Trump Administration Live Updates: I.R.S. Is Said to Be Laying Off 6,000 Newer Hires

One senior official said the cuts appeared likely to be part of an effort to focus Pentagon money on programs that the Trump administration favors, instead of actually cutting the Defense Department’s $850 billion annual budget.

For example, the Pentagon is already spending more money on the Trump administration’s efforts at the southern border, including on military flights that have taken migrants in the United States to countries as far away as India.

Mr. Hegseth has vowed to use thousands of active-duty U.S. troops to help stem the flow of migrants across the border, a top priority for President Trump. But illegal crossings, which reached record levels during the Biden administration, slowed significantly before Mr. Trump took office last month.

In a statement on Wednesday, Robert G. Salesses, the acting deputy defense secretary, said the president’s “charge to the department is clear: to achieve peace through strength.”

He added that the Pentagon was undertaking the budget cuts with an aim of bolstering other priorities. “To achieve our mandate from President Trump,” he said, “we are guided by his priorities, including securing our borders, building the Iron Dome for America and ending radical and wasteful government D.E.I. programs and preferencing.”

In the memo issued on Tuesday, which The Washington Post reported earlier, Mr. Hegseth repeated a phrase he uses often about the need for the military to focus on “the warrior ethos.” He called for a rejection of “excessive bureaucracy” and unnecessary spending.

Any cuts to the defense budget may face opposition in Congress, where lawmakers often focus on budget cuts that could affect their districts.

The Pentagon is also bracing for proposed cuts to its work force, and has already been asked to hand over to the Trump administration lists of probationary employees who could be laid off.

A senior military official said on Wednesday that Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency had expressed interest in moving full-time Pentagon employees to contract positions so that they would be easier to fire.

On social media on Tuesday, Mr. Hegseth shared a post from Mr. Musk’s team saying that it was looking forward to eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“DOGE the waste; Double-Down on warriors,” Mr. Hegseth wrote.

Trump also claimed that U.S. is not “being paid back” for the military and humanitarian aid given to Ukraine and repeated the false claim that the U.S. has provided considerably more aid to Ukraine than its European allies. In fact, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Europe has allocated $138 billion compared with $119 billion from the United States.

President Trump said Russia has “the cards” in peace negotiations with Ukraine because it has “taken a lot of territory” and said Russian officials are negotiating in good faith. “I think the Russians want to see the war end,” he said. “But I think they have the cards a little bit, because they’ve taken a lot of territory, so they have the cards.”

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump was referring to paying off consumer debt or paying off the national debt, which currently stands at $36 trillion, but his comments suggested that he may have been talking about both. In January before Mr. Trump was inaugurated, Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who is leading DOGE, set expectations for cost cutting at $1 trillion.

Mr. Trump provided scant details on the potential taxpayer returns, including on whether the proposal was even feasible or if he would need congressional approval. A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump made his remarks during an international investment conference in Miami Beach, Fla., hosted by the Future Investment Initiative, a Saudi Arabian foundation that promotes the kingdom’s economy and cultural priorities through a variety of annual events.

The president spoke to a packed auditorium with an audience that featured Mr. Musk; Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi Arabian sovereign-wealth fund; Princess Reema Bandar al-Saud, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States; and Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body.

Mr. Trump praised the work that DOGE was doing, promising that the department would save “billions, hundreds of billions” of dollars in wasteful spending.

And he stressed the importance of paying down debt.

“If it were a real estate balance sheet, the debt is tiny, but we still want to pay it down,” he said.

He added: “We don’t look at it as a piece of real estate. It’s America.”

When Mr. Trump won in November, the Justice Department abandoned the two federal cases against him, and a judge in Manhattan issued an unconditional discharge in his hush money case.

Mr. Trump gave voice to something that his advisers had long said he had in the back of his mind as he campaigned. But he did not publicly acknowledge throughout 2024 that he was campaigning for his freedom as much as for the White House itself.

The president made the comments in response to a question about how he would spend a year if granted a sabbatical. Mr. Trump did not directly answer the question, saying he was honored to be president. But he said it took “a certain amount of courage” to run again because of the personal risks.

Mr. Trump also said he disagreed with historians’ assessment that Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated, were the two most mistreated presidents.

“Nobody was treated like me,” he said. “Nobody, and I will tell you, you learn a lot about yourself, but there’s nothing I’d rather do.”

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump faced dozens of criminal charges across four different cases. Jack Smith, who served as a special counsel, charged him in two different cases, one related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and another related to his handling of classified government documents after he left the White House in 2021. The documents case had been dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge, but Mr. Smith’s team was appealing it.

He also faced charges in Georgia over attempts to overturn his election loss in 2020, and he was found guilty on all counts in the hush-money case in New York, where he could have faced up to four years in prison.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Mr. Musk’s team has helped push through layoffs of thousands of workers across the government, including at the Transportation Department. But at the same time, the department’s secretary, Sean Duffy, has asked Mr. Musk, whose companies span the sectors of technology and transportation, to aid in addressing the agency’s aging air traffic control technology.

The firings come at a time when the F.A.A., the nation’s premier aviation safety agency, is dealing with several deadly plane crashes across the country, including a midair collision between an Army helicopter and American Airlines plane that killed 67 people on Jan. 27.

About 400 probationary workers — who were “hired less than a year ago” — were cut from the agency, according to Mr. Duffy, in a social media post on Monday responding to criticism from his Democratic predecessor, Pete Buttigieg.

“Zero air traffic controllers and critical safety personnel were let go,” Mr. Duffy wrote.

The Transportation Department added in a statement that the agency was continuing to hire and train air traffic controllers and aviation safety workers. However, union representatives say that some of the fired employees served in important support roles.

The layoffs included about 300 workers represented by the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union. Afterward, Dave Spero, the union’s national president, and Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, called for the Trump administration to halt additional work force reductions at the agency.

The notice of termination sent to employees said that they were being let go because “D.O.T. F.A.A. finds, that based on your performance you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the D.O.T. F.A.A. would be in the public interest,” according to an email an employee received.

Mr. Spero said he disagreed with the rationale for the firings. He said that although the laid-off workers did not include air traffic controllers and aviation safety inspectors, those who were let go were critical support and administrative staff who assisted safety personnel.

The workers who were dismissed included maintenance mechanics and aviation safety assistants, Mr. Spero said.

“They aren’t safety-of-flight people but the rest of us can’t do our jobs without them, and that’s the impact of losing these people,” he said.

Mr. Blumenthal sent a letter to Mr. Duffy on Wednesday calling for the firings to be reversed, saying they posed safety risks.

“A string of recent aviation incidents has shaken the public’s confidence in the safety of air travel and the trust placed in the agencies responsible for keeping our skies safe, the F.A.A. and Department of Transportation,” Mr. Blumenthal said in the letter.

In addition to the layoffs, anxiety grew in the aviation industry after employees from Mr. Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, visited the F.A.A.’s air-traffic command center in Warrenton, Va., on Monday as well as a facility that manages air traffic in and out of the nation’s capital.

Representatives for Mr. Musk’s team, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Duffy said in a social-media post on Sunday that the visit would allow the SpaceX team members to see the system firsthand so they could better understand the technology challenges that air traffic controllers face.

“America deserves safe, state-of-the-art air travel, and President Trump has ordered that I deliver a new, world-class air traffic control system that will be the envy of the world,” Mr. Duffy wrote. “To do that, I need advice from the brightest minds in America.”

A new Gallup poll shows President Trump’s approval rating at 45 percent, two points lower than it was in his first week of office, with 51 percent disapproving of his job so far. His approval rating is 15 points below the average for mid-February of all other elected presidents since 1953, but it is five points higher than it was in February 2017.

Some 42 percent of voters approved of President Trump’s handling of the economy, lower than his rating on the issue in February 2017 (48 percent) and his lowest ever in the poll.

A federal judge said today that the Trump administration had created a “mess” and “potential inconsistencies” in its directives for overseas workers left stranded by the attempt to all but dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development. Judge Carl Nichols of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia had placed a temporary restraining order barring the Trump administration from placing U.S.A.I.D. workers on administrative leave and forcing those abroad to return within 30 days.

At today’s hearing, Judge Nichols asked the Trump administration to submit answers by noon Thursday clarifying its policies on the choices given to overseas employees, before the restraining order expires at midnight. “I am at a loss,” he said at one point, adding that he was struggling to understand “just what the current policy is or would be absent an injunction.”

“The Justice Department’s authority to freeze assets is a serious power that it should exercise only when supported by evidence that the assets can be traced to a crime,” Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and three other lawmakers wrote in a letter to the agency’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz.

“The reports that Ms. Cheung was pressured to circumvent this standard suggest a deliberate attempt to weaponize the Justice Department for political purposes,” they wrote.

The climate funding stems from a law former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, which aimed to invest billions of dollars in clean energy.

As part of the law, Congress directed the Environmental Protection Agency to grant money to states, local governments and nonprofit groups working to reduce planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

President Trump campaigned on a promise to claw back funding from the law, and called global warming a “scam.” When he came into office, he ordered agencies including the E.P.A. to freeze grants and loans, including those that had already been obligated by the government. According to the letter from lawmakers, the funding Ms. Cheung was asked to investigate came from initiatives aimed at helping communities put in place programs that would reduce climate pollution and deploy more wind, solar and other clean energy.

In a related move, Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, ordered an internal review of Biden-era funding. As proof of there being mishandling of funds by the previous administration, he cited a video produced last year by Project Veritas, a right-wing group known for trying to entrap political opponents with covert recordings.

In the video, an unidentified person who said he was an E.P.A. employee discussed a rush to spend money authorized by the law before the end of the Biden term. “It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing like gold bars off the edge,” he said in the video.

In her resignation letter, Ms. Cheung said that officials in the Justice Department’s office of the deputy attorney general, headed by Emil Bove III, also cited that video as a reason to open a criminal probe.

Mr. Markey, in his letter, said that Ms. Cheung’s resignation followed a “troubling trend.” Three other senators — Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland; Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island; and Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont — signed the letter.

The Justice Department inspector general’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

He continued: “We need both Chambers to pass the House Budget.”

The president’s comments did little to end the monthslong debate on Capitol Hill about how best to roll out his sweeping legislative agenda, which includes enhanced border enforcement and a range of tax cuts.

Senate Republicans said they planned to continue with their tactic of advancing Mr. Trump’s agenda in pieces — by first moving a border-enforcement bill — and expressed skepticism that House Republicans, who have been riven by bitter infighting, would be able to reconcile their differences to produce a final product.

“He’s made it clear for a long time that he would prefer one big, beautiful bill, and we’re fine with that too,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, said after Mr. Trump’s post. “If the House can produce one big, beautiful bill, we’re prepared to work with them to get that across the finish line. But we believe that the president also likes optionality.”

Mr. Trump’s announcement came just hours after he gave conflicting directions to congressional Republicans on how they should proceed with regards to cuts to social safety net programs.

In an appearance Tuesday evening on Fox News, Mr. Trump was adamant that there should be no cuts to Medicaid, the health care program for America’s poor, or other entitlement programs.

“Social Security won’t be touched, other than this fraud or something we’re going to find,” he said. “It’s going to be strengthened, but won’t be touched. Medicare, Medicaid, none of that stuff is going to be touched.”

But by the next morning Mr. Trump was endorsing House Republicans’ budget bill, which has deep cuts to Medicaid on the table.

The apparent contradiction made one thing clear: The budget process is about to get increasingly messy.

“You have a lot of people who’ve been talking about fiscal responsibility and cutting spending forever, and then can’t point to anything they’re really comfortable doing,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which argues Congress needs to get serious about addressing the nation’s $36 trillion debt.

“Reducing spending and raising taxes isn’t popular,” she said. “Neither is exercise and eating healthy. We’re making some really shortsighted decisions in terms of continuing to run up the debt.”

Republicans are trying to perform a tricky tightrope walk in their effort to extend Mr. Trump’s $4 trillion in proposed tax cuts. But they want to do so without increasing American’s debt, which has risen to record levels. To close the gap, they will need to find deep cuts elsewhere in the budget.

So far, House Republicans have been eyeing a range of changes to Medicaid, including to limit the amount the federal government pays to states, which could save the federal government hundreds of millions.

Democrats have sought to focus public attention on the fact that the plan opens the door to cuts to Medicaid, a program polling shows is widely popular.

“The math doesn’t add up and the only way he’s going to be able to do it is to go after Medicaid,” Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, said Wednesday. “It’s really an appalling agenda.”

The House budget resolution lays out broad spending targets by committee, but doesn’t name specific cuts. The plan instructs the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid, to come up with at least $880 billion in cuts. A wish list circulated by the House Budget Committee contained numerous options to reshape Medicaid, which covers 72 million poor and disabled Americans. Many of its proposals focus on different ways to make state governments pay more.

Mr. Trump has never been the model of consistency. He has taken contradictory positions on a wide range of issues, including abortion, the Affordable Care Act, state and local tax deductions and key provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to name a few.

But the issue of whether to make changes to Medicaid to free up money for tax cuts is particularly thorny.

Speaker Mike Johnson has endorsed adding work requirements to Medicaid and cutting down on waste, but he argued that position isn’t inconsistent with the president’s view. Those moves, however, are likely to save only a small fraction of the money needed.

“Medicaid has never been on the chopping block,” Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said at a recent news conference, adding: “If you eliminate fraud, waste, abuse in Medicaid, you’ve got a huge amount of money that you can spend on real priorities for the country.”

He added: “If you add work requirements into Medicaid, it makes sense to people. It’s common sense.”

President Trump began a speech at an investment conference in Miami Beach, Fla., by shouting out attendees from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the event’s host, a group that included Elon Musk; Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi’s Public Investment Fund; and Princess Reema bint Bandar al-Saud, the Saudi ambassador. “The best and most successful investors on earth are now racing to invest in the United States,” Trump said.

Trump is arguing that there is no better time to invest in America than during his presidency. “If you want to build the future, push boundaries, unleash breakthroughs, transform industries and make a fortune — because you want to make a fortune,” he said. “There’s no better place on Earth than the current and future United States of America under a certain president named Donald J. Trump.”

It turns out Dr. Oz is also a sizable investor in the supplement company, according to filings released on Wednesday by the Office of Government Ethics.

Dr. Oz pledged to sell the vast majority of his multimillion-dollar holdings, which are varied and include investments in numerous health care companies and two artificial intelligence firms.

But the fate of his iHerb holding, one of the largest in his portfolio and valued at an unspecified figure in the range of $5 million to $25 million, is unclear, according to experts who reviewed his disclosure forms.

In one filing, Dr. Oz pledged to divest his iHerb holdings “as soon as practicable but not later than 90 days after confirmation” by the Senate to the government post.

In another government disclosure, he repeated that language but then held open the possibility that even once he is at the helm of the agency, he might retain some iHerb stock until the company goes public or is bought. Either of those events could cause the stocks to soar and result in a windfall for Dr. Oz.

Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics, said that the conflicting language in the disclosures left it vague as to whether he would sell his holdings. “It is poorly drafted and unclear,” she said, noting it even contained a typographical error.

Richard W. Painter, a former ethics official in the administration of George W. Bush, said the wording was ambiguous. “I cannot figure out if he is going to sell or not,” he said.

Dr. Oz, 64, also indicated in the filings that he would retain a financial interest in an entity called iHerb Oz Partners L.L.C., created in 2023 when he became the company’s pitchman. What the entity does is unknown, and so is whether it has a separate ownership stake in iHerb.

Christopher Krepich, a spokesman for Dr. Oz, declined to discuss the apparent discrepancy.

Dr. Oz, a heart surgeon who rose to fame as the host of a daytime television show that ran for 13 seasons, has frequently been criticized for supporting questionable medical treatments and for the promotion of products on his show. He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022.

His financial filings underscore how wealthy Dr. Oz and his family are, with a net worth somewhere in the neighborhood of roughly $90 million to $335 million. Lisa Oz, his wife, is among numerous heirs to one of the nation’s largest private companies, Asplundh Tree Expert, which provides tree-removal and related services for utilities and municipalities. It is impossible to pinpoint the couple’s net worth because the financial disclosure forms allow estimates of asset values to be listed under a wide range.

Dr. Oz is preparing for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, meeting with various lawmakers in Washington. The panel has not set a date for his testimony but it is expected to do so in the coming weeks now that his financial and ethics papers have been filed with the committee.

His investments in iHerb and in other health care companies are likely to be a focus for some lawmakers. As the country’s top Medicare official, he could press private plans that offer insurance under the federal program to increase their coverage of vitamins and supplements sold by iHerb and others.

Dr. Oz listed dozens of investments, including in health care companies that do business with the U.S. government, that he said he would end his associations with and would divest from. Among those holdings are UnitedHealth Group, the conglomerate that sells private insurance plans for older adults on Medicare, pharmaceutical giants like AbbVie and Eli Lilly, the for-profit hospital chain HCA Healthcare and the supplement company PanTheryx.

In the new filings, Dr. Oz also listed his role as an adviser to three health care companies: Eko Health, the maker of digital stethoscopes; Housey Pharma; and Cardiology Partners, a Florida cardiology practice. In the government ethics agreement, he said that if confirmed he would resign from his role at those companies and divest his holdings in them.

He also said he planned to divest his stock in several major technology companies, including Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. He owns Bitcoin valued at as much as $1 million. It was not among the assets listed in the filings that he would sell.

Mr. Trump’s revisionism sets the stage for a geopolitical about-face unlike any in generations as the president embarks on negotiations with Russia that Ukraine fears could come at its own expense. By vilifying Mr. Zelensky and shifting blame for the war from Moscow to Kyiv, Mr. Trump seems to be laying a predicate for withdrawing support for an ally under attack.

The sharp exchange of words between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky this week signaled how much has changed with the inauguration of a new president in Washington. Even for Mr. Trump, who has never been a fan of Ukraine and has long expressed admiration of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the vitriol expressed toward Mr. Zelensky drew gasps of surprise on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

A day after falsely declaring that Ukraine started the war, Mr. Trump doubled down on Wednesday with a remarkable broadside against the leader of an ally, built on a lie. “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.

It was a striking distortion of reality. Mr. Zelensky did not talk the United States into giving him money “to go into a war.” He and his country were attacked, and only then did the United States under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. respond with expansive financial assistance. And even then, it has been only about a third of what Mr. Trump claimed.

But Mr. Trump went on, characterizing Mr. Zelensky not as a defender of democracy but an enemy of it. “He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle,’” Mr. Trump wrote. “A Dictator without Elections, Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”

While Ukraine has suspended elections during the war, Mr. Zelensky was in fact originally elected by a landslide in 2019 in a contest deemed free and fair by the international community — unlike Mr. Putin, an actual dictator who has stayed in power for a quarter-century through elections widely deemed to be farces. And Mr. Zelensky enjoys a 57 percent approval rating, according to a new poll, higher than Mr. Trump’s.

The president’s “dictator” jab came just hours before he referred to himself online regarding a domestic issue as “the king,” followed up by a White House official who posted an illustration of Mr. Trump in royal garb.

The president’s attack on Mr. Zelensky, while sparing any harsh words for Mr. Putin, provoked outrage among European leaders, Democrats in Washington and even a few Republicans who were willing to speak out.

“Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war,” Mike Pence, his former vice president, said online. “Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.”

Charles M. Kupperman, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term, compared the president’s actions to the British prime minister who tried to appease Adolf Hitler by agreeing to give him part of Czechoslovakia. “Trump’s name will be remembered in history as a surrender artist just like Neville Chamberlain,” Mr. Kupperman said in an interview.

Moscow, on the other hand, seemed delighted. Dmitri A. Medvedev, a senior adviser to Mr. Putin who served as caretaker president for four years, cited Mr. Trump’s comments about Mr. Zelensky being a dictator without elections. “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US president, I would have laughed out loud,” he wrote online. Mr. Trump, he added, “is 200 percent right. Bankrupt clown.”

There is of course a long history of American presidents growing frustrated with the leaders of foreign allies they were trying to help during wartime. Franklin D. Roosevelt never liked Charles de Gaulle even as U.S. troops fought to liberate France. John F. Kennedy was so alienated by South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem that his government did not discourage a coup.

George W. Bush and Barack Obama both found Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq to be mercurial and unconstructive. Mr. Biden certainly grew angry with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel even as he backed his war on Hamas. For that matter, Mr. Biden’s relationship with Mr. Zelensky could be prickly at times.

But those presidents still supported the allies’ cause, while it is not clear that Mr. Trump does. And as with so many things, Mr. Trump goes much further than his predecessors in terms of public vitriol against an ally facing an existential threat, employing the kind of language that presidents rarely use about an ostensible friend.

Vice President JD Vance, who in 2022 said that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine,” went as far as to warn Mr. Zelensky not to fight back. After Mr. Zelensky complained on Wednesday that Mr. Trump was “caught in a web of disinformation,” Mr. Vance told The Daily Mail that such comments would only backfire.

“The idea that Zelensky is going to change the president’s mind by bad-mouthing him in public media,” he said, is “an atrocious way to deal with this administration.”

Mr. Trump has never been particularly sympathetic to Ukraine even before the latest fighting. As far back as his first campaign for president in 2016, he signaled that he could accept Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and expressed admiration for Mr. Putin’s strength.

His disregard for Ukraine later grew into outright animosity as he became persuaded that Ukraine had intervened in the 2016 election against him, repeating a propaganda line pushed by Russia, which actually did intervene in the election on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, his ally and lawyer who was in touch with Ukrainian figures seeking influence, encouraged this line of thinking, so much so that Mr. Trump increasingly saw Ukraine as a personal adversary.

“Trump was driven in his first term by the intense desire to disprove any Russian collusion in the 2016 election,” Mr. Kupperman recalled. “He wanted to demonstrate he won without any outside influence or interference, and it gnawed at him when it came to allegations that he won because of Russian assistance. Ukraine became one path to demonstrate he won without any such assistance.”

That ultimately led to the famous phone call with Mr. Zelensky in 2019 pushing Ukraine to help tarnish Mr. Biden, then the leading Democratic candidate for president, by announcing a corruption investigation. Mr. Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine at the same time and only released it under pressure by advisers and Republican senators. Revelations about his actions led to his impeachment by the House later that year.

When Russia mounted its full-scale invasion in 2022, Mr. Trump offered little sympathy or support for Ukraine, even as blue-and-yellow flags went up around the United States in solidarity. In the days leading up to the attack, in fact, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Putin’s “genius” move in putting pressure on Ukraine.

In the years since, he has repeatedly questioned Mr. Biden’s decision to devote so much American money to defending Ukraine, much as the commentator Tucker Carlson and others on the far right of the Republican Party have, even while more mainstream party leaders were criticizing Mr. Biden for not doing more.

In response to Mr. Trump’s pressure, House Republicans blocked a new aid request for months, undercutting Ukrainian forces and giving Russian invaders time to regroup and stabilize their positions. Only after G.O.P. allies and foreign dignitaries lobbied him to relent did he permit House Republicans to let the aid go through.

But while many Americans might understandably oppose investing taxpayer dollars in someone else’s war, Mr. Trump goes further by questioning whether Ukraine is legitimately the injured party. Several times in recent days, he has expressed great distress over how many people have been killed and how much of the country has been destroyed.

Yet in doing so, he points to Mr. Zelensky, rather than Mr. Putin, as the author of all that carnage. “I love Ukraine,” he wrote on Wednesday, “but Zelenskyy has done a terrible job, his Country is shattered, and MILLIONS have unnecessarily died.”

On Wednesday, as representatives of the United States and Russia met for their most extensive conversation in years, to agree to work on a peace settlement without Ukraine’s presence and to discuss the possibility of American oil companies doing hundreds of billions of dollars in business in Russia, several Republican senators dismissed the talks as preliminary.

Here’s a look at some of their statements, then and now.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina

What he said: “If you’re worried about being too provocative about Russia, stop worrying. Stop worrying. You are not too provocative — we need to up our game when it comes to Russia.”

Mr. Graham made those remarks last June while introducing a bipartisan resolution to designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, a label currently reserved for North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Iran.

He has often called Mr. Putin a “thug,” and previously compared him to Hitler. Mr. Graham has also called for the Russian leader to be assassinated: “Vladimir Putin is not a legitimate leader; he is a war criminal that needs to be dealt with.”

What he is saying now: Last week at the Munich Security Conference, Mr. Graham praised Mr. Trump as a strong leader who could “get a good deal for Ukraine.”

He also voiced support for a deal Mr. Trump proposed that would grant the United States a 50 percent interest in all of Ukraine’s mineral resources in exchange for American support — the offer that Mr. Zelensky has rejected.

“I don’t care if they meet Putin in Cleveland,” he said of the Trump administration. “I don’t care if they talk, I don’t care if they go on vacation. It doesn’t matter to me what you do as long as you get it right.”

Senator John Thune of South Dakota

What he said: “America cannot retreat from the world stage. American leadership is desperately needed now more than I think any time in recent history, and we need to make sure that Ukraine has the weaponry and the resources that it needs to defeat the Russians.”

Last March, Mr. Thune pushed for the passage of a Ukraine aid bill and stressed that if the United States did not arm Ukraine that Russia would cinch a victory in Ukraine and “roll into a NATO country,” igniting a conflict that could involve American troops.

“We’re going to be sending American sons and daughters,” he said in an interview on PBS News Hour.

What he is saying now: This week, Mr. Thune, now the majority leader, told reporters that the conflict has “dragged on” and that the United States needed to “bring an end to the war.”

Of Ukraine, he said, “at some point, they’ve got to be part of that conversation.”

“This thing’s dragged on for three years now. We need to bring an end to the war, and at some point they’ve got to be part of that conversation. So hopefully they’ll figure out a path forward that brings the war to an end, that maintains a sovereign Ukraine, and prevents the further incursion of Russia in that region, the world, in Europe.”

Senator Jim Risch of Idaho

What he said: “Putin is not going to stop with Ukraine” if he wins the war. “If we end up in war with Russia, what we’re spending here is a drop in the bucket by comparison. I deal with this every day and it’s on my mind every day.”

Mr. Risch, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has called the Russian invasion of Ukraine a “challenge” confronting the United States and said that the nation should “deny Russia a victory.” Ahead of a vote on an aid package to Ukraine in 2023, Mr. Risch gave a full-throated defense of funding aid and arms to the nation.

He also blamed President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for not being able to articulate the need for aiding Ukraine.

What he is saying now: Mr. Risch has called the peace talks “a work in progress” and said he would give the Trump administration “space” to figure out how to negotiate.

“But obviously, the Ukrainians have to be there — and the Europeans for that matter, too.”

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa

What she has said: “The United States, Ukraine and the free world have the will and the means to stop Vladimir Putin’s tyranny.”

Ms. Ernst spoke on the Senate floor in 2022 after joining a bipartisan delegation to Europe less than one month after Russia invaded Ukraine, and declared that Mr. Putin’s “best days are behind him.”

She criticized the Biden administration, for its actions early in the war, as attempting to appease Mr. Putin.

“Letting an adversary define the military’s rules of engagement, letting an aggressor dictate the boundaries of our response is not just a folly — it’s suicidal. The administration crossed their fingers and hoped Putin would play nice.”

Ms. Ernst added that the nation’s “unshakable commitment to allies and partners keeps Americans prosperous and our families safe.”

What she is saying now: Ms. Ernst told reporters on Tuesday that she was glad Russia was at the negotiating table and brushed off any concern over Ukraine’s lack of representation. “Obviously I’m a huge supporter of Ukraine, but it’s just the beginning.”

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas

What he has said: “It’s not just Vladimir Putin and Europe that’s watching; the rest of the world is watching and most particularly Xi Jinping is watching what happens in Ukraine,” Mr. Cotton said in March 2022 on Fox News Radio, referring to China’s leader.

He suggested the United States would look weak to Mr. Xi if it did not stand up to Russia. “If he sees the United States and the West faltering and pressing Ukraine to sue for peace while Russian troops are still on Ukraine soil, he is much more likely to go for the jugular in Taiwan.”

In an interview on CNN during the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Cotton shrugged off concerns that Mr. Trump would not stand by Ukraine in the conflict with Russia.

“President Trump has always been strong in defense of Ukraine,” Mr. Cotton said, and he praised Mr. Trump for sending weapons during his first term.

What he is saying now: On Tuesday, while promoting a new book on China during an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Mr. Cotton called for “getting creative” to try to reach a truce and echoed Mr. Graham’s support for making a deal with Ukraine on its mineral resources.

On CNN later that day, he defended Mr. Trump’s establishing “diplomatic channels” with Russia and accused Mr. Biden of “tempting” Russia to invade.

While some Republicans have expressed dismay at Mr. Trump’s moves and statements, there has been no concerted effort to challenge him from G.O.P. leaders or senators who play pivotal roles in overseeing military and foreign policy in Congress.

“Right now, you have got to give him some space,” Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader, said at a news conference on Capitol Hill Wednesday after a closed-door Senate lunch with Vice President JD Vance.

The weekly meeting often provides senators an opportunity to iron out internal disputes. A few senators expressed a desire to use at least part of the time to press Mr. Vance about Mr. Trump’s apparent willingness to abandon American allies, draw nearer to Mr. Putin and denounce President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine as a “dictator.”

But when the time came, the topic did not come up, according to several attendees.

“What I’m in support of is a peaceful outcome and result in Ukraine,” Mr. Thune told reporters after the meeting, “and I think right now the administration, the president and his team are working to achieve that.” Of Mr. Trump’s labeling of Mr. Zelensky as a dictator, he said only: “The president speaks for himself.”

Mr. Thune was among the sizable contingent of Republican senators who spent the past three years backing legislation to send tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine for its war effort. Now that Mr. Trump is in the White House, they are putting up little fight as he turns against Kyiv.

Even Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former party leader who worked to establish himself as a principal Republican voice in support of Ukraine and a counterweight to Mr. Trump’s “America First” approach to foreign policy, has remained publicly silent in the face of the president’s move toward Russia.

It is a striking turn for Republicans, who for decades defined themselves as the party of a strong defense and argued that the United States had a pivotal role to play as a beacon of freedom and defender of democracies around the globe.

Some G.O.P. lawmakers have made clear they do not agree with Mr. Trump’s approach, but most have done so taking pains not to criticize the president. Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he disagreed with the idea of an in-person meeting with Mr. Putin.

“My advice to the president, if he asked me, would be not to give Vladimir Putin the benefit of sitting with a democratically elected head of state,” said Mr. Wicker, calling the Russian leader “an international scofflaw and a war criminal of the worst kind.”

But though he leads the Senate committee that oversees national security, Mr. Wicker made it clear that Mr. Trump has not consulted him.

A year ago, nearly two dozen Republican senators defied Mr. Trump’s wishes and voted in favor of continuing to send tens of billions of dollars in military and other aid to Ukraine to fight off Russia. Few of those lawmakers have spoken out against his current stance, and those who have mostly offered carefully worded criticism aimed at Mr. Putin — but not Mr. Trump.

“Well, it sounds like that’s the direction they are headed,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said of the Trump administration’s push to reset diplomatic ties with Russia.

Ms. Murkowski, appearing to speak carefully to avoid directly criticizing Mr. Trump, said that she hoped that the country would not “lose sight of the fact that Russia, Putin just brazenly and without regard to life or borders invaded Ukraine.”

“I think we need to be very careful,” she added.

Mr. Trump has said in recent days Ukraine is to blame for the start of the war, telling reporters from his Mar-a-Lago estate that Ukrainian leaders “could have made a deal.” On Wednesday, he sharpened his criticism, calling Mr. Zelensky a “dictator without elections.”

Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, who recently returned from a trip to Kyiv where he and two other senators reaffirmed their support for Ukraine, balked at the “dictator” remark.

“It’s not a word I would use,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

“There is no moral equivalency between Vladimir Putin and President Zelensky,” Mr. Tillis said of the comments Mr. Trump made in a post on his social media site.

But Mr. Tillis, who recently considered and then retreated from a confrontation with Mr. Trump over his defense secretary, was also careful to avoid directly criticizing the president’s approach. Mr. Tillis said he believed Mr. Trump would ultimately listen to his advisers and take note of the discomfort from Republicans on Capitol Hill, who may be privately urging him to avoid appeasing Mr. Putin.

When asked if she supported the idea of Mr. Trump holding an in-person meeting with the Russian president, Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, simply shrugged her shoulders.

Last year, Ms. Ernst was among the contingent of Republicans who voted in favor of sending billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine. At the time, she said her support was to project American strength on the world stage, something she said President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was not doing.

“By strengthening and equipping America to push back against our adversaries’ aggression, Congress has stepped up to do the job this president will not,” Ms. Ernst said in a statement then.

Now that Mr. Trump is in office, many Republicans have dropped their most hawkish positions on Russia and Mr. Putin to support Mr. Trump’s push to end the war.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, once called Mr. Putin a “thug” and a war criminal, saying he “needs to be dealt with.” But shortly after Mr. Trump announced that Mr. Putin had extended an invitation for the president to travel to Moscow, Mr. Graham changed his tune substantially.

“I don’t care if they meet Putin in Cleveland,” he said in recent days of plans to hold high-level talks between the White House and the Kremlin. “I don’t care if they talk, I don’t care if they go on vacation. It doesn’t matter to me what you do as long as you get it right.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Graham wrote on social media that Mr. Trump “is Ukraine’s best hope to end this war honorably and justly,” adding that he believes the president “will be successful and he will achieve this goal in the Trump way.”

In short, critics say, administration officials are paying lip service to complying with the letter of the court orders while violating their spirit. The tactic shows how aggressively and nimbly the Trump administration is working to keep funds jammed up, and the complexity judges face if they want to compel the administration to unblock the money.

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

The clearest explanation of this tactic emerged from the administration itself, in a declaration filed late Tuesday by Pete Marocco, the Trump appointee who has been leading the president’s effort to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development. The disclosure came in a lawsuit over Mr. Trump’s executive order imposing a freeze on nearly all foreign aid spending.

In the declaration to Judge Amir H. Ali of the Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Marocco said U.S.A.I.D. officials were told not to enforce a directive, issued under Mr. Trump’s freeze order, that had required them to suspend paying out contracts and awards.

But that does not mean the money is flowing again. The agency’s payments system, known as Phoenix, is still nonfunctional, according to more than a dozen employees of the agency and the aid organizations that rely on its funding. That means it has been impossible in practice to fulfill the administration’s stated policy of allowing programs that provide lifesaving humanitarian aid to keep functioning, they said.

Mr. Marocco said the administration had developed a new payment procedure with tighter controls, including requiring written evidence that a senior official has validated that any particular payment complies with administration policies. It is also carrying out a comprehensive review process to ensure there is no basis to terminate each grant or contract, he said.

“Payments will be released as they are processed” through this new system, he added.

And as a basis for continuing to block the disbursement of foreign aid funds, he cited not Mr. Trump’s order but various other statutes, regulations and grant and loan agreements. Those are “authorities that the department understands were not enjoined” by Judge Ali’s restraining order, he said.

Invoking that kind of loophole is not limited to the freeze on foreign aid spending. It has also arisen in litigation over an order by Mr. Trump’s Office of Management and Budget instructing agencies to halt as much as $3 trillion in domestic grants, loans and contractual spending.

The White House later rescinded that order, and judges have blocked the government from complying with it. But groups that were awarded domestic grants have also reported that in practice, the systems that allow them to draw down on the funds have remained inaccessible.

In response, one of the judges who intervened, John J. McConnell Jr. of U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, declared on Feb. 10 that the continued “pauses in funding violate the plain text” of his order. He said the administration “must immediately take every step necessary” to restore all the withheld funds.

But almost immediately, the Trump administration came back with an argument that confounded that seemingly simple directive. It said that it wanted to freeze payments to New York City for a FEMA-run program that had helped defray the cost of putting up migrants in hotels and providing services to them. The stated rationale was based not on the O.M.B. memo but on concerns that the city was not complying with the conditions of the grant.

In a slightly testy order, Judge McConnell agreed that the administration could, on its own, withhold that spending because the cited justification was “authority in the applicable statutory, regulatory or grant terms” separate from the O.M.B. directive. The administration proceeded not just to cut off the grant, but to claw back $80 million from the city’s bank accounts.

The administration’s success in blocking spending on the migrant program in New York could become a model for justifying a continued freeze on many other domestic grants. In the same court filing, the Justice Department said the administration had “identified this FEMA funding as one (of potentially many) sources of funding” that it intended to freeze under other specific legal authorities.

It remains to be seen whether judges will decide that this approach is a pretext, and that the continued withholding of funds across the government is happening because Mr. Trump’s orders, while enjoined, made clear to subordinate officials what they are expected to do.

On Feb. 12 — the same day that Judge McConnell said the administration could withhold spending so long as it cited some specific authority other than the O.M.B. memo — budget officers at the Agriculture Department received an email with a “halt spending flowchart” to help them determine which programs could continue and which must be blocked.

On Wednesday evening, the department said in a statement: “U.S.D.A. has not enacted a blanket freezing of funds. The department continues to release funds as it reviews program activities and makes determinations.”

The flowchart, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, flatly declared that certain spending Congress had approved, including through the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, should be frozen, as well as foreign assistance that was not already committed before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

“Do not obligate or outlay,” the flowchart said, citing no specific legal authorities.

At U.S.A.I.D. and the State Department, officials and aid groups say aid operations remain frozen, and programs in the field continue to wither, despite the restraining order imposed Feb. 13 by Judge Ali.

On Thursday, senior officials at U.S.A.I.D. sent an email to agency employees, obtained by The Times, taking note of Judge Ali’s order but noting that its terms did not prevent the agency from reviewing contracts or grants and terminating them under their contractual language.

Numerous work contracts continue to be terminated “for convenience,” invoking a standard clause that is written into most or all contracts, former contractors for the agency said. One termination letter sent to a contractor on Wednesday had that phrase, according to a copy obtained by The Times.

In his declaration, Mr. Marocco also mentioned the “convenience” clause as an independent source of authority to terminate foreign assistance contracts. He said the State Department had already terminated 25 such contracts and issued stop-work or suspension orders for at least 711 additional contracts.

As justification, he cited statutory authorities granted to Secretary of State Marco Rubio — whom Mr. Trump has made acting head of U.S.A.I.D. — and “terms included in the contracts themselves.” Mr. Trump has moved to fold the agency into the State Department, in violation of a law in which Congress established the agency as an independent entity.

Mr. Marocco also said the department had ended 733 foreign assistance-funded grants, also pursuant to their terms, he wrote, which “permit awards to be terminated if they no longer effectuate the program goals or agency priorities.” And it has suspended about 6,824 grants while a case-by-case review continues, he said, again citing authorities other than Mr. Trump’s foreign aid freeze order.

Officials at the agency said that the Trump administration also appeared to be moving forward with preparations to repatriate the bulk of U.S.A.I.D. foreign service officers to the United States, despite a temporary restraining order by Judge Carl J. Nichols of the Federal District Court in Washington that no such employees can be involuntarily evacuated from their host countries for now.

That order, which Judge Nichols has already extended once, is set to expire on Friday. On Tuesday, U.S.A.I.D. foreign service officers who logged into their official travel portals discovered that they had been assigned a date of March 7 to return to the United States, according to six people who received the orders.

Two of the people said that the U.S. embassies in their host countries had informed them it was merely a place holder — but with no official caveat, many worried that it signaled that they would be forced to pack up their lives in little more than two weeks.

Karoun Demirjian, Nicholas Nehamas, Stephanie Nolen, Linda Qiu and Edward Wong contributed reporting.