Trump Administration Live Updates: Latest News on Tariffs, RFK Jr. and More – The New York Times

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Regardless, the layoffs could mark a major increase in the scale of the Trump administration’s efforts to shed federal workers and reshape government. The administration had already said that about 75,000 workers had accepted an offer to resign in exchange for being paid through September, but the removal of most workers on probation, generally recent hires who have been in their roles less than a year, could cut much deeper into the federal government’s civilian work force of 2.3 million.

The cuts even extended to the agency ordering them, the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal civilian work force. It laid off dozens of employees on Thursday, according to people familiar with the move.

The dismissals came on the same day that leaders at O.P.M. met with agency representatives and urged them to lay off most probationary employees, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak about the issue publicly.

Many employees on fixed-term assignments at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were also terminated on Thursday, according to several people familiar with the matter. The dismissals came after more than 70 probationary workers at the bureau were laid off earlier this week.

Workers on probation do not receive the same protections that many other federal employees have. Probationary periods tend to last a year, but they can be longer for certain positions. According to the most recent data as of May, the federal government employed roughly 220,000 employees who were serving in their roles for less than a year.

A spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management said the probationary period was “not an entitlement for permanent employment,” and that agencies were taking independent action in support of President Trump’s broader efforts to reduce the size of the federal government.

The terminations were swiftly condemned by union leaders representing federal workers.

“These firings are not about poor performance — there is no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants,” Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in a statement. “They are about gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.”

The exact number of workers who were fired at the Office of Personnel Management was unclear, but three people at the agency familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that those affected included probationary employees who had worked there for less than two years, members of the agency’s communications office and Schedule A workers — individuals, including veterans, with severe physical, psychiatric or intellectual disabilities.

The affected O.P.M. employees were locked out of their computer systems and asked to leave the building less than an hour after they were informed of the layoffs in a group call, according to audio of the call, which was shared with The New York Times. An email to staff, also shared with The Times, said that the agency’s communications office was being dissolved as part of wider cuts at the Office of Personnel Management.

The firings came a day after the Trump administration moved forward with a deferred resignation program for federal workers, which encouraged employees to resign in exchange for being paid through September, though Congress has not approved funding for it yet. The incentive program has closed to new entries after a judge allowed it to proceed.

Officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs said that workers who accepted the resignation offer were exempt from the terminations on Thursday. There are currently more than 43,000 probationary employees across the department, and the vast majority were exempt from the terminations because they serve in “mission-critical positions” or are covered under a collective bargaining agreement, according to department officials.

The dismissals came after other agencies had already moved to lay off workers in recent days. On Wednesday, the General Services Administration — which manages the federal real estate portfolio and much of the government’s tech work force — told dozens of employees across its technology division that they were losing their jobs. On the same day, at least 60 probationary employees at the Education Department were laid off, according to officials at the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union.

Dozens of probationary employees at the Small Business Administration were also told on Tuesday that they would be terminated, officials at A.F.G.E. said.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing agencies to start initiating plans for “large scale” reductions in staffing. The order gave Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency substantial power to reshape the federal work force and approve which career officials are hired in the future.

The Trump administration has also collected information from agencies like the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and others about their new hires, raising the specter of more mass firings in coming weeks. More than 1,100 Environmental Protection Agency employees who had been hired in the last year and still had probationary status were warned last week that they could be fired at any time.

Kate Conger, Stacy Cowley and Matthew Goldstein contributed reporting.

President Trump has accused Taiwan of spending too little on its own security and of gaining an unfair dominance in semiconductors. Lai Ching-te, the president of Taiwan, said Friday that it would boost defense spending from 2.5 percent to over 3 percent of its gross domestic product.

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In response, Judge Ali, a Biden appointee, issued a temporary injunction saying that the Trump administration could not freeze foreign aid spending that predates Mr. Trump’s inauguration, nor could it fire or suspend workers associated with those spending projects.

The ruling reverses a decision that had thrown into turmoil programs that provide shelter for millions of people and fight hunger and illness around the globe. Other court decisions have also blocked the administration from carrying out its plan to virtually dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main government organization that provides humanitarian aid, and put its employees on administrative leave.

In his 15-page ruling, Judge Ali said that the plaintiffs — a coalition of aid groups, businesses, and health and media nonprofits — had “made a strong preliminary showing of irreparable harm.”

He cited the example of one nonprofit that protects refugees and asylum seekers. It reported having to lay off 535 staff members after losing federal grants, shutter program offices and defer payments to its vendors.

Judge Ali was unpersuaded that the administration’s use of waivers to allow some foreign aid programs to continue was a meaningful defense. He cited testimony indicating that even in some cases when funding had been deemed essential and granted a waiver by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the money remained stalled.

“Such waivers do not address the problem, because a business cannot halt global supply chains midstream and then resume operations with uncertainty as to whether it will have to halt again in 30 days,” he wrote. Trump administration lawyers, he wrote, “pointed to the waiver process but did not rebut this evidence, acknowledging that the waiver process may have had ‘hiccups.’”

Judge Ali was also skeptical about the Trump administration’s stated rationale for the freeze: to allow for a review in part to locate what it claims is hidden wasteful spending.

Trump administration lawyers “have not offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shock wave and upended reliance interests for thousands of agreements with businesses, nonprofits and organizations around the country, was a rational precursor to reviewing programs,” he wrote.

Judge Ali did not entirely embrace the plaintiffs’ request, denying their request that he entirely block Mr. Trump’s executive order. Judge Ali said there was no reason to block, for instance, Mr. Trump’s call for an internal review of foreign aid spending.

The judge ordered the Trump administration to file a status report by Tuesday showing its compliance with his order.

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It is not clear what precisely Mr. Gebbia will do or how formal his role will be. Many members of Mr. Musk’s government-overhaul effort float among agencies depending on the day’s tasks. Many of them consider their center of gravity to be the Office of Personnel Management or the General Services Administration.

Mr. Musk and his allies have taken over the United States Digital Service, now renamed the “United States DOGE Service.” The agency was established in 2014 to fix the federal government’s online services. Many of his foot soldiers are young software engineers with no government experience who have parachuted into federal agencies seeking to overhaul or even dismantle them.

Mr. Gebbia was until recently a Democratic donor, spending over $200,000 each to boost Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in the 2016 and 2020 general elections, and $20,000 to support Mr. Biden’s re-election run in 2023.

Mr. Gebbia has said his politics have shifted toward Republicans, in major part because of the advocacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Mr. Gebbia considers a political ally. Mr. Gebbia attended Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation hearing last month, writing on X that morning that it was a “big day ahead for the future of health in America.”

Mr. Gebbia did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday evening.

Mr. Trump has embraced leaders and donors in the tech industry, and many in Silicon Valley have rallied around him since he won the presidency.

In a post on X the day before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Gebbia said he had voted for Democrats dating back to Al Gore in 2000 but acknowledged supporting Mr. Trump in November. “I did a bad thing. Something the younger me would hate myself for doing. Something that only a few people (and maybe ByteDance) know: I voted Republican last November,” he wrote, referring to TikTok’s parent.

Mr. Gebbia’s net worth approaches $9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, thanks to his shares in Airbnb, which he founded in 2008. One of Mr. Gebbia’s co-founders, Brian Chesky, the C.E.O., has developed a close relationship with former President Barack Obama. But Mr. Gebbia has been considered among the three founders to have the most interest in — and time for — politics. He was originally the company’s chief product officer and has gradually stepped away from company operations to focus on personal pursuits, such as his stake in the N.B.A. team the San Antonio Spurs. He remains on Airbnb’s board.

Mr. Gebbia, whose background like Mr. Chesky’s is in industrial design, has become one of Mr. Musk’s closest friends in recent years. Mr. Musk had discussed buying a home from Mr. Gebbia’s new startup, Samara, and Mr. Gebbia’s texts to Mr. Musk have come up in recent Musk-related litigation. Mr. Musk frequently engages with Mr. Gebbia on X.

Mr. Gebbia has also posted admiringly on X about Mr. Musk’s new project in Washington, writing shortly after the election that there was a “historic corporate turnaround about to take place: DOGE.” This week, he praised the Musk team’s efforts to claw back $80 million that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had sent to New York City to cover some of the costs of housing migrants.

Kate Conger contributed reporting.

A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction saying that, until further notice, the Trump administration cannot freeze foreign aid spending that predates President Trump’s inauguration, nor fire nor suspend workers associated with those spending projects.

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The warm greetings also extended to Elon Musk, the constant Trump companion barreling through the federal government as the head of an initiative to reshape and cut down the federal government: The two had a meeting and photo op. Mr. Musk, the wealthiest man in the world, owns a number of companies, including Starlink, a high-speed internet service, that have sought to make an entry in India.

All the flattery concealed a number of tensions between the two nations, including on two of Mr. Trump’s signature issues, trade and immigration. Mr. Trump hinted at the biggest thorn when he said at the news conference that the United States had a nearly $100 billion trade deficit with India, though he inflated the number — in 2024, the figure was nearly $50 billion.

Just hours earlier, Mr. Trump had directed his advisers to devise new tariff levels for countries around the world that take into account a range of trade barriers and other economic approaches adopted by America’s trading partners. India is among the nations that could face particularly significant consequences from the tariffs.

At the news conference, Mr. Trump said that he had toyed with that idea during his first term, and noted that he could not get India to lower tariffs against the United States then. Now, “we’re just going to say, ‘whatever you charge, we charge,’” Mr. Trump said.

“I think that’s fair for the people of the United States,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think it’s actually fair for India.”

Despite the looming economic punishment, Mr. Modi opened his remarks by saying he was focusing on doubling bilateral trade to $500 billion by 2030 and “concluding very soon a mutually beneficial trade agreement” with the United States.

Mr. Modi also said that India and the United States would create a framework for defense cooperation for the next decade and added that the two countries would also collaborate to develop semiconductors, quantum technology and artificial intelligence.

Even on an issue that has infuriated some of his constituents in India, Mr. Modi sought to placate Mr. Trump. At one point, Mr. Modi was asked about a U.S. military plane filled with migrants from India that the United States sent to the Indian state of Punjab last week.

Video posted by a top U.S. border official showed migrants in shackles, and prompted outrage in India.

Mr. Modi made no acknowledgment of that. “We are of the opinion that anybody who enters another country illegally, they have absolutely no right to be in that country,” he said.

Earlier in the afternoon, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Modi in the Oval Office, joined by some of the president’s cabinet secretaries. The two leaders sat in chairs, fielding questions from reporters.

Mr. Modi and Mr. Trump have enjoyed a generally friendly relationship. Mr. Modi welcomed Mr. Trump with an enormous rally during a presidential visit to India during Mr. Trump’s first term.

Before Mr. Trump and Mr. Modi met, the Indian prime minister sat down with Mr. Musk.

Mr. Modi shared photos on Mr. Musk’s social media site, X, that underscored Mr. Musk’s power within the Trump administration: The billionaire sat in front of an American flag next to the prime minister and the Indian flag, the kind of pose usually struck by a head of state and that Mr. Trump himself has assumed in recent weeks. Mr. Musk was accompanied by Shivon Zilis, who is a longtime adviser and the mother to some of his children, as well as three of his children, who appeared to exchange gifts with Mr. Modi.

At the news conference, Mr. Modi said he had known Mr. Musk for some time.

It was Mr. Trump’s fourth visit from a foreign leader in rapid succession in the past few weeks, as he approaches foreign policy with an expansionist mind-set and a firm desire to push other countries to reimburse the United States for its military spending. He had already met with the leaders of Israel, Japan and Jordan.

Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s government plane en route to Munich turned around midflight because of “a mechanical issue,” the State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, said. The Air Force jet is returning to Joint Base Andrews just outside of Washington.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new health secretary who was confirmed earlier today, said in an interview on Fox News that President Trump had asked him to “study the safety signals” of abortion pills, something that Kennedy said “is worth doing.”

Trump distanced himself from a proposed federal ban on abortion during his campaign, but his advisers have previously recommended using the long-dormant Comstock Act to block the sale of abortion pills. Earlier today, a Texas judge ordered a provider of abortion pills to stop sending them to patients in Texas, in a case that is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court.

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What followed was a rapid series of exchanges between the lawyers and Mr. Trump’s administration that exploded this week into a confrontation between top Justice Department officials in Washington and New York prosecutors.

On Monday, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department sent a memo ordering prosecutors to dismiss the charges against the mayor. By Thursday, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, had resigned in protest over what she described as a quid pro quo between the Trump administration and the mayor of New York City. Five officials overseeing the Justice Department’s public integrity unit in Washington stepped down soon after.

The conflagration originated in the back-and-forth between Mr. Adams’s lawyers, Alex Spiro and William A. Burck, and the Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, exchanges which have not been previously reported.

The series of events — in which the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department seemed to guide criminal defense lawyers toward a rationale for dropping charges against a high-profile client — represents an extraordinary shattering of norms for an agency charged with enforcing the laws of the United States.

It also sends a message that, under the Trump administration, the Justice Department will make prosecutorial decisions based not on the merits of a case but on purely political concerns, longtime prosecutors and defense lawyers said.

Prompted by Mr. Bove, the mayor’s lawyers refined their approach until they landed on a highly unorthodox argument, records and interviews show — one that was ultimately reflected in Mr. Bove’s memo to prosecutors on Monday. That memo stated that the criminal case had “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability” to address illegal immigration and violent crime. It also pointedly said that the decision had nothing to do with the evidence or the law.

This account of what led to Mr. Bove’s memo and the internal resistance with which it was met is based on interviews with five people with direct knowledge of the matter, as well as documents related to the case against Mr. Adams.

There remain several unanswered questions about the lead-up to the extraordinary decision, including how many times Mr. Spiro and Mr. Bove interacted.

But the sudden push to dismiss the case against Mr. Adams came even as Manhattan prosecutors were preparing to move forward with more charges against him.

Just weeks before the order to drop the case, prosecutors had said in a court filing submitted on Jan. 6, during the presidential transition, that they had uncovered unspecified “additional criminal conduct by Adams.”

In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday, Ms. Sassoon said that prosecutors in her office had been prepared to seek a new indictment of the mayor, “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the F.B.I., and that would add further factual allegations regarding his participation in a fraudulent straw donor scheme.”

Mr. Spiro shot back in a public statement, saying that if the Manhattan prosecutors “had any proof whatsoever that the mayor destroyed evidence, they would have brought those charges — as they continually threatened to do, but didn’t, over months and months.”

But in private, far from a courtroom, the picture was different. Amid rumblings of potential new charges, Mr. Spiro, Mr. Burck and Mr. Bove appear to have structured what the defense lawyers likely hoped would be the end of the corruption case against Mr. Adams.

On Wednesday, the same day that the acting U.S. attorney was privately saying she would not comply with the Justice Department’s directive, Mr. Spiro held a news conference and repeatedly called the charges politically motivated, saying that the Justice Department’s dismissal order was the only legitimate conclusion it could have reached.

The directive from Mr. Bove was like a neon sign signaling that a connection within Mr. Trump’s orbit matters as much as the facts. Until recently, Mr. Bove was a criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump. Mr. Spiro also represents Elon Musk, a close adviser to Mr. Trump and the world’s richest man. And Mr. Burck recently became the outside ethics adviser to Mr. Trump’s company.

“The message is getting out that if you want to save yourself from prosecution, it’s best to find someone from Trumpworld,” said Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia University and former federal prosecutor in Manhattan. “Why is that bad? Generally, we like to think criminal prosecutions are resolved on the merits, not political intervention.”

The White House did not respond to several requests for comment. Officials at the Justice Department declined to engage with questions about the reporting.

Mr. Adams was indicted in September after a yearslong investigation. Manhattan prosecutors charged him with conspiracy, bribery and other crimes, saying that he had accepted more than $100,000 in flight upgrades and airline tickets; pressured the city’s Fire Department to sign off on the opening of a new high-rise Turkish consulate building despite safety concerns; and fraudulently obtained millions of dollars in public funds for his campaign.

The mayor pleaded not guilty. His informal efforts to win a pardon began shortly after Mr. Trump’s victory in the presidential election. The mayor sharpened his position on immigration, refused to say Vice President Kamala Harris’s name the day before the election, met with Mr. Trump near Mar-a-Lago and attended the inauguration.

The formal, legal effort to kill the case began immediately after Mr. Trump took office. Mr. Spiro sent a letter directly to the White House counsel, David Warrington, requesting a pretrial pardon from Mr. Trump. On his first day in office, Mr. Trump signed roughly 1,500 pardons, all prepared by Mr. Warrington, for people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.

The letter from Mr. Spiro appeared to be focused on appealing to Mr. Trump’s own grievances with how the Justice Department treated him. It echoed the president’s arguments about the federal cases against him. It said that Mayor Adams was the victim of a “weaponized” Justice Department and leaks to the news media, particularly to The New York Times. It also mounted a lengthy attack on the merits of the case.

“President Trump has made clear his desire to reform the Department of Justice so that it is an agency that once again seeks justice and truth above all else,” Mr. Spiro wrote. “This case is a prime example.”

Mr. Trump had said in December that he would consider pardoning the mayor. But in the days after the letter was sent, the White House had been silent on the matter.

Around that time, the acting deputy attorney general, Mr. Bove, who represented Mr. Trump in three of his criminal indictments, reached out to Mr. Spiro.

In one of the conversations, Mr. Bove said that he would like to know how the prosecution was affecting Mr. Adams’s ability to do his job. Mr. Bove also said he wanted to have a meeting in Washington with prosecutors and Mr. Spiro to discuss dismissing the case.

That meeting occurred on Jan. 31, 11 days after Mr. Trump was sworn in.

Mr. Spiro — a brash defense lawyer with a record of representing celebrity clients like Mr. Musk — had repeatedly angered prosecutors with his contentious style, outlandish claims and unsupported accusations that the authorities were leaking confidential grand jury evidence.

But he was accompanied at the meeting by Mr. Burck, who is known for having a softer touch and has become increasingly close to Mr. Trump, his aides and his political appointees. Along with his appointment last month as the outside ethics adviser to the Trump Organization, Mr. Burck helped lead the confirmation process of the Treasury secretary.

The meeting was attended by Ms. Sassoon and several of her deputies.

During the meeting, Mr. Bove signaled that the decision about whether to dismiss the case had nothing to do with its legal merits.

Instead, Mr. Bove said he was interested in whether the case was hindering Mr. Adams’s leadership, particularly with regard to the city’s ability to cooperate with the federal government on Mr. Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

Mr. Bove also said he was interested in whether the case, brought by the former U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, was a politically motivated prosecution meant to hurt Mr. Adams’s re-election prospects.

In her letter to Ms. Bondi, Ms. Sassoon said that she was “baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal.”

She also said that when she and other prosecutors attended the meeting, Mr. Adams’s lawyers “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed.” She said that Mr. Bove had chastised a member of her team for taking notes and directed that they be confiscated when the meeting ended.

Asked to respond, Mr. Spiro said, “The idea that there was a quid pro quo is a total lie. We offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us.

“We were asked if the case had any bearing on national security and immigration enforcement, and we truthfully answered it did,” he added.

Four days after the meeting, Mr. Adams’s team sent a letter to Mr. Bove at the Justice Department, this one signed by both Mr. Spiro and Mr. Burck. The letter showed the issues Mr. Bove was focused on.

“We wanted to address questions you have raised with respect to the indictment’s impact on Mayor Adams’s ability to lead New York City, including by working with the federal government on important issues of immigration enforcement and national security,” the letter said.

The letter went on to make a more refined argument about how the indictment was impinging on Mr. Adams’s role as mayor, while also attacking Mr. Williams for what it said was a politically motivated investigation.

The letter also said that trial preparation would unduly restrict Mr. Adams and that the trial itself would keep him stuck in court, potentially for more than a month. It said that Mr. Adams’s loss of a security clearance during the inquiry had hurt his ability to cooperate with federal authorities on important national security investigations.

And it asserted that Mr. Adams was aligned with the Trump administration on public safety and illegal immigration. If the prosecution proceeded, the letter said, Mr. Adams could not be an active partner to the Department of Homeland Security.

Despite those arguments — or perhaps in light of them — Mr. Bove’s directive to Manhattan federal prosecutors included an unusual footnote.

“The government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams’s assistance on immigration enforcement,” it said.

Mr. Spiro has asserted that the case against Mr. Adams, if dropped, will not be revived, but the Justice Department memo left open the possibility that it could be brought again. It said that Mr. Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney in Manhattan, who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, will review the case after the mayoral election in November.

Mr. Spiro insisted on Wednesday that the plan would not give the Trump administration leverage over Mr. Adams.

“This isn’t hanging over anybody’s head,” he said. “This case is over. I think everybody knows this case.”

The mayor met on Thursday with Mr. Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan.

Afterward, Mr. Adams announced he would issue an order allowing federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex.

Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.

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Judge Nichols said he would rule by the end of next week on whether to grant the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction that would indefinitely block key elements of the high-profile Trump administration effort.

The plan was driven in large part by Elon Musk, the billionaire tech entrepreneur tasked with making cuts to the federal budget, to shutter an agency he and Mr. Trump have vilified. The temporary restraining order applies to about 2,700 direct hires of U.S.A.I.D., including hundreds of Foreign Service officers, who would have been put on administrative leave under the directive, which also warned that contractors’ jobs could be terminated.

The lawsuit was filed by two unions representing the affected U.S.A.I.D. employees: the American Foreign Service Association, to which aid workers in global missions belong, and the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents other direct hires. They have argued that President Trump’s executive order freezing foreign aid for 90 days and subsequent directives to dismantle certain U.S.A.I.D. operations and reduce staff were unconstitutional, and have asked the court to overturn them.

Democratic lawmakers, U.S.A.I.D. workers, and the aid organizations that depend on U.S. foreign assistance have decried any moves to unilaterally shut down the agency as unlawful, as its role in the federal government was established by law and Congress funded it, like the rest of the government, through March 14.

During a hearing on Thursday, Judge Nichols pressed Karla Gilbride, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, on why being placed on administrative leave would cause irreparable harm to the employees.

He also asked Ms. Gilbride a series of questions about why the unions and the employees they represent had not first sought relief through established arbitration processes for the federal work force — an argument that the Justice Department had made in its responses to the lawsuit.

Ms. Gilbride said that if employees went through an arbitration process, there might not be a U.S.A.I.D. left to employ them by the time their cases were considered.

“This court is the only forum that can address these harms on the time scale that this urgent situation demands,” she said, noting that the administrative processes in question were designed to handle the grievances of individual employees, not an entire federal agency on the brink of dissolution.

Whether federal employee unions can experience the direct harm necessary to file a lawsuit — a concept known as standing — became an issue in another case against the Trump administration.

Unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, challenged an offer to pay federal workers through September if they agreed to resign. The judge in that case, George A. O’Toole of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, ruled on Wednesday that the unions did not have the standing to sue because they had not been directly affected by the offer.

Judge O’Toole also noted that Congress had established administrative processes for raising the type of claims at issue in the case.

Eric Hamilton, the Justice Department lawyer, made a similar argument about the U.S.A.I.D. employees on Thursday, pointing to the existence of administrative processes for settling labor disputes involving the federal work force.

“We certainly don’t think unions coming to district court is the right form to litigate,” he said.

But those administrative processes can take years, and Mr. Trump has also targeted some of them. On Monday, he fired the chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears appeals to firings and other disciplinary actions against federal employees.

Ms. Gilbride on Thursday made a series of arguments about the uncertainties and dangers facing workers stranded overseas and in bureaucratic limbo, some of whom submitted testimonials about being in physical danger and struggling to get security guidance because they were unable to access their accounts to receive official communications. These included several officers posted to the Democratic Republic of Congo, who described how they were left to determine whether and how to flee Kinshasa amid protests, as demonstrators approached their houses and, in one case, looted all of one officer’s belongings.

Ms. Gilbride said they and the rest of the U.S.A.I.D. Foreign Service officers had been “forced under extreme time pressure” to choose whether to uproot their families and return to the United States, with the understanding that the Trump administration would not extend relocation assistance to those who resisted departing on the U.S. government’s timeline.

Mr. Trump’s political appointees and Mr. Musk, labeled a “special government employee” by the White House, are aiming to cut most of the around $70 billion of annual foreign aid money that is allocated through congressional mandates and legislation. About $40 billion of that amount is funneled through U.S.A.I.D., accounting for less than 1 percent of the annual federal budget.

Mr. Hamilton defended planned cuts to the agency’s work force as falling within Mr. Trump’s purview. He acknowledged the unique safety risks employees in high-risk locations faced and assured Judge Nichols that the administration was taking steps to protect them.

“You can understand, I’m sure, why I would not want to be in the position of having government employees overseas be at risk because they are placed on administrative leave,” Judge Nichols said.

“We share the concern about the security of U.S.A.I.D. employees,” Mr. Hamilton said.

Pressed by the judge to detail those additional measures, Mr. Hamilton said he did not know what they were.

Judge Nichols instructed him to provide the court with details about the safety measures. He also asked Mr. Hamilton to give the court information about what the administrative leave status meant for other nonsalary benefits that come with an overseas employee’s post, such as diplomatic housing and school tuitions.

The government has said employees on administrative leave would continue to be paid, but U.S.A.I.D. Foreign Service officers expect that they would lose many of the additional benefits afforded to those who work globally if they are forced to return to the United States. For an officer without a home base in the United States, losing those benefits could force a dip into savings to keep a roof over their head.

It is also not clear how long employees put on administrative leave would remain on that status.

Lawyers for the Trump administration have said that officials had determined that only 611 of U.S.A.I.D.’s approximately 10,000 workers were too “essential” to be put on administrative leave or terminated, for now. They defended the drastic planned cuts by arguing in court documents that “the president’s powers in the realm of foreign affairs are vast and generally unreviewable.”

The lawsuit is one of several seeking to beat back the Trump administration’s efforts to severely restrict foreign aid, which has affected not just U.S.A.I.D.’s work force, but the global network of aid organizations that depend on the U.S. to carry out humanitarian, health and development programs.

Another suit pending before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, brought by a group of contractors and nongovernmental organizations who lost funding, asks the court to order the administration to restart disbursements of foreign aid funds and stop the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D.

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DOGE, which is not an official department but an entity housed within the executive office of the president, has already faced numerous legal challenges over its attempts to overhaul government agencies and cut spending. Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Musk’s team has inserted itself into at least 19 agencies, according to a tally by The New York Times.

The White House and representatives of Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The 14 states argued that Mr. Trump had violated the appointments clause of the Constitution by granting sweeping powers to Mr. Musk, who has “transformed a minor position that was formerly responsible for managing government websites into a designated agent of chaos without limitation,” according to the complaint, which was filed in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia.

“Mr. Musk’s seemingly limitless and unchecked power to strip the government of its work force and eliminate entire departments with the stroke of a pen or click of a mouse would have been shocking to those who won this country’s independence,” the complaint reads. “The sweeping authority now vested in a single unelected and unconfirmed individual is antithetical to the nation’s entire constitutional structure.”

The states also asserted that Mr. Musk’s actions could harm their residents by disrupting billions of dollars in federal funding for critical services like law enforcement, education and health care. They argued that, for instance, Mr. Musk’s desire to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could require states to invest far more resources and personnel to “protect their citizens.”

The suit was filed by the attorneys general in New Mexico, Arizona, Michigan, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Vermont.

The State Democracy Defenders Fund, which filed its lawsuit with the firm Marziani, Stevens & Gonzalez, also argued that Mr. Musk wielded an “extraordinary amount of power” and that his actions had violated the Constitution’s appointments clause.

The plaintiffs are seeking to prevent Mr. Musk and his team from continuing their work until Mr. Musk is “properly appointed,” according to the complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

Over the past three weeks, Mr. Musk’s team has helped effectively shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development; announced various cuts at the Education Department, totaling more than $900 million; and gained access to the Treasury Department’s payments system. Several attorneys general have filed a separate lawsuit challenging that access, and a federal judge on Saturday temporarily restricted it.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump further empowered Mr. Musk by signing an executive order giving his team more authority to shape the federal work force and approve the hirings of career officials in the future. White House officials have defended Mr. Musk’s actions, which they say are helping taxpayers by identifying wasteful and fraudulent spending.

“Our government has rules to protect the American people from executive overreach,” Norman Eisen, the executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund, said in a statement, adding: “We can and will achieve accountability through the courts.”

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If I were to say this, borrowing an expression from America, our vision for a developed India is to make India great again, or MIGA. When America and India work together, that is MAGA. When it’s MAGA plus MIGA, it becomes mega, a mega partnership for prosperity.

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In addition, the United States and India will be working together like never before to confront the threat of radical Islamic terrorism, a threat all over the world, actually. Today, I’m pleased to announce that my administration has approved the extradition of one of the plotters and one of the very evil people of the world, and having to do with the horrific 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack, to face justice in India. So he’s going to be going back to India to face justice.

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A hearing on two related lawsuits was held in U.S. District Court in Boston last week before Judge Leo T. Sorokin, who was appointed by President Barack Obama. Judge Sorokin granted the injunction on Thursday; it is effective immediately, and nationwide in scope.

“First, allegiance in the United States arises from the fact of birth,” Judge Sorokin wrote in his decision. “It does not depend on the status of a child’s parents, nor must it be exclusive, as the defendants contend. Applying the defendants’ view of allegiance would mean children of dual citizens and lawful permanent residents would not be birthright citizens — a result even the defendants do not support.”

One of the lawsuits filed in Boston was brought by 18 states, the District of Columbia and the City of San Francisco. The other was filed on behalf of an expectant mother by Lawyers for Civil Rights, a legal activist group based in Boston.

The Trump administration’s crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration has prompted at least 10 lawsuits, with seven of them challenging the executive order on birthright citizenship.

The order, among the first issued by President Trump after he took office last month, would have affected children born after Feb. 19 in the United States to undocumented parents.

Mirian Albert, senior attorney for Lawyers for Civil Rights, said in a statement that the ruling on Thursday provided “protection for vulnerable communities and restores a sense of order and justice.”

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“It is outrageous,” said Erik Bottcher, the city councilman who represents the Greenwich Village neighborhood that is home to the monument. “This is the latest attempt to erase the very existence of transgender people.”

He added: “The rebellion at Stonewall would not have happened without trans people. To attempt to erase their existence is utterly shameful.”

Dr. Carla Smith, the chief executive of the L.G.B.T. Community Center, said in a statement that the website changes were “factually inaccurate” and “an affront to our entire community,” and she urged the Park Service to “immediately restore accurate and inclusive language.”

The Stonewall Inn, a tavern on Christopher Street, has been considered a cradle of gay rights activism since a police raid there in 1969 touched off three days of protests that helped galvanize a long-marginalized population into a force for political and social change.

The 7.7-acre national monument — which includes the bar, Christopher Park across the street, and several other nearby streets and sidewalks — was established under President Barack Obama in 2016.

On Wednesday, according to a version of the Park Service website saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the introductory text on the monument’s main page said: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.”

By Thursday afternoon, the word “transgender” and the letter T in the abbreviation had been removed from the page. By Thursday evening, the word “queer” and “Q+” had also been removed from the website.

A Park Service ranger at the monument’s visitor center said on Thursday afternoon that she had not been informed about the changes to the website and had just noticed that the “T” was missing. She declined to provide her name and would not comment further.

The Park Service’s public affairs department said the agency took the actions to implement an executive order signed by President Trump, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” and a second order signed by the former acting secretary of the interior.

In addition to being part of the national monument, the Stonewall Inn is a New York State historic site. A plaque on the facade of the building identifies it as a place associated with “monumental change for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer” Americans.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, in a statement posted online, condemned the changes to the monument website as “cruel and petty.”

“Transgender people play a critical role in the fight for L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, and New York will never allow their contributions to be erased,” she said.

The website changes included the virtual elimination of a page listing interpretive flags associated with the L.G.B.T.Q. movement, including the pink, blue and white one representing transgender people, and the times when the flags typically fly in Christopher Park.

On Thursday, the transgender pride flag still waved over the park.

Randy Wicker, an L.G.B.T. activist since 1958, was close to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two transgender women who are widely seen as mothers of the movement and as pivotal figures in the Stonewall uprising. The scrubbing of the monument website left him aghast.

“It’s frightening what is happening, the extent of it and the venom of it,” Mr. Wicker, 87, said, adding that “the idea that they would try to take transgender people out of the Stonewall National Monument — you can’t just erase history.”

Raquel Willis, a founder of the Gender Liberation Movement, a trans activist group, echoed that sentiment.

“The Stonewall riots happened because trans people, particularly of color, rose up against state violence,” she said. “You can’t tell the story without us.”

The changes to the monument website followed a series of other moves by the Trump administration to strip transgender people of federal recognition, including by altering other government websites. The effort began with an executive order Mr. Trump signed on his first day in office that was described as “restoring biological truth to the federal government.”

The measures have included moving to bar transgender people from identifying as they choose on documents like passports; imposing a national restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths; investigating schools with gender-neutral bathrooms; criminalizing teacher support for transgender students; and commanding federal prison officials to force an estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men.

Stacy Lentz, an owner of the Stonewall Inn and the chief executive of the nonprofit Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative, said she had learned about the website changes Thursday morning.

“I want to say that I’m shocked, but I am not shocked,” she said.

Still, it was almost incomprehensible to her that the anti-trans campaign had arrived at Stonewall.

“Coming into our home, into our place, and trying to erase folks who are instrumental to this movement is insanity,” she said.

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The order is not a final decision on the legal issues but presents a setback for the Trump administration — and a second legal roadblock to Mr. Trump’s broad effort to prohibit the government and taxpayer-funded institutions from recognizing transgender Americans according to their gender identities. Earlier this month, another federal judge blocked Mr. Trump’s directive to withhold gender-transition medical treatment for federal prisoners and to house transgender women inmates with men.

“The goal is protection,” the judge, an appointee of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said. “But this seems to put these children at extreme risk.”

Judge Hurson said that it seemed likely that the plaintiffs would prevail in their argument that the specific provisions of Mr. Trump’s efforts exceed his authority by directing the federal agencies to withhold funds appropriated by Congress. The judge added that the plaintiffs have “unassailable documentation” that they are suffering irreparable harm, “beyond the violation of the separation of powers.”

Plaintiffs in the case, who live in Maryland, New York and Massachusetts, say that their access to gender-transition treatment is threatened by two executive orders that Mr. Trump announced after his inauguration last month.

One order directs federal agencies to ensure that grant funding for research or education does not support “gender ideology,” which it defines as the idea that “males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.” The second order specifically directs agencies to withhold funds from medical providers that offer puberty blockers, hormone therapies and surgeries to people younger than 19 for the purpose of gender transition. After Mr. Trump issued that order, the lawsuit says, several clinics canceled appointments. The plaintiffs noted a White House news release from earlier this month, which stated that the order is “already having its intended effect,” and cited several announcements from hospitals.

The order, titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” states that the goal is to protect young people from long-term effects that may cause them to regret undergoing the treatments. But on Thursday, Judge Hurson said that stopping patients’ care abruptly “really casts doubt of whether, in fact, the goals are to protect the recipients of care.”

The lawsuit names as defendants officials at the Department of Health and Human Services and several agencies that provide medical research and education grants, including the National Institutes of Health, the Health Resources and Services Administration and the National Science Foundation. The individual plaintiffs are not named in court filings, and they are described using pseudonyms.

In court documents, plaintiffs and their families said they feared negative effects, including anxiety, depression and unwanted physical changes, if treatment were withheld. A 14-year-old who lives in Maryland, known in the lawsuit as Gabe Goe, had planned to start hormone therapy in late January, court documents say, but his provider told him that it had paused gender-transition treatment for patients younger than 19.

Withholding the funds, the plaintiffs argue, violates equal protection guarantees and conflicts with federal protections against sex discrimination in the Affordable Care Act and other statutes. Four parents of transgender minors who are also plaintiffs in the case say that Mr. Trump’s orders violate due process rights under the Fifth Amendment when it comes to their decisions on medical care for their children. Two other plaintiffs — a national L.G.B.T.Q. rights group called PFLAG and G.L.M.A., an L.G.B.T.Q. medical association — sued on behalf of their members.

The government argued that the lawsuit was premature because the agencies named as defendants had not yet carried out Mr. Trump’s order. The government also argued that its interest in protecting young people from the regret that some people experience after transitioning was sufficient grounds to enact Mr. Trump’s policies. Little research exists on how often that regret happens or why. Over the last several years, a group of individuals who have “detransitioned” have testified in favor of Republican-led state bans on gender medicine for minors.

In a series of executive orders targeting transgender Americans, Mr. Trump has sought to withhold federal funds from schools that allow trans girls and women to play on girls’ and women’s sports teams; to bar trans people from serving in the military; and to prevent trans people from designating their gender identities on passports.

The topic of when treatments like puberty blockers, hormone therapies or surgery are appropriate for young people who want their bodies to better reflect their internal sense of gender has been hotly debated. Several European countries have limited the treatments after scientific reviews and, since 2021, 24 states in this country have barred minors from receiving the treatments.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has said it is conducting its own review. But the academy and most major medical groups in the United States continue to endorse them as effective in relieving the psychological distress many transgender youths experience as a result of the incongruence between their sex and their gender identities. Before Thursday’s hearing, about 50 people gathered outside the courthouse holding signs that said, “Protect Trans Youth.”

In his order on youth gender medicine, Mr. Trump used terms like “maiming,” “mutilation” and “chemical castration” to describe the treatments. Judge Hurson raised a question of whether Mr. Trump’s orders were motivated by “animus,” which could factor into the arguments over the orders’ constitutionality. The same question was raised earlier this month by another federal judge, in a case challenging Mr. Trump’s order that authorizes a ban on trans people serving in the military.

The language Mr. Trump used “seems to deny that this population exists, or even has the right to exist, and I’m struggling with how that can’t be animus,’’ Judge Hurson said.

A second federal lawsuit challenging Mr. Trump’s orders on gender-transition care was filed last week in Seattle by the state attorneys general of Washington, Oregon and Minnesota. A hearing in that case is scheduled for Friday.

Judge Hurson said that his order would be in effect for 14 days but might be extended. He directed the government to provide the court with written notice of its compliance by Feb. 20.