’s planned megaprojects. Between the traditional red-and-white-checkered headdresses worn by Saudi attendees, a handful of MAGA hats could be spotted.

“I’m a fan of President Trump since long ago,” said Mohammad Bahareth, 40, a Saudi self-help influencer who runs a private space firm. He had proudly donned a “Trump 2028” hat paired with a red tie. Mr. Trump “says what is on his mind, and he doesn’t care about what people think,” Mr. Bahareth said.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has pledged to invest $600 billion in the United States during Mr. Trump’s term. (Mr. Trump has asked for $1 trillion; economists say both sums are far-fetched.)

Attendees at the conference on Tuesday included the Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman; Jane Fraser, Citigroup’s chief executive; and Alex Karp, the Palantir chief executive. (Eddie Trump, a wealthy real estate developer who is not related to the president, was also spotted.)

The conference was standing-room-only by Tuesday afternoon, as everyone waited for Mr. Trump to arrive and address the crowd.

It wasn’t all glitz and glamour. Men in suits took off their jackets and wiped the sweat from their foreheads as they waited in a long line snaking through a sandy parking lot to board shuttle buses to the venue. A shortage of food left delegates quipping about how ravenous they were. When bite-size bowls of shrimp and gnocchi finally appeared, the crowd descended on them like piranhas.

Despite the glitches, one American speaker after another took to the stage to relate warm anecdotes about Saudi Arabia.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the audience that he had a “long history with Saudi,” noting that his “first proper job in New York City” was working for a Saudi family-owned company, the Olayan Group.

The American billionaire Larry Fink, chief executive of the investment management firm BlackRock, praised Saudi Arabia for transforming itself from an “exporter of capital” to a “great destination for capital.”

Mr. Bahareth, who owns a Tesla and brought his own fluoride-free bottled water to the conference, said he had lost friends over his admiration of Mr. Trump, but had gained new ones more aligned with his values.

“People can either accept you or find another friend or find another business partner,” he said.

Asked if he knew that Mr. Trump cannot legally run for president again in 2028, he said he was aware, but that his hat was just a jab to tease Democrats. Besides, he said, “maybe his son will run, or Ivanka.”