Trump Administration Live Updates: Officials Break With Elon Musk Over Federal Workers Ultimatum

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At a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday, Mr. Johnson said Republican leaders were “very close” to winning the votes they needed to do so, but signaled the vote could slip to later in the week.

“There may be a vote tonight,” he said. “There might not be.”

It was a familiar conundrum for the speaker, who is working to quell discontent from both flanks of his fractious conference, all while dealing with a razor-thin majority that will accommodate almost no defections. If all members were present and voting, Mr. Johnson could afford to lose no more than a single Republican, and a handful have already said they are against the measure.

Approval of the budget plan is a crucial first step for Republicans to smooth the way through Congress for a massive fiscal package using a process called reconciliation, which allows such bills to steer clear of a filibuster and pass the Senate on a simple majority vote.

The House blueprint calls for legislation that would add roughly $3 trillion to the deficit over a decade, while teeing up deep cuts in spending on health care and food programs for low-income people. That would help pay for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. It also calls for raising the debt limit by $4 trillion.

At least five conservatives on Tuesday morning said they planned to vote against it.

“It’s insane,” said Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. “We’re going to increase the deficit with this. Why would I vote for that? You can’t cut taxes without cutting spending, and they’re not really cutting spending.”

At the same time, Republicans in swing-seat districts have said they are uncomfortable approving a plan that could lead to major cuts to Medicaid and food stamps. The budget does not specify precise cuts, but it lays out broad spending targets by committee that dictate where Republicans must find the money to finance their tax cuts.

For example, the plan instructs the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees Medicaid and Medicare, to come up with at least $880 billion in cuts. It would not be possible to find anywhere approaching that amount of money without slicing deeply into at least one of those programs.

“I’m still making my point all the way to the end about the need to protect the services that are important to my district,” Representative Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, said as he left a closed-door meeting of Republicans on Tuesday morning to discuss the plan. “Obviously, this is only the beginning. This is where the real fight actually begins to protect the services that I’ve been fighting for, while also delivering on the promise of slashing down the size of government.”

Republican leaders in recent days have huddled with those skeptical lawmakers and tried to assure them that they will not ultimately be asked to approve deep cuts to those programs. They have argued the House urgently needs to approve the blueprint — which does not carry the force of law — in order to move the reconciliation process forward.

“The question before us now is, what will move us in the right direction: failure, or a partial success?” said Representative Dusty Johnson, a South Dakota Republican who leads the centrist Main Street Caucus. “I think we’re going to come together around the idea that failure is the wrong option, and a partial success is far preferable.”

Maya C. Miller contributed reporting.

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In response to a social media post about the petition on Monday, Mr. Musk wrote on X that “Canada is not a real country.”

Mr. Trump has charged Mr. Musk, the billionaire tech executive, with carrying out a drastic overhaul of the federal bureaucracy. Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is not a Cabinet-level department, and a judge in Washington on Monday said the way the Trump administration had set it up may be unconstitutional.

It is unclear whether Mr. Musk has had any involvement in Mr. Trump’s approach to relations with Canada, though his posts on social media have repeatedly made jabs at the country’s sovereignty. Mr. Musk, who was born in South Africa, holds Canadian citizenship through his mother, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of the businessman. Mr. Musk also holds U.S. citizenship, which he received in 2002, according to the biography.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada has said that he does not see Mr. Trump’s statements as having been made in jest and that he takes the threat seriously. Mr. Trump has also moved forward with plans to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canadian exports to the United States.

The petition, addressed to Mr. Trudeau and sponsored by Charlie Angus, a member of Parliament for the left-of-center New Democratic Party, was reported by The Canadian Press on Saturday.

“He has used his wealth and power to influence our elections,” said the petition, which was initiated by the author Qualia Reed.

Mr. Musk recently endorsed Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, the main opposition party, as Canada’s next leader. Mr. Musk has needled Mr. Trudeau, calling him “a governor.”

Petitions must receive at least 500 valid signatures to be presented in the House of Commons and potentially receive a response from the government, according to parliamentary procedure. According to the Canadian government, citizenship can be revoked if a citizen commits fraud, misrepresents themselves or knowingly hides information on an immigrant or citizenship application. The House of Commons did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Costa Rica’s government confirms it will receive a plane carrying migrants from around the world deported by the United States from the southern border. The plane, which it says will carry 65 people, is scheduled to land at 3 p.m. at an airport outside Costa Rica’s capital, San José.

It is the second flight of its kind to land in Costa Rica; the first arrived late last week and carried families, including dozens of children, mainly from Central Asian countries, China and Eastern Europe. The migrants were bused to a remote shelter where they will be held until being deported or being granted asylum by another country, according to officials. Panama accepted three similar flights earlier this month.

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He has spoken fondly of his deployment to the base, where he served as a platoon leader for an infantry unit of the New Jersey National Guard. The unit conducted security operations for what was then a massive operation of nearly 2,600 U.S. forces and more than 600 detainees, spread out across a sprawling prison zone on a bluff overlooking the Caribbean.

As of Tuesday, he was visiting a much-reduced operation. The Defense Department now holds 15 foreign men there from the war on terrorism at a facility called Camp 5, including six men who are charged in death-penalty cases for Al Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and on the U.S.S. Cole on Oct. 12, 2000.

Next door, in a prison building called Camp 6, the Homeland Security and Defense Departments on Tuesday were housing 17 men, aged 23 to 62, who the Trump administration has said are designated for deportation. They included seven men from Honduras, four from Colombia, three from El Salvador, two from Guatemala and one from Ecuador, according to a document seen by The New York Times.

In 2021, in an appearance on Fox, Mr. Hegseth lamented that the Guantánamo detention operation had become “a prison without a mission.”

“It got mucked up very, very early when left-wing lawyers and other protections came in,” he said, adding: “It could have been a great place to expeditiously interrogate, try and, you know, execute, because we are in a war.”

Mr. Hegseth’s visit comes as civil liberties lawyers have been pressing for access to the immigration agency detainees.

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Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee said that by his count there were about five conservatives opposed to voting for the House G.O.P. budget resolution because it would add to the deficit. The resolution calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and at least $2 trillion in spending cuts.

“It’s insane — we’re going to increase the deficit with this,” said Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who says he will vote against the resolution.

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But the recent jump has been significant enough to warrant attention, stoking yet more uncertainty about an economic outlook already clouded by President Trump’s ever-evolving approach to trade, immigration, taxation and other policy areas. On Tuesday, a survey from the Conference Board showed that consumer confidence fell sharply in February and inflation expectations rose as Americans fretted about the surging price of eggs and the potential impact of tariffs.

If those worries persist, it could be a political problem for Mr. Trump, whose promise to control prices was a central part of his message during last year’s campaign. It would also add to the challenge facing policymakers at the Fed, who are already concerned that progress against inflation is stalling out.

“This is the kind of thing that can unnerve a policymaker,” Jonathan Pingle, who used to work at the Fed and is now chief economist at UBS, said about the overarching trend in inflation expectations. “We don’t want inflation expectations moving up so much that it makes the Fed’s job harder to get inflation back to 2 percent.”

Most economists see keeping inflation expectations in check as crucial to controlling inflation itself. That’s because beliefs about where prices are headed can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: If workers expect the cost of living to rise, they will demand raises to compensate; if businesses expect the cost of materials and labor to rise, they will increase their own prices in anticipation. That can make it much harder for the Fed to bring inflation to heel.

That’s what happened in the 1960s and 1970s: Years of high inflation led consumers and businesses to expect prices to keep rising rapidly. Only by raising interest rates to a punishing level and causing a severe recession was the Fed able to bring inflation fully back under control.

When prices began rising rapidly in 2021 and 2022, many forecasters feared a repeat of that scenario. Instead, inflation expectations remained relatively docile — rising only modestly, and falling quickly once inflation began to ease — and the Fed was able to bring down inflation without causing a big increase in unemployment.

“The No. 1 reason why that scenario didn’t play out was that, even though inflation went up quite a bit, expected inflation by most measures only went up a little bit,” said Laurence Ball, an economist at Johns Hopkins University. “That’s the big difference between the 1970s and the 2020s.”

Now, though, there are hints that Americans are anticipating higher inflation in the years ahead. Persistent price pressures driven in part by a surge in the costs of eggs and energy-related expenses coupled with concerns about the impact of tariffs are among the factors to have pushed consumers’ expectations for inflation over the next 12 months to their highest level in more than a year, according to the long-running survey from the University of Michigan.

More concerning to economists, consumers’ expectations for inflation in the longer run — which tend to be more stable over time — experienced their biggest one-month jump since 2021 in February. The increase cut across age and income levels, suggesting inflation fears are widespread.

Expectations in the Michigan survey have risen before, only to fall back in subsequent months. And the recent results have shown a huge partisan split — inflation expectations have risen sharply among Democrats since the election, but have fallen among Republicans — leading some economists to discount the results.

Inflation expectations have also risen among political independents, however — a significant development because their assessment of the economy is typically more stable, said Joanne Hsu, who leads the Michigan survey.

Other measures paint a mixed picture. The Conference Board’s survey showed rising concerns about inflation in both January and February, but another from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in January did not. One closely watched measure of investors’ inflation expectations has been edging up, but another one has not. Both measures are based on yields on U.S. government debt — when investors expect inflation to eat away at the value of their bond holdings, they demand a greater return to make up for it. Surveys of businesses and of professional forecasters have found little if any evidence that inflation expectations are rising.

But economists said that the longer inflation remained elevated, the greater the chances that consumers and businesses would start to readjust their expectations. What central banks fear most is if those expectations become “unanchored,” or move enough to suggest little confidence that over time inflation will return to the 2 percent target. That risk appears more prominent now than it did a few months ago. Progress on inflation has stalled in recent months and President Trump has pursued policies that many economists believe are likely to push prices higher, such as imposing tariffs and restricting immigration.

“The data does show that inflation expectations appear to be well anchored, but if I were at the Fed, I wouldn’t assume that or take that for granted,” said Richard Clarida, a former Fed vice chair who is now at Pimco, an investment firm.

Officials at the central bank have so far downplayed concerns about inflation expectations. Austan Goolsbee, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said the latest survey from the University of Michigan “wasn’t a great number,” but reflected just one month’s worth of data so far.

“You need at least two or three months for that to count,” Mr. Goolsbee, who casts votes on policy decisions this year, said on Sunday.

Alberto Musalem, president of the St. Louis Fed and a voting member, was also emphatic that inflation expectations were under control while talking to reporters last week. Mr. Musalem described the Michigan data as “one metric amongst a variety of metrics that has shown a little uptick.”

Despite this confidence, the Fed has put additional interest rate cuts on hold for the time being. Officials not only want more evidence that inflation is in retreat but have also said a solid economy affords them time to wait and see how Mr. Trump’s plan will impact the trajectory for consumer prices, the labor market and growth more broadly.

Minutes from the most recent policy meeting in January showed that policymakers expected some impact on consumer prices from Mr. Trump’s policies. But how the central bank should respond remains a big point of debate.

Some, like Fed governor Christopher J. Waller, have argued that the central bank can “look through” the economic impact of policies like tariffs. But that stance hinges on a number of factors, most crucially that such levies lead to only a one-off increase in prices and that expectations across businesses and households remain in check.

But according to Charles Evans, who retired as president of the Chicago Fed in 2023, that could be a risky strategy, especially in light of the inflation surge that followed the Covid-era economic shock.

“That’s the same transitory story the Fed and everybody was saying in 2021,” he said. “You would think that policymakers would be a little more reluctant to lean on that.”

Already, Mr. Evans said that seeing inflation expectations move up somewhat made him “a little nervous,” especially in light of his concerns that businesses might be more inclined than in the past to pass along higher prices to their customers. For those reasons, he expects the Fed to stay “cautious” about further interest rate cuts this year.

John Roberts, who most recently served as a top staff member in the division of research and statistics at the Fed before joining Evercore ISI, added that the central bank might be inclined to forgo cuts entirely this year if inflation expectations did not improve from current levels. At this point, he already sees “a little bit of unanchoring here.”

After the release of the latest University of Michigan data on Friday, economists at LHMeyer, a research firm, pushed back their timing for the next Fed cut from June to September.

There is also another risk: If Mr. Trump moves to erode the Fed’s independence, or threatens to do so, that could undermine confidence in the central bank’s ability to bring inflation under control, leading inflation expectations to rise.

Last week, Mr. Trump sought to expand his reach over the Fed as part of a broader effort to wrest greater control of congressionally designated independent agencies. The executive order targeted the central bank’s supervision and regulation of Wall Street and carved out its decisions on monetary policy. But the expansive nature of the order stoked concerns about how much further Mr. Trump’s encroachment on the Fed’s independence could eventually go.

“That’s the most dangerous scenario,” Mr. Ball said, adding that even the threat of political interference could make the Fed’s job more difficult. “The Fed’s ability to control expectations could be impeded not only by the Trump administration taking over, but also by the fear that might happen.”

Speaker Mike Johnson is huddling with House Republicans this morning here on Capitol Hill, trying to put together the votes to pass their budget resolution later today. He is facing possible defections from a group of moderates who are leery that the legislation could pave the way for deep Medicaid cuts in their districts, as well as a handful of conservatives who want even deeper cuts.

One of those moderates is Representative David Valadao of California, whose predicament we wrote about here. Almost two in three of his constituents are on Medicaid.

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Among the programs the group singled out for preservation were those aimed at assessing the physical security of voting locations and election offices, shoring up cybersecurity for election offices, sharing classified intelligence on foreign threats to elections and responding to attacks like ransomware.

“We favor continuity of the core resources,” the secretaries said, while also asking Ms. Noem to discuss with them any “potential changes or impacts to election security-related services before making a final decision.”

Last week, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had already reassigned several dozen officials working on foreign interference in U.S. elections at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forced out others at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

The letter’s tepid wording was unsurprising: The association, comprising 40 secretaries of state belonging to both parties, is often loath to wade into any debate that could appear political. But election officials nationwide have expressed concern and confusion about the administration’s moves.

The letter was signed by the association’s president, Steve Simon, the Democratic secretary of state in Minnesota, and Michael Watson, the group’s president-elect, the Republican secretary of state in Mississippi. Mr. Watson could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Simon said in an interview that it reflected a “broad consensus” that cuts could “put the secretaries of state and those who run elections at a real disadvantage in light of the threats that we know are out there.”

Mr. Simon noted that the homeland security programs were created in response to efforts by foreign governments to hack into American election systems in 2016. Among them is “penetration testing,” in which federal government experts try to hack or break into state election systems to identify any vulnerabilities and tie it to intelligence reports of foreign threats.

“This is very much a national security issue, and it’s not just the opinion of secretaries of state,” he said. “That’s the opinion of the federal government across multiple administrations now.”

While the ramifications of the changes at the F.B.I. are not yet fully known, other secretaries of state said they worried that those could threaten their personal safety.

Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state and a Democrat, said she had worked closely with federal partners over the past four years as her office was flooded with death threats against her.

“Four people have been prosecuted for threatening my life, three by the F.B.I.,” she said, adding that nearly 20 cases of threats against her were under active investigation recently: “Where is that work going, the work to protect election officials?”

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He lashed out at the office after the hearing. “There are no separate sovereigns in this executive branch,” he wrote in a statement that also suggested his former co-workers prepare to resign if they disagreed.

It was the latest chapter in Mr. Bove’s estranged-family feud with the Southern District, where he rose to prominence as a top terrorism prosecutor and departed in December 2021 after a case he oversaw crumbled over procedural violations by members of his team.

He would go on to become a key member of Mr. Trump’s defense team known for his unyielding style. Since being installed at the Justice Department, he has emerged as one of the most powerful officials in the country and the main enforcer of Mr. Trump’s demands for retribution and unimpeded control of federal law enforcement.

That Mr. Bove, 44, has quashed dissent at the Southern District is an indication of its outsize importance as a symbol of prosecutorial independence — and its enduring role in Mr. Trump’s own long, tortured relationship with the department since his first term. But his forceful tack is also a measure of his own fraught relationship with an office that provided him with the know-how and confidence to now challenge its power and autonomy.

Interviews with more than two dozen former colleagues, current department officials and others, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, reveal new details about Mr. Bove’s nine years at the Southern District, a turbulent period that defined his career and foreshadowed his current effort to bend the Justice Department to the Trump agenda.

Jessica A. Roth, a former Southern District prosecutor, said Mr. Bove’s bellicose approach to overriding the judgment of his former office appeared to be an effort to undermine its historical independence.

“It’s this sense of ‘It’s my way or the highway’ and no tolerance for disagreement, even when respectfully presented,” said Ms. Roth, who now teaches at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. “The notion that disagreement is insubordination is highly distressing.”

Ellen Blain, a former assistant U.S. attorney who worked in the office during Mr. Bove’s tenure, said these actions represented a dangerous new paradigm, forcing career prosecutors “to use the power of the Justice Department to instill fear in the president’s enemies and bestow favors on his friends.”

A spokesman for Mr. Bove had no comment. Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, accused Mr. Bove’s former colleagues of “leaking sensitive investigative information, mixed with lies,” to the news media. Seeking to invert the criticism of the administration, he called it “an unacceptable weaponization of the criminal justice system.”

A Steady Rise

Mr. Bove began his climb on the low rung of one of the highest-powered U.S. attorney’s offices in the country.

After graduating from the State University of New York at Albany in 2003, he applied for a job as a paralegal in the Southern District, knowing it was the center of the action. To his surprise, he was offered a slot in the securities unit.

He left in 2005 to attend Georgetown University’s law school, after making a strong impression, but was always intent on returning. After two federal clerkships and a stint in a white-shoe law firm, he was hired in 2012 by the Obama-appointed U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, as a prosecutor.

Mr. Bove would play a significant role in many major investigations over the years, both as a line attorney and supervisor, overseeing the indictment of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela on drug-trafficking charges and the conviction of Cesar Sayoc, who was charged with sending pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and other Trump critics.

Mr. Bove racked up convictions at trial and in guilty pleas, as in one case of a Hezbollah operative and another with an F.B.I. employee accused of being an agent for China. A high point, former colleagues said, was the successful prosecution and trial of the man who detonated a pressure-cooker bomb in Manhattan and was sentenced to two life terms in prison.

He took particular pride in his work on terrorism cases, and kept a capped pipe bomb from one of his cases on his desk as a memento, according to people who visited his office.

Veterans of the Southern District like to say they take the work seriously but not themselves. Particularly among the younger lawyers, there is a lot of joking and pranking, and roasts are held when prosecutors leave the office.

Mr. Bove did not quite fit into that mold, former colleagues say. He could be friendly, had a dark sense of humor and bonded with colleagues who shared his enthusiasm for running and working out. But he had a hard edge and could be awkward or short with people.

He was intensely proud of his work in the Southern District, and approached the job with the same intensity he had exhibited as a standout lacrosse player in college.

Then came an episode that appeared to color his view of the office from that point forward.

In 2016, during a corruption investigation into Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2013 campaign fund-raising, an F.B.I. agent surprised Mr. Bove’s wife, a policy adviser to the mayor, with a request that she turn over records of her communications, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

(There was no allegation of wrongdoing by Mr. Bove’s wife, and Mr. de Blasio was never charged.)

Mr. Bove believed that approach, while not technically improper, was too aggressive and needlessly traumatized his family. He made it clear that he had only wanted a heads-up and would never have tipped off his wife beforehand.

His superiors countered by saying that alerting him could have potentially compromised a sensitive political investigation.

His reaction was instant and emotional. He briefly considered quitting, and was so upset that he took several days off to clear his head. That did not sit well with some of his colleagues who believed he had overreacted, those people said.

If his aggressiveness fueled his success inside the office, it also caused problems and Mr. Bove was advised to take steps to tone down his behavior.

By all accounts, he succeeded, working on a criminal case alongside Nicolas Roos and Danielle R. Sassoon, who this month resigned as interim U.S. attorney at the Southern District rather than sign off on Mr. Bove’s order to dismiss the Adams case.

At the time, both prosecutors praised Mr. Bove’s contributions, according to people familiar with the matter.

But in March 2018, David E. Patton, then the head of the federal public defenders’ office in New York, which represents thousands of indigent defendants in the city, emailed Mr. Bove’s supervisors to relay complaints from defense lawyers.

In the message, obtained by The New York Times, one lawyer described Mr. Bove as vindictive, someone who abused his power and was “impossible to deal with.” Another lawyer called Mr. Bove “completely reckless and out of control.”

One public defender in Mr. Patton’s office cast Mr. Bove as purely adversarial, and prone to defining justice however he saw fit.

Mr. Patton did not ask Mr. Bove’s superiors for any specific disciplinary action, but wrote, “I fear there will be many future problems.” Mr. Patton did not respond to a request for comment.

The complaint appeared to have stalled Mr. Bove’s ascent, delaying his promotion to help run the office’s critical unit that investigates terrorism and international narcotics trafficking cases.

Pursuing Jan. 6

But Mr. Bove sought to address those issues, and by October 2019 his standing improved to the point that he was promoted to co-chief of the terrorism unit.

Tommy Cindric, a former agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who worked closely with Mr. Bove, said: “Emil is a bulldog. I think he’s an aggressive, smart, obsessive prosecutor. For me, he has a moral compass — and that compass has always been true north.”

During the more than two years that he helped lead the unit, Mr. Bove would oversee some of his most important terrorism and drug cases. But his curt, at times browbeating, management style resurfaced, alienating some subordinates, according to former colleagues.

It was his supervision of another high-profile international prosecution that undermined his position in the office beyond repair — yet also paved his remarkable path to Mr. Trump and a far more commanding role in federal law enforcement.

In 2020, defense lawyers accused prosecutors working under Mr. Bove’s supervision of seeking to hide exculpatory evidence in a case against an Iranian banker, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad, who was convicted that March of seeking to evade U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Republic. That July, the judge vacated the conviction and dismissed the indictment after the government acknowledged that there were problems in the way evidence had been turned over to the defense.

In September, the judge issued an opinion excoriating the Southern District for its handling of the case and criticized the office’s leaders for failing to “unequivocally condemn these prosecutors’ improper actions and communications.” In one instance, a prosecutor had suggested to a colleague that they “bury” a document in the trove of records sent to the defense.

The judge ultimately concluded that while government errors and ethical lapses in the case were “pervasive,” she did not find that “prosecutors intentionally withheld documents from the defense or intentionally misled the court.”

It was a major embarrassment to the office.

Around the same time, the Southern District’s leaders had decided to demote Mr. Bove after an internal investigation prompted by complaints about his management style that had caused morale in his unit to plummet, according to three people familiar with the matter. But they kept him in place until the Sadr matter had been resolved, to avoid the appearance that anyone, including Mr. Bove, had done anything intentionally wrong.

In the middle of all this came a convulsive shock, the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Mr. Bove, who in his new role at the Justice Department pressured the F.B.I.’s interim leaders to turn over the names of personnel involved in the Jan. 6 investigations, has not publicly acknowledged any role in enforcement efforts after the riot. Yet he was not only involved; he was an unapologetic participant, according to people who worked with him.

Mr. Bove watched the events unfold from his office in Lower Manhattan, and repeatedly expressed determination to help federal prosecutors in Washington in any way he could, according to a former senior department official who worked directly with him.

While the Southern District could play only a limited role, Mr. Bove worked with the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, never expressed reservations about the investigation, and half-jokingly told a member of his team to come back with an indictment of a rioter or not bother to return to the office, the person said.

A Potential Conflict

By the end of 2021, Mr. Bove moved on, joining a small but well-regarded firm in New Jersey.

Even there he could not escape the gravitational pull of his former office. In the summer of 2023, when Mr. Bove began to represent a woman who had been charged by the Southern District with committing extensive fraud, prosecutors asked that he be disqualified from the case.

Mr. Bove, they wrote, “may be in possession of information he learned” when he worked in the Southern District. “This dynamic creates a conflict of interest given that Bove cannot give his clients his undivided loyalty.”

He pushed back, arguing that his representation of the woman was consistent with legal ethics and that she could waive any potential conflict. Ultimately, she chose not to enter a waiver and he withdrew from the case, angering him.

In September 2023, Mr. Bove joined a law firm run by Todd Blanche, who had also begun his career as a paralegal in the Southern District and was then leading Mr. Trump’s criminal defense. Mr. Bove was quickly added to the Trump defense team.

He took on an expansive role, a hard-driving counterpart to the more laid-back Mr. Blanche, willing to make overtly political arguments in court, to the occasional annoyance of judges.

At one hearing, Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump appointee who presided over the case involving Mr. Trump’s retention of classified documents after his first term, offered a verbal eye-roll when Mr. Bove griped that it was interfering with Mr. Trump’s need to hit the campaign trail. The argument echoed his rationale for dropping the Adams case ahead of the 2025 mayoral election.

“Can we talk about the actual legal issues?” she asked.

But Mr. Trump liked his toughness. During his Manhattan criminal trial in 2024, which stemmed from a hush money payment investigated earlier by the Southern District, Mr. Trump rarely belittled Mr. Bove the way he did his other lawyers during sometimes explosive sessions in a holding room, perhaps because he was second in command to Mr. Blanche, people familiar with the situation said.

The kinship appears to run deeper. Mr. Bove has shown he shares Mr. Trump’s maximalist approach to conflict.

He slammed Ms. Sassoon, a respected prosecutor who is a member of the conservative Federalist Society, for “insubordination and apparent misconduct reflected in the approach that you and your office have taken in this matter.”

He went even further in accusing the Biden-appointed former U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Damian Williams, of opening the Adams investigation to promote his own political career. He offered no evidence to support the claim.

Mr. Bove’s rebuke of the office, and in particular Ms. Sassoon, surprised former colleagues who had been encouraged by his more measured attitude shift a few years earlier.

In fact, the email from the federal public defenders’ office outlining complaints about his conduct had cut so deeply that he displayed a copy of it in his office, telling colleagues it served as a pointed, corrective reminder of his past behavior.

Reporting was contributed by Devlin Barrett from Washington, and Alan Feuer, Matthew Goldstein, Nicole Hong and William K. Rashbaum from New York.

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Mr. O’Donnell’s departure comes at a turbulent time for the I.R.S. Mr. Trump has targeted the tax collector, long a political villain for Republicans, for deep layoffs, with more than 6,700 employees dismissed last week. Mr. Musk has suggested the I.R.S. should be abolished and deployed a member of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency to the agency, with others expected to follow.

With roughly 100,000 staff members before the layoffs, the I.R.S. is responsible for collecting more than $5 trillion in revenue every year. Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had poured billions in new funding into the agency in hopes of modernizing its antiquated technology and beefing up its ability to go after companies and wealthy people who do not pay the taxes they owe.

Mr. Trump is rapidly reversing those efforts, in moves that tax experts warn could increase the deficit by making it easier for people to avoid paying taxes.

The I.R.S. is also in the middle of the annual filing season, its most work-intensive period, when millions of Americans submit their tax returns. Democrats have warned that the layoffs could create delays and errors for Americans waiting for their tax refunds. A Treasury Department spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

In a break from the tradition of treating the leader of the I.R.S. as a nonpartisan management job, Mr. Trump has nominated Billy Long, a former Republican congressman, as the commissioner. Mr. Long supported legislation calling for the abolition of the I.R.S. while in Congress and after he left aggressively marketed a tax credit that the I.R.S. warned was a magnet for fraud. The Senate has not yet considered Mr. Long’s nomination.

Mr. O’Donnell had been considering retiring soon, even before Mr. Trump took office and began cutting thousands of jobs at the tax collector, two of the people familiar with his departure said.

I.R.S. officials last week had resisted efforts by Mr. Musk’s team to receive broad access to the agency’s data, which includes sensitive information about Americans’ earnings and families.

The agency ultimately outlined an agreement barring Gavin Kliger, a young software engineer affiliated with Mr. Musk’s team, from viewing individual taxpayers’ information while he works at the I.R.S.

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In a statement posted to the agency’s website, Mr. Dellinger said that the decision to fire probationary employees en masse “without individualized cause” appeared “contrary to a reasonable reading of the law,” and that he would ask a government review board to pause the firings for 45 days.

The move marks an attempt by federal workers to use the levers of government to push back against the mass firings by the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk’s team. A spokesman for Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Dellinger’s move, which was reported earlier by Government Executive, a trade publication, also highlights the many layers of government officials who have been targeted by the Trump administration. At every level of the case, the officials reviewing the firings have themselves been dismissed and are using other legal means to fight to hold on to their jobs.

The Office of Special Counsel, which was created in 1979, is not connected to the special counsels who are appointed by the Justice Department.

Mr. Dellinger himself was fired on Feb. 7. He sued, and a federal judge entered a temporary restraining order allowing him to keep his job until Feb. 26. The Supreme Court declined to intervene while his case continues to make its way through the courts.

Next, the case will be reviewed by an entity called the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency that reviews actions by the Office of Personnel Management. The three-member board includes appointees from both Republican and Democratic administrations.

It, too, has been under attack by the Trump administration. The chairwoman, Cathy Harris, a longtime employment lawyer, was confirmed by the Senate in 2022. She also sued, and Ms. Harris was recently reinstated as the chairwoman of the board after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order to block her firing, at least for now.

Trump officials have moved to fire most of the estimated 200,000 federal workers on probation, mostly because they are new to government service.

Workers from multiple federal agencies filed complaints with Mr. Dellinger’s office, the first step in the process to contest their firings. Those filings argued that the Trump administration had violated federal personnel laws by firing probationary employees en masse.

Under federal personnel laws, probationary workers may be terminated after an individualized review only “if their performance or conduct demonstrates that they are unfit for federal employment,” according to the stay request. If federal agencies plan to lay off workers in a general restructuring or downsizing, they must follow relevant legal procedures, according to the filing.

Lawyers from Democracy Forward, the legal advocacy group that filed the complaint on behalf of the fired workers, celebrated Mr. Dellinger’s decision.

The Trump administration’s firing of the probationary federal workers was “illegal and cruel,” said Skye Perryman, the organization’s president and chief executive.

“It’s beyond troubling to think that we now have to protect the very people who serve this nation from attacks by the president,” she said.

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“Based on the limited record I have before me, I have some concerns about the constitutionality of U.S.D.S.’s structure and operations,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly said at a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington. She expressed particular concern that it violated the appointments clause of the Constitution, which requires leaders of federal agencies to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Musk was neither nominated nor confirmed.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s remarks about the Musk operation were part of a civil case brought by two labor unions and a group representing millions of American retirees. They are seeking an injunction that would bar the Musk team from accessing sensitive records maintained by the Treasury Department.

Last week, a federal judge in Manhattan, entertaining a similar legal issue, banned Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting group from regaining access to the Treasury Department’s payment and data systems until the conclusion of a separate lawsuit claiming that its access to the records is unlawful.

The suits are among several challenging Mr. Musk’s wide-ranging efforts to scrutinize government spending and slash the federal work force, which have spawned dueling directives from Mr. Musk and the heads of various federal agencies, as well as termination notices that were quickly rescinded.

Some of the suits have directly questioned the constitutionality of the Musk operation. But Judge Kollar-Kotelly was the first federal judge handling one of the cases to hint at how she might rule on that critical issue.

The judge also indicated that she had serious concerns about how the organization is being run. Her concerns emerged from unresolved questions about who is in charge of the U.S. DOGE Service and what role Mr. Musk plays in its operations.

At the hearing, Judge Kollar-Kotelly repeatedly asked a lawyer for the government, Bradley Humphreys, to identify the service’s administrator. He was unable to answer her.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly also asked Mr. Humphreys what position Mr. Musk holds. Mr. Humphreys responded that Mr. Musk was not the DOGE Service’s administrator, or even an employee of the organization, echoing what a White House official had declared in a separate case challenging the powers of the group.

When the judge pressed him on what Mr. Musk’s job actually was, Mr. Humphreys said, “I don’t have any information beyond he’s a close adviser to the president.”

That exchange seemed to irk Judge Kollar-Kotelly, who signaled her skepticism about the organization’s structure and powers.

“It does seem to me if you have people that are not authorized to carry out some of these functions that they’re carrying out that does raise an issue,” she said. “I would hope that by now we would know who is the administrator, who is the acting administrator and what authority do they have?”

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Judge Trevor N. McFadden of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, said The Associated Press’s circumstances were “not the type of dire situation” that would require emergency intervention against the White House, in part because the organization could still report the news through shared reports sent out to all media organizations in the White House Correspondents’ Association.

While Judge McFadden said he was hesitant to immediately force the Trump administration’s hand, he seemed sympathetic to arguments against the White House, including that its actions appeared to be intended to coerce or punish the news organization over a language choice, which, he repeatedly said, amounted to “viewpoint discrimination.”

After reading his ruling, he warned the lawyer representing the Trump administration that legal precedent from other cases in which the White House had banned specific reporters was “uniformly unhelpful to the White House.” He ordered an expedited hearing to consider an injunction against the Trump administration, ahead of which both sides could introduce more evidence.

“It might be a good idea for the White House to think about whether what they’re doing is really appropriate given the case law,” he said.

The Associated Press had requested a restraining order to prevent the White House from excluding its journalists from events where the president routinely makes news, such as when he signs executive orders in the Oval Office and often speaks unscripted to the journalists assembled to watch.

Charles D. Tobin, a lawyer for the news organization, said the lawsuit boiled down to the decision by Mr. Trump and his staff to punish one outlet over others by keeping them out of events they cover on behalf of thousands of newsrooms and broadcasters worldwide.

Mr. Tobin likened journalism to a jury trial, in which reporters and photographers must be able to observe the president the same way jurors assess a witness’s credibility on the stand. He argued that while presidents routinely hold private events that are closed to the press — such as fund-raisers — restricting one outlet from joining otherwise open events amounted to an arbitrary deprivation of their access.

“Once you let people in, it becomes a different constitutional analysis,” he said.

The White House celebrated the judge’s move.

“As we have said from the beginning, asking the president of the United States questions in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One is a privilege granted to journalists, not a legal right,” the statement said.

On Monday, when President Emmanuel Macron of France met with Mr. Trump at the White House, the French press corps decided that a Paris-based reporter from The Associated Press would ask their first question during the planned joint news conference. She was allowed to do so, according to a report issued by the press pool, the rotating group of journalists who travel with the president and have reserved seats in otherwise walled-off events in the White House complex.

Lawyers defending the Trump administration had argued that it was the president’s prerogative to choose which members of the news media to allow into otherwise restricted areas, including the Oval Office, Air Force One and his residence at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. They argued that the makeup of the press pool, which traditionally comprises just 13 people, but always includes The Associated Press and other wire services, can be changed at the president’s discretion without “offending the Constitution.”

At the hearing on Monday, Brian P. Hudak, a lawyer representing Trump officials, compared participation in the press pool to other “special access events,” such as one-on-one sit-down interviews with the president, which he said presidents had no obligation to give to every organization.

He argued that a president may have legitimate reasons for choosing specific outlets in specific contexts, such as by inviting a group of financial journalists to an event about tariffs.

Mr. Hudak said he believed that Mr. Trump would be within his rights to go even further, such as by hypothetically banning all but a handful of cameramen from the White House. But he argued that Mr. Trump’s staff had not caused The Associated Press harm to that extent, pointing to its continued access to the White House grounds and its press briefings.

“If tomorrow the White House decides to eliminate the pool, I think they can do that,” he said, adding that journalists are granted access to the White House at the president’s “grace and discretion.”

But Judge McFadden appeared to disagree, saying that while there would appear to have been “any number of content-neutral reasons” for excluding The Associated Press’s print journalists and photographers, it seemed clear that the administration had picked a fight with the organization over its content.

Earlier in the day, Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, denounced The Associated Press on social media.

“As President Trumps’ lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first,” Mr. Martin said.

The extraordinary statement, coming from a federal prosecutor amid litigation and suggesting that Justice Department attorneys are the president’s lawyers rather than representatives of the government, only added to the tension as both sides prepared to continue litigating.

“We look forward to our next hearing on March 20 where we will continue to stand for the right of the press and the public to speak freely without government retaliation,” Lauren Easton, a spokeswoman for The Associated Press, said in a statement. “This is a fundamental American freedom.”

While lawyers argued on Monday, Zeke Miller, the chief White House correspondent for The Associated Press, joined his organization’s lawyers at the plaintiff’s table, with his back to a full courtroom. Eugene Daniels, a White House correspondent for Politico who is the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, watched in the crowd, as did Julie Pace, the executive editor of the outlet.

Making his case, Mr. Tobin told Judge McFadden that he was not asking the court to determine whether Mr. Trump’s motive was “geographical propaganda” or a “patriotic” rebranding of a body of water.” But he said the decision to punish The Associated Press over its editorial choices cut against established legal norms.

“For better or worse, what goes into newspapers is the decision of editors,” he said.

Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.