Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge Blocks Trump’s D.E.I. Crackdown

Judge Abelson wrote in his opinion that the plaintiffs in the case — groups representing college professors and school diversity officers — had established that they would suffer irreparable harm under the order, and had “shown they are likely to prove” that provisions of the orders were “unconstitutionally vague on their face,” and beyond that, provisions of the orders “squarely, unconstitutionally,” violated freedom of speech.

“As plaintiffs put it, ‘efforts to foster inclusion have been widespread and uncontroversially legal for decades,’” Judge Abelson wrote, adding that “plaintiffs’ irreparable harms include widespread chilling of unquestionably protected speech.”

The Trump administration has moved to shut down diversity initiatives in government agencies, going so far as to quickly take down government web pages that referred to equal employment opportunity programs and diversity initiatives.

Among the most aggressive orders signed by Mr. Trump were ones that mandated the immediate purge of hiring practices that sought to reverse the effects of systemic discrimination against women, minorities and people with disabilities. Administration officials also threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they failed to report on colleagues who defied the orders.

Judge Abelson made note of the Trump administration’s aggressive moves in his ruling, writing that the orders sought to punish people for constitutionally protected speech.

“The White House and Attorney General have made clear,” Judge Abelson wrote, that “viewpoints and speech considered to be in favor of or supportive of D.E.I.” are “viewpoints the government wishes to punish and, apparently, attempt to extinguish.”

He continued, “As the Supreme Court has made clear time and time again, the government cannot rely on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion’ to suppress disfavored speech.”

On Wednesday, civil rights organizations sued the Trump administration, alleging that the D.E.I. orders were discriminatory and illegal, and imperiled funding for groups that provide critical services to historically underserved groups of Americans.

Representatives from the Treasury Department and the consumer bureau did not respond to requests for comment.

Russell Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director, was named the acting director of the consumer bureau’ two weeks ago. He immediately began shutting down what he called “a woke & weaponized agency,” ordering its headquarters closed and its staff to halt all work. Nearly 200 employees — those who were probationary hires or who worked on fixed-term contracts — were fired, and those who remained were forbidden from entering the agency’s offices.

The consumer bureau cannot be officially abolished without action from Congress, which created the agency in the aftermath of the Great Recession to regulate consumer products like mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and bank accounts. The bureau has twice survived Supreme Court cases that aimed to eliminate it.

But firing nearly all the bureau’s staff — as Mr. Vought intends, according to litigation in federal court in Washington that is aimed at curtailing his actions — and eliminating its physical premises would functionally be a death knell.

Employees will be assigned a 15-minute window in which they can return to the agency’s headquarters to pick up their personal effects, according to two people who were told of the shutdown plan.

Among the many open questions are what will happen to the agency’s records, some of which are subject to “litigation holds” and cannot legally be destroyed. A plan to transfer papers to a storage facility is being developed, but several employees said they worried about what would happen to the vast array of agency records held by cloud software providers. If the contracts with those providers are canceled, irreplaceable data risks being deleted.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, of the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia, issued an order last week that temporarily prevents the consumer bureau from deleting any agency data, which includes records located on the agency’s “premises, on physical media, on a cloud server, or otherwise.”

That order will last until Judge Jackson rules on a request for a restraining order sought by lawyers representing the consumer bureau’s staff union and other parties. A hearing on that request is scheduled for March 3.

While Judge Jackson’s order has paused some of the unwinding of the agency’s staff and infrastructure, the physical dismantling of its premise has begun. Workers this week removed the signage on its Washington headquarters.

Friday night’s order, the judge wrote, “bars the Treasury Department from granting access to any member of the DOGE team within the Treasury Department to any payment record, payment systems, or any other data systems maintained by the Treasury Department containing personally identifiable information and/or confidential financial information of payees.”

The case stems from a lawsuit filed by 19 state attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York, who sued to block the Trump administration’s policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” who work with Mr. Musk to access the systems. The systems contain some of the country’s most sensitive information, including Americans’ bank account and Social Security data.

“Musk and DOGE are trying to wipe out vital programs and services — from health care to public safety to education — that our communities need,” Ms. James said in a statement Friday night. “I led a coalition of attorneys general to put a stop to this lawlessness, and a federal court has yet again blocked their access to our confidential information.”

White House press officials did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

The case, one of dozens filed in the country against the administration’s sweeping agenda, could test the ability of the courts to interpret and enforce the law when it runs counter to the goals of the executive branch.

When Mr. Musk’s team turned its focus to the Treasury last month, David Lebryk, who briefly served as the agency’s acting secretary, resisted the group’s efforts to access its sensitive systems. Mr. Lebryk later abruptly retired.

In recent weeks, Vice President JD Vance has claimed that judges are not allowed “to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

The attorneys general argue in their suit that only career civil servants who have received training and security clearances should have access to the systems. The untrained members of Mr. Musk’s team, they say, should not have “unfettered access.”

Lawyers for the attorneys general said in court that their concern was that Mr. Musk’s team intended to flag and pause Treasury payments based on an “ideological litmus test” and that to do so, the group had been given unlawful access to sensitive information, creating security risks.

The government has rebutted those accusations. In a hearing on Friday, a lawyer for the defendants — the Treasury Department and its secretary, Scott Bessent — said that only two DOGE members had been given access to the systems and that they had received some training, although he was not able to say how much.

The government argues that the courts cannot usurp the powers given to President Trump as the chief executive.

“There is nothing unlawful about the Treasury carrying out the new policies of the new administration using Treasury employees,” Jeffrey Stuart Oestericher, one of the government’s lawyers, said at a hearing last week.

But in her order on Friday, the judge said that the plaintiffs had “established that there is a realistic danger that confidential financial information will be disclosed.”

“More fundamentally,” Judge Vargas wrote. “There is a realistic danger that the rushed and ad hoc process that has been employed to date by the Treasury DOGE Team has increased the risk of exposure of the States’ information.”

Even the government has conceded that granting such broad access to members of the DOGE team “created heightened security risks” and that their efforts to mitigate the dangers “did not completely address those risks,” she wrote.

Matt Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general, exulted in a post on Mr. Musk’s own X social media platform: “DOGE hackers lose again: court agrees with us that the world’s richest man can’t spy on your sensitive data.”

Mr. Musk’s group has become the central point of contention for lawsuits across the country, as its cost-cutting efforts have paralyzed parts of the federal government.

The team, created by an executive order from Mr. Trump, is tasked with trimming federal spending that is not in line with the administration’s goals. In recent weeks, DOGE — some of whose members are as young as 19 — has bulldozed through the federal bureaucracy, leaving thousands of fired employees in its wake. In some cases, the amount of money the group has claimed to cut has been overstated.

The team has often acted under a cloud of secrecy — one that has partly lifted as the government has been forced to respond to the lawsuits.

In the New York case, the administration’s lawyers said in court filings that the two people who had been given access to the Treasury systems could not edit any information and did not have access to underlying code. Both men were eventually designated as temporary employees of the Treasury Department.

But Joseph Gioeli, deputy commissioner of the department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, later said that one of the two people, Marko Elez, had mistakenly been given a higher level of access: “read/write” instead of “read-only.” Mr. Gioeli said that Mr. Elez was unaware that he had such access.

Mr. Elez resigned this month after being linked to racist posts he made on X under a pseudonym.

The administration has been unclear about Mr. Musk’s formal role with DOGE. Mr. Trump said he would lead the team, and Mr. Musk answered questions about its work during a recent news conference in the Oval Office attended by the president.

A filing on Monday in a separate case questioning DOGE’s ability to access data at seven other federal agencies complicates the picture. Joshua Fisher, a White House official, asserted in the filing that Mr. Musk was not in charge of DOGE, but merely an employee of the White House.

Mr. Fisher said in the filing that Mr. Musk was a senior adviser to the president, and had “no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself.”

“Mr. Musk is not the U.S. DOGE service administrator,” he wrote.

He did not say who was if not Mr. Musk.

Mr. Hegseth said in his statement that he would also replace Gen. James C. Slife, the Air Force’s vice chief of staff, as well as the top uniformed lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force.

Both Admiral Franchetti and General Slife “have had distinguished careers,” Mr. Hegseth said, adding “We thank them for their service and dedication to our country.”

“Under President Trump, we are putting in place new leadership that will focus our military on its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars,” he added.

According to her official biography, Admiral Franchetti received her commission in 1985 through the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Northwestern University, just seven years after the Navy ended its prohibition on women serving on ships at sea.

She became a surface warfare officer at a time when women joining the fleet in that role were typically limited to serving on auxiliary ships — noncombat vessels that carry cargo, fuel, ammunition or specialized equipment to repair submarines.

The prohibition against women serving on warships ended in 1993, opening the door for officers like Admiral Franchetti to compete equally with their male counterparts. Women were not allowed on submarines, however, until 2010.

She spent roughly half of her 40-year career at sea, rising to command the destroyer U.S.S. Ross, and later a destroyer squadron, two aircraft carrier strike groups, all naval forces in Korea and the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea.

Admiral Franchetti became the 33rd Chief of Naval Operations on Nov. 2, 2023, making her the first woman to have a permanent seat as a member of the Joint Chiefs.

At the time, the White House cited Admiral Franchetti’s “extensive operational and policy experience” as among the reasons President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had picked her.

The firing of a service chief such as Admiral Franchetti is vanishingly rare, though President Trump fired another four-star female admiral less than 24 hours after his second inauguration.

That was Adm. Linda L. Fagan, who as commandant of the Coast Guard shattered a glass ceiling to become the first woman to lead a branch of the armed forces.

The last Chief of Naval Operations to not complete a full four-year term in office was Adm. Mike Mullen, who became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2007.

A decade earlier, Adm. Jeremy M. Boorda, a Chief of Naval Operations who was the first person in Navy history to begin their service as an enlisted sailor before becoming a four-star admiral, died by suicide in 1996.

Thirty years before that, the Navy’s chief during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Adm. George W. Anderson, retired early in 1963 after clashing with Robert McNamara, who was the defense secretary at the time.

During his second administration, Mr. Trump has shown personal animus toward high-ranking military officers, both those on active duty and some who retired years ago.

Mr. Trump has suggested that Gen. Mark A. Milley, his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who retired in 2023, should be executed for engaging with his Chinese counterpart during the turmoil surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection.

General Milley’s official portrait as chairman was removed from the Pentagon on Inauguration Day.

A week later, Mr. Hegseth revoked General Milley’s government-funded personal security detail, which was provided to the retired general because of the death threats he has received from Iran following the U.S. strike that killed a powerful Iranian general in early 2020.

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

A federal judge in Maryland has temporarily blocked some enforcement of a series of executive orders by President Trump targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the government. In his ruling late Friday, Judge Adam B. Abelson of the District of Maryland, said that the defendants shall not “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate any awards, contracts or obligations,” or “change the terms of any current obligation” related to equity programs.

Judge Abelson wrote in his opinion that the plaintiffs in the case had “shown they are likely to prove” that provisions of the orders were “unconstitutionally vague on their face,” and beyond that, provisions of the orders “squarely, unconstitutionally,” violate freedom of speech.

In all, six Pentagon officials were fired, including Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy; Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force; and the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force.

The decision to fire General Brown, which Mr. Trump announced in a message on Truth Social, reflects the president’s insistence that the military’s leadership is too mired in diversity issues, has lost sight of its role as a combat force to defend the country and is out of step with his “America First” movement.

Joint Chiefs chairmen traditionally remain in place as administrations change, regardless of the president’s political party. But current White House and Pentagon officials said they wanted to appoint their own top leaders.

In a statement, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth thanked Admiral Franchetti and General Slife “for their service and dedication to our country” and requested nominations for their replacements.

Mr. Hegseth did not say why he was firing the judge advocates general. But in his Senate confirmation hearing last month, he criticized military lawyers for placing needless legal restrictions on soldiers in battle — putting “his or her own priorities in front of the war fighters, their promotions, their medals, in front of having the backs of those making the tough calls on the front lines.”

Mr. Hegseth has previously said General Brown should be fired because of his “woke” focus on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the military.

“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Mr. Hegseth said in an appearance on the “Shawn Ryan Show” in November. He added that any general involved with D.E.I. efforts should be fired. “Either you’re in for warfighting, and that’s it,” he said. “That’s the only litmus test we care about.”

On Mr. Hegseth’s first day at the Pentagon, however, he stood next to General Brown, who became chairman in October 2023, and said he looked forward to working with him.

But it soon became clear that General Brown had not been welcomed into Mr. Trump’s inner circle. He has not been invited to key meetings with the president, officials said.

It was a significant reversal for Mr. Trump from 2020, when he nominated General Brown to be the Air Force’s chief of staff. At the time, the president noted the historic significance of his decision to appoint the “first-ever African American military service chief,” writing on social media that the general was “a Patriot and Great Leader.”

General Brown had told aides repeatedly that he would not resign. On Friday, he was in El Paso and at the southwestern border, reviewing the military’s latest mission of helping to carry out Mr. Trump’s immigration directives.

Mr. Trump did not say in his post why he was firing General Brown. “He is a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader, and I wish a great future for him and his family,” the president wrote.

General Brown found out he was being removed when Mr. Hegseth telephoned him at his hotel in El Paso on Friday evening, a military official said.

General Caine retired with three stars, as a lieutenant general. By statute, anyone picked to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is supposed to have served as a combatant commander, as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or as the top uniformed officer of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps or Space Force.

It was unclear whether General Caine would need a congressional waiver; a congressional aide said the president had some latitude to choose whom he wanted and that exceptions could be made for national security reasons.

Regardless of whether he requires one, he will need to be confirmed by the Senate.

In the past, the position has been viewed as one that, like the military itself, spans administrations.

In his message on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said he was honored to be nominating “Air Force Lieutenant General Dan ‘Razin’ Caine to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” calling him “an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.”

In recent years, Mr. Trump has publicly lauded General Caine for telling him that the Islamic State could be defeated far more quickly than his advisers had suggested. The details of the story, which could not be independently verified, have shifted over time. In one version, Mr. Trump said the general claimed it would take a week to defeat the group; in another, he said four weeks.

Mr. Trump has also claimed that General Caine, during their meeting in Iraq in December 2018, donned a “Make America Great Again” hat, in defiance of military guidelines that active-duty troop should not wear political paraphernalia. General Caine has told aides that he has never worn a MAGA hat.

In his post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump again lauded General Caine’s counterterrorism skills.

“During my first term, Razin was instrumental in the complete annihilation of the ISIS caliphate,” Mr. Trump said. “It was done in record setting time, a matter of weeks. Many so-called military ‘geniuses’ said it would take years to defeat ISIS. General Caine, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly, and he delivered.”

In fact, by December 2018 when Mr. Trump visited General Caine in Iraq, other senior U.S. officials were saying that the final defeat of the last remnants of the Islamic State was only months away, although rebuilding Iraq would probably take years.

Mr. Trump has fixated on the position of the Joint Chiefs chairman since 2019, when he picked Gen. Mark A. Milley, General Brown’s predecessor, a decision the president came to bitterly regret.

Mr. Trump has complained in particular about General Milley’s calls to his Chinese counterpart during the waning weeks of the president’s first term. In a post on social media, Mr. Trump called the act “so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

Having a loyalist as his top military adviser is now paramount to Mr. Trump, aides say.

The dismissal of General Brown comes amid growing tumult at the Pentagon, the largest federal agency with three million employees, including 1.3 million service members. Mr. Hegseth has ordered senior military and Defense Department officials to draw up plans to cut 8 percent from the military budget over each of the next five years, officials said on Wednesday.

In a memo issued on Tuesday, Mr. Hegseth said a number of branches in the military and the Pentagon should turn in budget-cutting proposals by Monday, two officials said. The memo listed 17 exceptions to the proposed cuts, including military operations at the southern border.

The decision to replace General Brown with General Caine was made over the past two weeks and was tightly held within a small group of senior administration officials, according to two people with knowledge of the deliberations.

While Mr. Hegseth was in Europe last week, General Caine met with Vice President JD Vance and then with Mr. Trump. Mr. Hegseth and General Caine spoke several times, and Mr. Hegseth advocated his appointment, one of the people said.

While reports of lists of senior general and admirals targeted for dismissal have circulated on Capitol Hill for weeks, administration officials said senior House and Senate leaders were not consulted before Mr. Trump’s decision to relieve General Brown.

In a statement on Friday night, Senator Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican who heads the Armed Services Committee — the panel that approves all military nominations — praised General Brown, but made no mention of General Caine, who has not yet been officially nominated.

“I thank Chairman Brown for his decades of honorable service to our nation,” Mr. Wicker said in a statement. “I am confident Secretary Hegseth and President Trump will select a qualified and capable successor for the critical position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, was sharply critical of the move. “Firing uniformed leaders as a type of political loyalty test, or for reasons relating to diversity and gender that have nothing to do with performance, erodes the trust and professionalism that our service members require to achieve their missions,” he said in a statement.

Even some of Mr. Hegseth’s staunchest supporters in Congress have warned that a purge in the senior ranks of the Pentagon could cause morale to plunge.

“There’s been a lot of talk about firing ‘woke’ generals,” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, said last month at Mr. Hegseth’s Senate confirmation hearing. “I would say give those men and women a chance under new leadership.”

Most recent Joint Chiefs chairmen have served four years, with a president nominating a successor months before the incumbent chairman steps down. In his first term, Mr. Trump hinted in late 2018 that General Milley would be his choice to succeed Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. nearly a year before General Dunford’s term ended.

Because General Caine is retired, he would have to be called back to active duty for the Senate to hold hearings on his nomination. Only one retired officer has been called back from retirement to serve as chairman: Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy.

It was unclear whether General Brown would remain chairman until his successor was confirmed by the Senate, or whether Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the vice chairman, would serve as the acting chairman.

Mr. Trump has now fired four four-star officers in the past month. Within 24 hours of his second inauguration, the president fired Adm. Linda L. Fagan, the first female officer to serve as the commandant of the Coast Guard.

John Ismay contributed reporting.

His timeline for identifying the employees who would go to field offices and Huntsville, Ala., was not immediately clear. Two former senior F.B.I. officials familiar with the matter said that agents would be sent to cities with high crime rates.

In a statement, the F.B.I. said: “Director Patel has made clear his promise to the American public that F.B.I. agents will be in communities focused on combating violent crime. He has directed F.B.I. leadership to implement a plan to put this promise into action.”

Mr. Patel had promised to shake up the bureau last year in an interview, making clear his hostility toward an agency he saw as biased against conservatives.

“I’d shut down the F.B.I. Hoover Building on Day 1 and reopen it the next day as a museum of the ‘deep state,’” Mr. Patel said on the podcast “The Shawn Ryan Show.” “Then, I’d take the 7,000 employees that work in that building and send them across America to chase down criminals. Go be cops. You’re cops — go be cops.”

How Mr. Patel reached his decision is not clear, but a group of former and current agents on his advisory team have been taking stock of the bureau’s operations. In an email to the work force on Friday, Mr. Patel said he would be “streamlining our operations at headquarters while bolstering the presence of field agents across the nation.”

Mr. Patel is not the first director to try to reduce ranks of agents at F.B.I. headquarters.

In the 1990s, another F.B.I. director, Louis Freeh, tried a similar approach. Shortly after becoming director, he relocated hundreds of agents and supervisors from desk jobs in the capital and other offices onto the streets.

Even before Mr. Patel took office, the Justice Department ordered the forced retirements of several senior workers for reasons that remain unclear, eliminating personnel who collectively had vast experience as agents and at the bureau.

Support staff on the seventh floor of headquarters, where top officials sit, were told to relocate to another floor, including the former director’s secretary. Mr. Patel has indicated his desire for a clean break from Christopher A. Wray, the previous director, who resigned before Mr. Trump took office.

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. Patel sought to explain his pledge to drastically overhaul the bureau. He said that there were about 11,000 F.B.I. employees out of around 38,000 working in the Capitol and surrounding areas like Quantico, Va., where the bureau’s training academy is based. Quantico is also home to the Critical Incident Response Group, which includes behavioral analysts, tactical teams, hostage negotiators and preparing agents for going undercover.

“I will do that over and over and over again because the American people deserve the resources, not in Washington, D.C., but in the rest of the country,” he told senators last month.

Relocating F.B.I. employees is expensive and doing so would come as President Trump has prioritized a cost-cutting initiative led by the billionaire Elon Musk. The administration has already asked for a list of probationary employees, among them nearly a thousand agents the bureau has to justify keeping, eliciting the possibility of swift reductions across the agency.

Former F.B.I. officials raised questions about where agents and support personnel should go and which field offices needed the resources.

“Where is he going to put them?” said Chris Piehota, who retired as a senior F.B.I. executive official in 2020. He cautioned that Mr. Patel would have to conduct an inventory of programs and assemble his leadership team before making such big decisions.

“You need to get in there and see behind the curtains,” he said. “He’s got a difficult balance to maintain between recalibrating the organization and still maintaining the operational effectiveness of the F.B.I.”

Shortly after being sworn in by Attorney General Pam Bondi, Mr. Patel expressed his disbelief. “I don’t really fully believe it yet,” he said, adding that any future criticism of the bureau be directed at him, not the rank and file. “They deserve better,” he said.

John Feal, a retired construction worker from Long Island who began advocating for the program’s creation years after he was injured helping with cleanup and recovery efforts at the World Trade Center, praised the reversal.

“The White House underestimated us,” he said.

He and other advocates began mobilizing opposition to the cuts last week as soon as the Trump administration fired 16 health program employees who helped administer medical treatment for those suffering from attack-related toxins.

The program’s 90-member staff was reduced about 20 percent overall. Advocates, members of Congress and workers who had been let go said that in addition to the 16 workers who were fired, others had taken buyouts and left.

The firings immediately touched off an outcry among Democratic lawmakers, who said the cuts would delay enrollment for new patients and make fewer workers available to patients and help with diagnoses and treatment.

One of those Democrats, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said on Friday that the program “should have never been on the chopping block in the first place.”

He added: “It makes sense that the Trump administration has done a complete about-face.”

Once announced, the cuts quickly proved to be a political third rail, and Democrats were soon joined in opposing them by Republican members of Congress in districts in and around New York City, where the memory of 9/11 continues to resonate powerfully.

On Wednesday, in a striking challenge to President Trump, eight congressional Republicans appealed to him in a letter “as a native New Yorker who lived in New York City as it recovered from the 9/11 terrorist attacks” to reverse the cuts.

The letter appeared to have a speedy effect. Word spread on Thursday that the administration had restored research grants that had been terminated. One, for $257,000, is for research by the New York City Fire Department comparing incidence rates for cancer in their ranks with those in other urban departments. The grant was cut last week as “nonessential,” which Fire Department officials disputed.

The city’s fire commissioner, Robert Tucker, said on Friday that the restoration of the grant money word “provide treatment coverage to those who need it most, and make good on our promise to never forget.”

Representative Andrew Garbarino, a Long Island Republican, hailed the reversal in a social media post on Friday and welcomed what he called “President Trump’s commitment to making sure these heroes continue to receive the health care they need.”

In confirming that the grants were being restored, the C.D.C. said that 11 of the employees who had been fired would return to work. The status of the other five was unclear.

Such a reversal was unusual but not unprecedented for the Trump administration, which has been slashing federal jobs across agencies as part of the billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called department of government efficiency, or DOGE.

The administration backtracked last week after firing scores of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Later, some of the laid-off staffers were brought back to work.

The congressional Republicans’ letter about cuts was mostly written by Mr. Garbarino and signed by five other New York House members and Representatives Chris Smith and Thomas Kean Jr. of New Jersey.

“To fulfill our moral obligation to 9/11 survivors and responders, we must ensure that the program not only has the necessary resources, but also is properly administered, so that program members receive the high-quality care that they need and deserve,” the letter said.

Congress created the program, which now assists 137,000 people, in 2011 as part of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act to provide treatment for emergency workers, cleanup crews and Lower Manhattan residents who became ill from being at or near ground zero.

Benjamin Chevat, the executive director at a group dedicated to extending the act, urged the president “to instruct his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to ensure that the World Trade Center Health Program is protected from further cuts and or disruptions.”

The department has more than 945,000 civilian employees. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said 17 specific missions, such as military operations at the southwestern border, would be exempt from the 8 percent cuts in the defense budget he has ordered for each of the next five years.

Senior Pentagon supervisors were told this week to expect the department to fire about 55,000 civilian workers worldwide, part of a push by President Trump and Elon Musk to drastically reduce the size of the federal work force.

The coming dismissals announced on Friday appear to be the first tranche, and target the easiest employees to fire. Workers on probation do not receive the same protections that many other federal employees have. Probationary periods tend to last a year but can be longer for certain positions.

Mr. Selnick’s statement said that the department would institute a hiring freeze while officials conducted “further analysis of our personnel needs.”

“It is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical,” he said.

Some Defense Department supervisors have criticized the looming personnel cuts as a hasty, ill-conceived move that could damage the department’s future.

The Postal Service is managed by a bipartisan board of governors — appointed to fixed terms by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Of the nine governors on the board, no more than five of the nine may belong to the same political party, and the group comes together to elect the agency’s leader, the postmaster general.

Mr. Trump confirmed his interest in the merger in remarks at the swearing-in ceremony for Howard Lutnick, the new commerce secretary, on Friday. Mr. Trump said that he intended to keep the Postal Service “a very similar way” but that he was considering a merger or possibly downsizing the agency.

“Whether it is a merger,” Mr. Trump said, “or just using some of the very talented people that we have elsewhere so it does not lose so much — it is losing a tremendous amount of money.”

A recent report by the Postal Service said that it had “recorded $87 billion in financial losses over the last 14 years and failed to meet service standards.” The report also noted the service’s struggles during the pandemic, when a dramatic increase in package deliveries “further stressed an already misaligned and outdated mail network.” The Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency, has labeled the Postal Service as a “high risk” program vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse.

The Postal Service, which was once a Cabinet-level department of the government, was reorganized into an independent agency under President Richard Nixon. The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 established the board of governors as a way to insulate the agency from political pressure while making decisions on postal rates, appointments and salaries. Unions representing postal workers had carried out widespread strikes that year calling for pay increases.

The Postal Service has also been affected by the president’s sweeping agenda on tariffs. The agency had initially halted deliveries of packages from mainland China and Hong Kong after an order by President Trump in January ended duty-free handling of many smaller parcels — but quickly reversed its decision as the widespread ramifications of such a move became apparent.

On Friday, Mr. Trump criticized the Postal Service for its recent financial troubles, suggesting that the agency was inefficient and a drain on the budget.

“We want to have a post office that works well and doesn’t lose massive amounts of money,” he said.

Many people in the group, which included children, did not have access to their documents, complicating the process of verifying family relationships, it said. (It was not clear if the migrants’ documents had been confiscated by American or Costa Rican authorities.)

The migrants sent to Costa Rica are the latest group of deportees, largely from Asia and the Middle East, to be sent to Central America by the Trump administration, which says they illegally crossed the U.S. border. More than half of those sent to Costa Rica are from Uzbekistan, China and Armenia, according to the Costa Rican government.

Costa Rica’s security minister, Mario Zamora, disputed the ombudsman office’s claims, asserting that its assessment was based on a two-hour period after the migrants landed, rather than when they reached their final destination, a facility several hours from the capital.

“We do not agree with what was stated,” Mr. Zamora said in a statement. “And regret that they did not accompany the migrants on their journey south as they should have.”

The ombudsman’s report was also directed at the United States, noting that the migrants said they had not been given any information about their transfer to Costa Rica, about how long they would be in the country or what “migration procedures” they were subject to.

“The lack of this information increased the distress and uncertainty of these individuals,” the report said.

Mr. Zamora, the security minister, said the office should have assessed the migrants’ condition once they were settled in the facility where the government plans to house them until they are repatriated to their countries of origin, or are granted asylum by another country. The facility, called the Temporary Attention Center for Migrants, lies in the southern canton of Corredores.

“United Nations personnel were present, as well as translators, who helped each individual understand the situation from the perspective of international migration law,” Mr. Zamora said.

The ombudsman’s office said migrants had been provided with “basic hygiene supplies for children, food (water bottle, sandwich, apple, and pastries), formula milk, sanitary towels, coloring books, and crayons,” and that the buses had restrooms and air-conditioning.

But it also pointed out that the migrants were placed on buses for a six- or seven-hour trip after the flight, creating an “unjust” situation, especially for children.

“After more than four hours of air travel, they were immediately transferred to a second mode of transportation,” the report said of the children. “It should be noted that their mothers indicated they had been unable to sleep properly for hours, and upon boarding the buses, they showed great hunger.”

The ombudsman also said that while some people “required emotional support” when they arrived, the migrants were not given medical or psychological evaluations then.

Mr. Zamora said they had all been individually evaluated by Friday morning.

“Witnessing the events described above should prompt us all to reflect,” the ombudsman’s office report said. “Costa Rica cannot stray from its historical tradition of respecting human rights and providing humanitarian assistance.”

A handful of countries in Central America have made deals with the Trump administration to take in deportees from other nations.

Last week, Panama received three flights carrying more than 300 migrants from faraway countries, including China and Iran, where it is not easy for the United States to deport people to because of frozen or frayed diplomatic relations or other obstacles.

Migrants in Panama, some of whom managed to communicate with reporters from The New York Times while being held in a hotel, said they had fled persecution in their countries and feared for their lives if they were to be repatriated.

The Costa Rican ombudsman’s office is an independent government entity created to protect the rights of people in the country.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson said that they would have rejected the Trump administration’s request for Supreme Court intervention outright. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., filed a dissent.

The majority, Justice Gorsuch wrote, presumably acted as it did because temporary restraining orders like the one in place in the case generally cannot be appealed — that is, he said, it “may not yet have ripened into an appealable order.”

“Respectfully,” he added, “I believe that it has and that each additional day where the order stands only serves to confirm the point.”

The court’s order came amid a blitz of executive actions, including ones seeking to remove thousands of federal employees, many of them in roles long thought protected from summary dismissal.

Mr. Dellinger has served as head of the Office of Special Counsel, which was created by Congress in 1978 to protect government whistle-blowers. It is unrelated to the special counsels appointed by the Justice Department.

The law says the special counsel must be confirmed by the Senate, serves for a five-year term and “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”

Mr. Dellinger, who was confirmed last year, was fired by an administration official in a terse email on Feb. 7. It did not say why.

He sued, and Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court in Washington entered a temporary restraining order allowing Mr. Dellinger to keep his job for two weeks while she considered whether to enter a preliminary injunction. The order expires on Feb. 26.

Temporary restraining orders, as the name suggests, are provisional, in place for brief periods and generally meant to preserve the status quo while judges get their bearings. Preliminary injunctions are more lasting judicial commands generally issued after substantial briefing and a hearing.

Justice Gorsuch wrote that there were powerful reasons to “look behind the label” and treat the temporary restraining order in Mr. Dellinger’s case as a preliminary injunction, which can be appealed.

One reason, he wrote, was that the judge had done something extraordinary. “The court effectively commanded the president and other executive branch officials to recognize and work with someone whom the president sought to remove from office,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.

He added that the relief Mr. Dellinger sought was unusual, seeking not just back pay but asking a court to order that he be reinstated.

After a divided three-judge panel of a federal appeals court said it lacked jurisdiction to consider the matter, that administration turned to the Supreme Court.

“This case involves an unprecedented assault on the separation of powers that warrants immediate relief,” Sarah M. Harris, the acting solicitor general, wrote, adding: “These judicial rulings irreparably harm the presidency by curtailing the president’s ability to manage the executive branch in the earliest days of his administration.”

In response, Joshua A. Matz, a lawyer for Mr. Dellinger, agreed that the case presented “weighty and complex questions of constitutional law.” But Mr. Matz said Supreme Court review was premature.

The justices, he wrote, should not rule on such fundamental questions in the context of a fast-moving emergency application arising from a temporary restraining order, saying it would amount to declaring a “five-alarm fire” based on a temporary court action.

He added that ruling prematurely, before full consideration of the case, could “provoke destabilizing, harmful consequences.”

Ms. Harris wrote that the legal issues were straightforward and asked the court to address them immediately. The court’s decision in July in Trump v. United States, granting Mr. Trump substantial immunity from prosecution, made clear that the administration must prevail, she said.

She also cited the case as an example of a “broader, weekslong trend” by lower court judges to impinge on Trump’s constitutional powers by issuing temporary restraining orders that have halted various policies. Among them, she wrote, were orders denying access to Treasury Department data and prohibiting the administration from suspending foreign aid money.

Mr. Matz countered that “this would be an especially unfortunate moment at which to weaken” the Office of Special Counsel, “given the historic upheaval currently occurring within federal employment and the continued importance of ensuring that whistle-blowers are guarded from reprisal.”

Ms. Harris cited two recent decisions, involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that had concluded that presidents may fire the heads of agencies led by a single official at will.

After the court ruled in the second case in 2021, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. fired the head of the housing agency. Not long after, citing the earlier decisions, he fired the head of the Social Security Administration.

Under those precedents and practices, Ms. Harris wrote, the case involving Mr. Dellinger was an easy one.

Mr. Matz acknowledged that the court had allowed for such firings in the past, at least where the agencies in question had broad authority.

But he said the Office of Special Counsel has far more limited responsibilities. Indeed, he wrote, the Supreme Court distinguished it from the C.F.P.B. in the decision allowing the removal of its leader.

Presidents of both parties have expressed reservations about whether Congress is entitled to place limits on the president’s power to remove the head of the Office of Special Counsel. But the Supreme Court has suggested that the agency may have distinctive features that justify differing treatment.