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Vince Hall, chief of government relations for Feeding America, a nationwide network of over 60,000 food pantries and other distributors, said that when he asked U.S.D.A. officials about the suspended shipments, he was told that the department was reviewing the food aid programs funded through the Commodity Credit Corporation.

It was unclear whether the review was related to the activities of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, which has sought to curtail spending across the government.

The halt to the funds, which was first reported by Politico, comes in addition to other recent cuts to federal food assistance. Earlier this month, the Agriculture Department halted two other programs that distributed food to banks and schools. Lawmakers are also mulling cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, which were used by about 42 million people in the 2023 fiscal year.

Food bank directors fear that an across-the-board contraction to federal food assistance could drive more people to food banks just as they are losing access to critical supplementary funds.

“This is perhaps the first moment in the history of food banking that we have seen record low unemployment and record high demand at food banks,” Mr. Hall said. “Any circumstance that would cause even a modest increase in demand at food distributions will result in a food crisis.”

Representatives of the Agriculture Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Hall said that Feeding America had struggled to get clear guidance from U.S.D.A. about how long the review will take, and whether the funds would ever be restored. Food banks have been left with little time to identify new funds and supplies, and with no assurance that the aid would ever be restored.

In the meantime, Mr. Hall added, rural communities would most likely feel the deepest immediate impact. Emergency food assistance programs, including those funded through the Commodity Credit Corporation, are “the food lifeline for rural America,” he explained, because they come with funding to improve food storage and distribution, which can be more challenging in rural areas.

The direct impact to communities across the country is likely to vary by state.

“It’s really hard to make up that volume that C.C.C. had been providing, especially at a time when the need is so great,” said Danny Faccinetti, vice president of Oregon Food Bank, which is expecting to lose access to 30 truckloads of food under the freeze.

Oregon’s food banks reported a 31 percent increase in use of their services in the 2024 fiscal year, which ended in June, compared with the year before. In late 2024, the funds in question made up 18 percent of all food aid they had distributed.

“It’s going to be a really, really big hit for certain areas,” Mr. Faccinetti continued, adding: “We’re already maximizing some of the donations that were available to us, so it would be difficult to make that up.”

In Maryland, food bank officials were notified that the U.S.D.A.’s freeze would deprive them of 12 truckloads of items like chicken, eggs, collard greens and blueberries. They are expecting to have four additional shipments frozen as well, for a total of almost $1.3 million in lost goods. But they seem relatively certain they will be able to weather the immediate impact of that cut without having to shortchange the approximately one million people who rely on their distribution centers.

In nearby Virginia, however, Eddie Oliver, the executive director of the Federation of Virginia Food Banks, said one food bank lost a scheduled shipment of seven loads of food, accounting for about a third of what the food bank was expecting this year through the Emergency Food Assistance Program.

“It’s going to be hard for us to replace that,” he said, noting the current economic climate. “Collectively, Virginia food banks are spending five times more money on food than we did in 2019, both because of higher food prices and greater demand at our pantries.”

Cynthia D. Kirkhart, the chief executive of Facing Hunger food bank, which manages about 250 pantries in West Virginia, put the losses her state is facing in more quantifiable terms.

“One thousand fifty cases of cheese; boned chicken by the can, 600 cases; fresh milk, 1,200 cases — all that stuff’s not coming,” she said.

In New Mexico, food bank officials are also doing some fast calculations in order to weather the unexpected suspension of federal assistance.

Food bank administrators there are bracing for missing 24 truckloads of food, including milk, cheese, cranberries and meats, that they had expected to receive between April and June. Officials are contemplating canceling contracts for future food purchases in order to free up funds needed immediately, according to Sonya Warwick, the communications director for Roadrunner Food Bank, part of the Feeding America network.

New Mexico’s network of food pantries includes several rural areas that are experiencing significant food insecurity, Ms. Warwick said, citing places like McKinley County, which includes tribal land and has a large Native American population, and where more than 30 percent of children are at risk of hunger.

While the state has allocated some extra funds for food aid, it is not enough to meet the growing need amid dwindling resources, Ms. Warwick added.

“None of us have crystal balls, but what we can do is encourage the community to get involved and get engaged,” she said.

If they cannot find resources through private donors, some food banks worry that they may need to cut back on the assistance they can offer the needy.

“Essentially, we had anticipated receiving many truckloads of U.S.D.A. food over the next few months,” said Cathy Kanefsky, the president and chief executive officer of the Food Bank of Delaware.

“Now it’s uncertain whether we will receive this food, meaning less meals we can provide to our neighbors,” she said, adding: “The effect on our neighbors could be devastating.”

Campbell Robertson, Chris Cameron and Linda Qiu contributed reporting from Washington.

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Hours after news of the planned meeting was published by The New York Times, Pentagon officials and President Trump denied that the session would be about military plans involving China. “China will not even be mentioned or discussed,” Mr. Trump said in a late-night social media post.

It was not clear if the briefing for Mr. Musk would go ahead as originally planned. But providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to Mr. Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.

It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.

Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country were to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.

The top-secret briefing that exists for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.

A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment about the purpose of the visit, how it came about, whether Mr. Trump was aware of it, and whether the visit raises questions of conflicts of interest. The White House has not said whether Mr. Trump signed a conflicts of interest waiver for Mr. Musk.

The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, initially did not respond to a similar email seeking comment about why Mr. Musk was to receive a briefing on the China war plan. Soon after The Times published this article on Thursday evening, Mr. Parnell gave a short statement: “The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting.”

About an hour later, Mr. Parnell posted a message on his X account: “This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also commented on X late on Thursday, saying: “This is NOT a meeting about ‘top secret China war plans.’ It’s an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!”

Roughly 30 minutes after that social media post, The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Mr. Musk had been scheduled to be briefed on the war planning for China.

Whatever the meeting will now be about, the planning reflected the extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the world’s wealthiest man and has been given broad authority by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Musk has a security clearance, and Mr. Hegseth can determine who has a need to know about the plan.

Mr. Hegseth; Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military’s Indo-Pacific Command, were set to present Mr. Musk with details on the U.S. plan to counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the officials said.

The meeting had been set to be held not in Mr. Hegseth’s office — where an informal discussion about innovation would most likely take place — but in the Tank, a secure conference room in the Pentagon, typically used for high-level meetings of members of the Joint Chiefs, their senior staff and visiting combatant commanders.

Operational plans for major contingencies, like a war with China, are extremely difficult for people without extensive military planning experience to understand. The technical nature is why presidents are typically presented with the broad contours of a plan, rather than the actual details of documents. How many details Mr. Musk had wanted or expected to hear was unclear.

Mr. Hegseth received part of the China war plan briefing last week and another part on Wednesday, according to officials familiar with the plan.

It was unclear what the impetus was for providing Mr. Musk such a sensitive briefing. He is not in the military chain of command, nor is he an official adviser to Mr. Trump on military matters involving China.

But there is a possible reason Mr. Musk might have needed to know aspects of the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his team of cost cutters from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, want to trim the Pentagon budget in a responsible way, they may need to know what weapons systems the Pentagon plans to use in a fight with China.

Take aircraft carriers, for example. Cutting back on future aircraft carriers would save billions of dollars, money that could be spent on drones or other weaponry. But if the U.S. war strategy relies on using aircraft carriers in innovative ways that would surprise China, mothballing existing ships or stopping production on future ships could cripple that plan.

Planning for a war with China has dominated Pentagon thinking for decades, well before a possible confrontation with Beijing became more conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill. The United States has built its Air Forces, Navy and Space Forces — and even more recently its Marines and Army forces — with a possible fight against China in mind.

Critics have said the military has invested too much in big expensive systems like fighter jets or aircraft carriers and too little in midrange drones and coastal defenses. But for Mr. Musk to evaluate how to reorient Pentagon spending, he would want to know what the military intends to use and for what purpose.

Mr. Musk has already called for the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-priced items like F-35 fighter jets, manufactured by one of his space-launch competitors, Lockheed Martin, in a program that costs the Pentagon more than $12 billion a year.

Yet Mr. Musk’s extensive business interests make any access to strategic secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts. Officials have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading the plans for defending against space warfare. China has developed a suite of weapons that can attack U.S. satellites.

Mr. Musk’s constellations of low-earth orbit Starlink satellites, which provide data and communications services from space, are considered more resilient than traditional satellites. But he could have an interest in learning about whether or not the United States could defend his satellites in a war with China.

Participating in a classified briefing on the China threat with some of the most senior Pentagon and U.S. military officials would be a tremendously valuable opportunity for any defense contractor seeking to sell services to the military.

Mr. Musk could gain insight into new tools that the Pentagon might need and that SpaceX, where he remains the chief executive, could sell.

Contractors working on relevant Pentagon projects generally do have access to certain limited war planning documents, but only once war plans are approved, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on defense strategy. Individual executives rarely if ever get exclusive access to top Pentagon officials for such a sensitive briefing, Mr. Harrison said.

“Musk at a war-planning briefing?” he said. “Giving the CEO of one defense company unique access seems like this could be grounds for a contract protest and is a real conflict of interest.”

Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is already being paid billions of dollars by the Pentagon and federal spy agencies to help the United States build new military satellite networks to try to confront rising military threats from China. SpaceX launches most of these military satellites for the Pentagon on its Falcon 9 rockets, which take off from launchpads SpaceX has set up at military bases in Florida and California.

The company separately has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the Pentagon that now relies heavily on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications network for military personnel to transmit data worldwide.

In 2024, SpaceX was granted about $1.6 billion in Air Force contracts. That does not include classified spending with SpaceX by the National Reconnaissance Office, which has hired the company to build it a new constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to spy on China, Russia and other threats.

Mr. Trump has already proposed that the United States build a new system the military is calling Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that recalls what President Ronald Reagan tried to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system Mr. Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)

Perceived missile threats from China — be it nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles or cruise missiles — are a major factor that led Mr. Trump to sign an executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to start work on Golden Dome.

Even starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens of billions of dollars, according to Pentagon officials, and most likely create large business opportunities for SpaceX, which already provides rocket launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communications systems, all of which will be required for Golden Dome.

Separately, Mr. Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret security clearance.

The investigations started last year after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Mr. Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.

Air Force officials, before the end of the Biden administration, started their own review, after Senate Democrats asked questions about Mr. Musk and asserted that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.

The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr. Musk for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Program, which is reserved for extremely sensitive classified programs, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.

In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the U.S. military.

“Starlink Militarization and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability” was the headline of one publication released last year from China’s National University of Defense Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mr. Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant on China, which houses one of the auto maker’s flagship factories in Shanghai. Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries. Last year, the company said in financial filings that it had a $2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.

In public, Mr. Musk has avoided criticizing Beijing and signaled his willingness to work with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022, he wrote a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.

That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a “special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable,” an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.

The following year at a tech conference, Mr. Musk called the democratic island “an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China,” and compared the Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the United States.

On X, the social platform he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to praise China. He has said the country is “by far” the world leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space program for being “far more advanced than people realize.” He has encouraged more people to visit the country, and posited openly about an “inevitable” Russia-China alliance.

Aaron Kessler contributed reporting.

Linda McMahon, the education secretary who has been tasked with dismantling her own department, said in an interview on Fox News that she would work to persuade lawmakers to sign off on President Trump’s plan, knowing that the agency can only be eliminated with approval of Congress.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, McMahon also said that many details of the planned shutdown had not been finalized. For example, it is unclear what would happen to the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates allegations of racial discrimination and antisemitism. Recent mass firings at the Department of Education had already gutted the Office of Civil Rights.

“The executive order did not specify what happens with any of the departments within Education,” McMahon said. “So we are looking at where best those those departments can be located.”

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It’s unclear how the money will be used to help the task force. The firm, Mr. Trump said, also agreed to conduct an audit to ensure its hiring practices are merit based “and will not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies.”

The deal materialized after the head of the firm, Brad Karp, went to the White House this week and had a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Trump to discuss a resolution. Members of the legal profession said in interviews that they were surprised by the deal, as it appears as if the firm — which is dominated by Democrats and has long prided itself in being at the forefront of the fight against the government for civil rights — was capitulating to Mr. Trump over an executive order that is likely illegal.

The agreement is a significant development in the retribution campaign Mr. Trump has opened against several top law firms that he sees as having supported efforts to help his opponents or unfairly prosecute him. And it is the latest demonstration of how Mr. Trump has used his power to extract concessions or public signs of support for his agenda from corporate leaders, news organizations and others since his election victory in November.

The White House said that Mr. Karp had acknowledged “wrongdoing” by one of the firm’s former partners, Mark F. Pomerantz. Mr. Pomerantz had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago while working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. It was not clear what wrongdoing Mr. Trump was referring to.

“The president is agreeing to this action in light of a meeting with Paul, Weiss Chairman, Brad Karp, during which Mr. Karp acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul, Weiss partner, Mark Pomerantz, the grave dangers of Weaponization, and the vital need to restore our System of Justice.”

In a statement, Mr. Pomerantz denied he had done anything wrong.

“I engaged in no wrongdoing by working as a prosecutor to uphold the rule of law,” Mr. Pomerantz said on Thursday evening.

Along with Mr. Pomerantz’s status as a former partner, the firm represented him as recently as 2023 in connection with efforts by congressional Republicans to question him as they sought to undermine charges brought against Mr. Trump by prosecutors in Manhattan.

Thursday’s deal applies only to the executive order against Paul, Weiss. It’s not clear what effect, if any, it will have on the orders targeting other firms or whether it will lead Mr. Trump to back off his stated intention to go after more of them.

Among the many accusations Mr. Trump and his allies have leveled at big law firms, like Paul, Weiss, is that they refused to represent conservative defendants like Mr. Trump because of their politics. In the meeting, Mr. Karp said that his firm — which has done legal work for Trump allies like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox — would represent clients no matter their political affiliations.

The firm has long prided itself on breaking barriers and standing up to the government on issues like civil rights. Its website trumpets how it was the first major New York City firm to have Jewish lawyers working alongside Gentiles, to hire a Black associate and to have a female partner.

Throughout the legal community, the firm is well known for having a stable of Democratic-leaning partners and has prominent former Obama administration officials in its ranks. Mr. Karp helped host a “Lawyers for Biden” fund-raiser for President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s re-election campaign in 2023 and one of its top lawyers oversaw then-Vice President Kamala Harris’s preparation for her debates with Mr. Trump.

As part of the agreement, the firm committed to working with the Trump administration on helping veterans, combating antisemitism, and on fairness in the justice system. In a statement posted on social media by Mr. Trump, Mr. Karp said he is looking forward “to an engaged and constructive relationship with the president and his administration.”

The deal on Thursday follows a series of moves by companies that found themselves at odds with Mr. Trump.

This year, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit Mr. Trump filed in 2021 over the suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. In that case, most of the money went to Mr. Trump’s future presidential library.

ABC News agreed in December to to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit Mr. Trump brought, with the money also going to his presidential library fund.

Mr. Trump’s executive orders targeting top law firms introduced a new element to his retribution campaign. They have raised deep concerns among legal experts and threatened to pose serious financial problems for the firms, creating a chilling effect that has deterred them from taking on clients at odds with the Trump administration.

The first order targeted Covington & Burling, a large firm that had done legal work for Jack Smith, who as special counsel during the Biden administration had brought two federal indictments against Mr. Trump.

Last week, a federal judge in Washington ruled that a subsequent executive order Mr. Trump signed targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, which is also aligned with Democrats, was likely unconstitutional and issued a restraining order halting it.

But two days later, Mr. Trump signed a nearly identical executive order against Paul, Weiss. Mr. Trump said he was taking the action to punish the firm for its ties to a lawyer who had pushed for him to be indicted and another who had brought a lawsuit against Jan. 6 rioters. The order barred the firm’s lawyers from dealing with the federal government and raised the possibility that its clients would lose their government contracts.

Over the weekend, the leaders of the top law firms in New York and Washington were in constant contact as they tried to figure out how to respond. A range of possibilities were discussed. Amid those discussions, Paul, Weiss reached out to Bill Burck, the co-managing partner of the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP, to represent it.

Quinn Emanuel, one of the few large law firms that has done work for Mr. Trump’s company and top officials in his administration, prepared to represent Paul, Weiss in bringing a suit against the president. At the same time, Mr. Burck engaged in discussions with the White House to potentially broker a deal between Mr. Karp and Mr. Trump. On Wednesday, Mr. Karp and Mr. Trump met in the Oval Office to discuss the framework for an agreement.

In the day that followed, White House aides and Mr. Karp finalized the terms of the agreement.

According to two people familiar with the matter, the White House and Mr. Karp had reached an agreement on the wording of the statement. But despite that agreement, the wording of the statement changed, including a reference to the fact that the firm would “not adopt, use, or pursue any DEI policies.”

A spokesperson for Paul, Weiss did not respond to a message seeking comment on how the statement changed and Mr. Trump’s statement about how Mr. Karp had criticized Mr. Pomerantz.

Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting from New York.

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This claim is far from true.

While it is true that reading scores for 13-year-olds are about the same as they were in the 1970s and math scores are only slightly better, this is because of recent, sharp declines that accelerated during the pandemic.

For most of the last half-century, American student achievement had been steadily climbing. This is best seen in long-term national data testing of 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds, which tracks performance over time.

From the 1970s to the early 2010s, students made particularly strong progress in math, which many experts believe is more influenced by what happens at school. Reading, which can be more influenced by students’ home lives, saw smaller gains.

By 2012, the share of 13-year-olds who could do complex math problems had nearly doubled to 34 percent, up from 18 percent in 1978. Students at this level can find averages, compute with fractions and solve the area of a rectangle.

There are a number of factors that experts say helped boost student achievement during this time frame, including the racial integration of public schools, which peaked in 1988. During the 2000s, a push for school accountability during the No Child Left Behind era also coincided with a rise in test scores.

The White House release also noted that school spending has also increased significantly. (Only about 10 percent of funding for K-12 schools comes from the federal government.)

There are intense debates about whether spending more money on schools helps achievement. But a wide body of research has shown that increases in money spent per pupil is associated with test score gains and increases in going to college. It matters how money is spent, however. Investments in low-income students and teacher quality are associated with greater improvements.

In arguing that education reform is needed, President Trump pointed out that United States is not a top performer internationally. This is true.

The United States routinely underperforms peer countries in math, though it does slightly better in reading.

While there are many reasons for that, one problem is the wide variety in both funding and outcomes seen across different states and districts.

Mr. Trump’s vision would further empower states, which could lead to even more variation. On Thursday, he vowed that states like Texas, Florida and Iowa would have “education that will be as good as Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, those top countries,” while other states, he said, would be “laggards” that his administration would seek to help.

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While Judge Hollander blocked Social Security’s top officials — Leland Dudek and Michael Russo — and the agency’s employees from granting Mr. Musk’s team of engineers entry to their systems, her order focused only on documents, such as tax records, that would allow Mr. Musk’s team to analyze people at an individual level. The order stated that the agency could provide Mr. Musk’s team with redacted or anonymized data that facilitated broader analysis without running afoul of federal privacy laws.

In other lawsuits challenging Mr. Musk’s aggressive incursions into the Treasury and Education Departments, judges have issued similar orders barring officials there from handing over sensitive data. As President Trump has escalated efforts to deport students and other foreign nationals, including some with valid visas, lawyers have argued that agencies’ data systems could be used to aid a broader immigration crackdown.

In sworn statements, Treasury officials have insisted that they have not given sensitive tax data stored in their systems to the Department of Homeland Security.

As in other cases, lawyers for the government had argued that the risks of data being improperly disclosed were still speculative, since the groups that filed the suits had not shown clear evidence that Mr. Musk’s team’s access to Social Security data had led to identity theft or political retaliation. The lawyers also argued that letting Mr. Musk’s team audit the agency’s books did not amount to an unlawful “disclosure,” such as a leak that could result in identity theft.

But Judge Hollander said in a 137-page opinion accompanying the order that the intrusion into Social Security data was concerning enough to justify the two-week restraining order while the lawsuit continued. She said that retirees, when submitting their bank information and other financial data to the agency to receive common benefits, had a reasonable expectation that their records would not be used to inform a governmentwide effort to slash spending.

“The unrestricted access to PII that SSA provided to the DOGE Team, without specified need, and/or without adequate training, detail agreements, and/or background investigations of all DOGE Team members,” she wrote, using abbreviations for personally identifiable information and the Social Security Administration, “would be highly offensive to an objectively reasonable person.”

She added: “The expectation of privacy shared by plaintiffs’ members is objectively reasonable. It is almost self-evident that, in our society, PII, such as SSNs, medical information, and certain financial records, are regarded as private, sensitive, and confidential information.”

Judge Hollander’s order came roughly a month after a coalition of labor unions sued to stop Mr. Musk, who has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, from targeting the agency’s data. Mr. Musk has also backed cuts to the agency’s call centers, and other changes that critics have warned could make customer support less accessible, and even make it easier for fraudsters to impersonate Social Security beneficiaries.

The order will expire in 14 days. Judge Hollander asked both sides to file motions by March 27 so she can schedule the next steps, such as extending the injunction that would keep Mr. Musk’s team barred from accessing the databases.

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The disclosure calls into question the credibility of Mr. Trump’s basis for invoking a rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to transfer a group of Venezuelans to a high-security prison in El Salvador last weekend, with no due process.

The intelligence community assessment concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders, according to the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Analysts put that conclusion at a “moderate” confidence level, the officials said, because of a limited volume of available reporting about the gang. Most of the intelligence community, including the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, agreed with that assessment.

Only one agency, the F.B.I., partly dissented. It maintained the gang has a connection to the administration of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, based on information the other agencies did not find credible.

“Multiple intelligence assessments are prepared on issues for a variety of reasons,” the White House said in a statement. “The president was well within his legal and constitutional authority to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to expel illegal foreign terrorists from our country.”

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s extraordinary use of wartime powers to advance his immigration crackdown has edged the administration closer to a constitutional clash with the judiciary. A judge in Washington is considering whether the administration violated his order blocking, for now, the expulsion of migrants under the law. The Justice Department denounced the order as infringing on Mr. Trump’s national security powers and asked an appeals court to overturn it.

The Alien Enemies Act empowers the executive branch to summarily remove foreign citizens whose government is in a declared war with the United States or is otherwise invading or engaged in a “predatory incursion” into American territory. The government last used the law in the internment and repatriation of Japanese, Italian and German citizens during and after World War II.

On its face, the law appears to require not just an invasion or incursion, but a link to the actions of a foreign government.

In his proclamation, Mr. Trump effectively summoned such a link into legal existence by saying that he had determined that Tren de Aragua was a proxy for the Venezuelan government and committing crimes in the United States at its direction because Mr. Maduro sought to destabilize the country.

“I make these findings using the full extent of my authority to conduct the nation’s foreign affairs under the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said.

But Mr. Trump’s key factual assertions contradicted the earlier intelligence assessment, the officials said. It concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Maduro administration and that the two are instead hostile to each other, citing incidents in which Venezuelan security forces exchanged gunfire with gang members.

Because available information in the world of intelligence is often imperfect or incomplete, analysts assign levels of confidence to factual assertions and conclusions. Such caveats indicate that even if most or all the currently available evidence points in one direction, it remains possible that something else might turn up that would change their minds.

The overall conclusion was put at “moderate” confidence, and some supporting points put at “low” confidence, the officials said, because there was not as much reporting as analysts typically want to have “high” confidence. The United States has long scrutinized the government of Venezuela, but only recently has it begun to focus on Tren de Aragua, they said.

The assessment, according to one official, also portrayed the gang as lacking the resources and being too disorganized — with little in the way of any centralized command-and-control — to be able to carry out any government orders. And, the official said, the assessment says that while a handful of corrupt Venezuelan officials have ties to gang members, that does not amount to the gang’s being under the sway of the government as a whole.

The assessment, this official also said, asserts that when the State Department designated the gang as a foreign terrorist organization last month at Mr. Trump’s direction, a minister in the Maduro administration publicly praised the action. (The administration’s move broke with the practice of limiting “terrorism” designations to organizations that are clearly ideologically motivated.)

Federal courts typically defer to the executive branch’s factual declarations about what is happening and why, rather than probing for what may actually be going on. That is particularly the case in matters of national security and foreign policy.

But such deference is premised on the idea that officials are making determinations in good faith and drawing on executive branch resources like intelligence agencies to evaluate fast-moving and sometimes dangerous situations. Mr. Trump’s pattern of distorting the truth is testing that practice.

The administration’s insistence that all the men it sent to El Salvador are members of Tren de Aragua has also been challenged. In one court filing, an official acknowledged that many have no criminal records but said the dearth of details only underscored that “they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

Lawyers for some of the migrants have collected statements from family members and others denying involvement in the gang. A lawyer for one detainee, for example, identified her client as a soccer player who had been tortured for participating in anti-Maduro protests and so fled to the United States to request asylum.

The lawyer said U.S. officials accused him of being a Tren de Aragua member based on a tattoo and on a hand gesture he made in a picture on social media. But, she said, the tattoo was a version of a soccer team logo, and the hand gesture was a common “rock ’n’ roll” symbol.

Mr. Trump’s proclamation cited scant evidence for his core finding that Tren de Aragua as an organization has been committing crimes to destabilize the United States “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

Its most concrete detail was that the gang had expanded from 2012 to 2017, when Tareck El Aissami served as governor of the region of Aragua, and in 2017 Mr. Maduro appointed him as vice president. But the proclamation omitted that Mr. Aissami is no longer part of the Maduro administration, which is prosecuting him on corruption charges.

On Saturday, as planeloads of Venezuelan migrants were being flown to El Salvador, Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, temporarily barred the administration from summarily removing people based on the Alien Enemies Act.

A former prosecutor, he was first appointed to the bench by a Republican president and elevated to his current role by a Democratic one. His decision to block the Trump administration’s deportations under the law has outraged the president and his allies, prompting Mr. Trump to call for his impeachment.

The administration has appealed to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The case is now before Judges Karen Henderson and Justin Walker, both Republican appointees, and Patricia Millett, a Democratic appointee.

Appeals courts typically reject challenges to temporary restraining orders. But the panel has ordered expedited briefings and scheduled arguments, suggesting it is considering deciding on the legal merits of Mr. Trump’s invocation of Alien Enemies Act powers.

Any ruling could turn in part on whether the judges accept Mr. Trump’s assertions about Tren de Aragua and its supposed ties to the Venezuelan government, as the administration has insisted.

The Justice Department wrote that “the determination of whether there has been an ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion,’ whether an organization is sufficiently linked to a foreign nation or government, or whether national security interests have otherwise been engaged so as to implicate the A.E.A., is fundamentally a political question to be answered by the president.”

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House Republicans, facing demands from Mr. Trump, could press the Judiciary Committee to at least explore the idea. But Democrats and some Republicans are certain to resist. And even if the House were to summon the necessary majority to impeach a judge, persuading the required 67 senators to convict and remove a judge over a ruling would be highly unlikely.

Here is how the process works, and a sense of how the politics of the issue could play out.

What power does the House have to impeach a federal judge?

The Constitution says that “civil officers” of the United States can be impeached for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” some of which federal judges have previously been removed over.

But it is the more subjective high crimes and misdemeanors clause that impeachment advocates are pointing to as the basis for trying to remove James E. Boasberg, a veteran judge in the District of Columbia who temporarily blocked Mr. Trump’s plan for deportations under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law.

After Mr. Trump urged Judge Boasberg’s ouster, Representative Brandon Gill, a hard-right first-term Republican from Texas, filed articles of impeachment. Mr. Gill said the judge had used his position “to advance political gain while interfering with the president’s constitutional prerogatives and enforcement of the rule of law.”

Three other federal judges have also had articles of impeachment filed against them by House Republicans.

What would be the next steps in the House?

The Judiciary Committee would need to decide if articles of impeachment merited review by the panel. Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who leads the panel, did not reject the idea of impeachment hearings in a recent appearance on CNN, saying “all options are on the table” with Judge Boasberg.

Mr. Jordan said the panel would take initial steps by convening hearings examining the breadth of judicial resistance to Mr. Trump’s actions in office so far. The impeachment of a federal judge would traditionally require an in-depth investigation and a hearing with an array of witnesses. Impeaching a judge would be decided by a majority vote on the House floor.

Would the Senate be required to act if the House impeached a judge?

Yes, the Senate would have to act on the articles of impeachment in some way. It could simply dismiss them, a move that would most likely infuriate the White House and House conservatives.

Unlike presidential impeachments, for which the full Senate conducts a trial, lawmakers can organize a smaller panel to hold the proceeding and make a recommendation to the full body. A conviction would require 67 votes, or two-thirds of the Senate.

With Republicans holding only 53 seats in the Senate, it would be difficult to convict a judge over what Democrats would see as a legal dispute and an abuse of the impeachment process.

What is the Senate’s view of the push for judicial impeachment?

Senior Republican senators have been much less enthusiastic than their House counterparts about pursuing impeachments over judicial rulings.

Two senior Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, told The New York Times in interviews recently that they were opposed to the idea, and said that appeals were the proper way to challenge judicial rulings.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who leads the panel, had been quiet on the issue, but said on Sunday on social media that the committee would be “taking action.” It was unclear what action he meant.

Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah and another member of the committee, has endorsed the possibility of impeachment.

But with conviction unlikely, Senate Republican leaders would not relish devoting much time to the issue, which would be a distraction from other legislative issues. It would also cause a difficult political vote for Senate Republicans who don’t view impeachment as warranted.

If the removal of a judge is so unlikely, why are Republicans making it an issue?

Mr. Trump and others around him have a long history of assailing judges who rule against his interests. Many legal observers say that the current impeachment campaign is an attempt to cow judges and discourage them from taking on the administration while they face heightened security threats.

The push to impeach also keeps the public’s focus on the Trump administration’s efforts to deliver on the president’s campaign promises, such as mass deportations. It shows that Mr. Trump is forging ahead despite resistance from the judicial branch.

How many federal judges have been impeached?

Fifteen federal judges have been impeached, the first in 1803. Eight have been convicted and removed, mainly for serious criminal acts such as bribery and conflicts of interest.

As Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggested in an unusual rebuke of Mr. Trump and others calling for impeachments, there has been an accepted view in the United States for two centuries that disagreement over decisions is not grounds for impeachment.

The last judicial impeachment was of Judge G. Thomas Porteous Jr. of Louisiana in 2010, on charges of bribery and perjury. He was convicted and removed. One impeached and convicted federal judge, Alcee L. Hastings of Florida, was later elected to the House of Representatives.

If the removal of judges targeted for impeachment is unlikely, could other legislative approaches arise from the debate?

Yes. In his CNN interview, Mr. Jordan noted that other legislative remedies could emerge. He noted that his panel recently approved legislation that would prevent district court judges from issuing orders that extend beyond their jurisdiction. Mr. Jordan said that he hoped for a floor vote on the bill.

Others have pushed for restricting the ability of those going to court from so-called judge shopping, or the practice of steering cases to sympathetic judges in friendly jurisdictions. And some lawmakers have suggested that because Congress established the federal courts below the Supreme Court, it could abolish some districts.

Democrats and some Republicans would see those acts as gross violations of the constitutional separation of powers. Any legislation restricting the courts would have to clear a filibuster in the Senate, where Democrats could block it.

In response to a judge’s ruling that Elon Musk and his DOGE team are likely subject to public disclosure laws and must comply with a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by a public interest group, the government said in a filing that, by an initial tally, it could be required to produce roughly 105,043 documents and internal records.

Before the judge’s ruling, the government had argued that it should not have to comply with the request because, among other reasons, it estimated that it would take around three years to produce all the documents at a standard pace. The court has directed both sides to propose a timeline for expedited processing.

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But they are not about to let debtors off the hook. Those states, after all, are not banks, and the Education Department is a big bank in all but name. It lends tens of billions of dollars to students and parents each year and oversees the collection of roughly $1.6 trillion in outstanding loans for over 40 million borrowers.

The debt-ridden federal government isn’t going to give up that money. So if the Education Department closed, another federal entity would take the loan system over. In the short term, any agency inheriting the loan portfolio would need to keep the servicers that collect and track payments.

What else might change? Here are some possible answers.

Can the president shut down the Education Department with an executive order?

Probably not. Congressional approval is needed to shut down a federal agency, as Ms. McMahon noted in her confirmation hearing.

“This is political theater, not serious public policy,” said Ted Mitchell, a former undersecretary of education who is now the president of the American Council on Education, a university membership group.

This could be true or largely so — unless the White House shuts the department down without congressional approval and tries to win the lawsuits that would most likely ensue. President Trump signaled Thursday that he may also ask Congress to act.

What if a shutdown happens anyway — whether via a vote in Congress, a court ruling or some other way?

Some other federal entity will need to take over debt issuance and collection. Speaking to reporters in early March, Mr. Trump said that the Small Business Administration was one possibility. The Treasury Department is another, given that many student loan debtors must regularly verify their incomes and Treasury has that data.

In either instance, Education Department employees could change departments in order to preserve institutional memory on how to run the often complex loan programs and interpret their terms.

Just how messy could any transfer of my loans end up being?

Pretty messy. The debt repayment system is complicated, with highly technical rules and repayment plans and many student loan servicers tracking and collecting payments. Borrowers should always maintain records of their loans and all previous payments.

Could disbursements of new loans be delayed?

It’s possible. Presumably, any new overseer would aim to make the transition orderly and schedule the handover during a part of the year when not many people were getting new loans.

On March 11, the Education Department sent layoff notices to over 1,000 employees as part of its effort to reduce its work force by half (including people who have already left since Mr. Trump’s inauguration).

While those layoffs are the subject of lawsuits, other employees with relevant student loan expertise may have already left or will walk out under their own volition. It could be difficult for borrowers to get a speedy resolution to many complicated issues for an indefinite period to come.

“Claiming that eliminating half the department won’t affect its services — without any clear plan to redistribute the workload — is, at best, naïve and, at worst, deliberately misleading,” said Beth Maglione, the interim president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “It also raises serious concerns about how billions of dollars in federal student aid will continue to be disbursed to students without interruption.”

Should I keep making my student loan payments?

Yes.

My loans have been on pause. What now?

Read every communication from your loan servicer carefully, and follow instructions to the letter. Check your spam folders frequently, and double check to make sure the servicer has your correct paper mail address. If your servicer is no longer going to administer your debt, it should let you know months before any switch.

Will I be able to take out federal loans in the future?

If the Education Department closes, some other department or entity could become the lender.

Republicans have made it a long-term goal to have private companies handle student lending, with the federal government as a kind of guarantor backstopping the debt.

What will happen to popular programs like income-driven repayment, Public Service Loan Forgiveness and Pell Grants?

All of these programs exist because of laws.

“We certainly should honor those programs,” Ms. McMahon said of Public Service Loan Forgiveness during her confirmation hearing. She also promised to maintain Pell grants and said she supported their expansion.

So presumably some governmental entity would continue to oversee each of them. But Congress may well try to alter or end any one of them.

What other changes might come?

Mr. Trump issued an executive order in an attempt to prevent borrowers enrolled in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program from having their loans canceled if they work for organizations disfavored by his administration.

This would include any entities supporting terrorism, “engaging in violence for the purpose of obstructing or influencing federal government policy,” child abuse “including the chemical or surgical castration or mutilation of children,” employers “engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” and those that are violating state tort laws “including laws against trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism and obstruction of highways.”

Anything this sweeping is certain to trigger lawsuits. It is not clear how soon the Education Department will attempt to put any of it in place.

Allies of Elon Musk, who embedded themselves at Education Department headquarters soon after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, have also discussed using software-enabled chatbots to replace workers who help answer questions for parents and borrowers.

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“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump said.

The department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and supports programs for students with disabilities, was created by an act of Congress. That means, according to Article I of the Constitution, that only Congress can shut it down. That clear delineation of power, a fundamental component of democracy from the inception of the United States, underscores why no other modern president has tried to unilaterally shutter a federal department.

But Mr. Trump has already taken significant steps that have limited the agency’s operations and authority. Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, his administration has slashed the department’s work force by more than half and eliminated $600 million in grants. The job cuts hit particularly hard at the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces the country’s guarantee that all students have an equal opportunity to an education.

Mr. Trump’s order contains potentially contradictory guidance for Ms. McMahon. On the one hand, the order directs her to facilitate the elimination of the agency. On the other, she is also mandated to rigorously comply with federal law. The order offers no guidance on how to square those two points.

Mr. Trump said Thursday that the department would continue to provide critical functions that are required by law, such as the administration of federal student aid, including loans and grants, as well as funding for special education and districts with high levels of student poverty. The department would also continue civil rights enforcement, White House officials said.

Mr. Trump called those programs “useful functions,” and said they’re going to be “preserved in full.” He added that some functions would be “redistributed to various other agencies and departments that will take very good care of them.”

Higher education leaders and advocacy groups immediately condemned the executive order.

“This is political theater, not serious public policy,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, an association that includes many colleges and universities in its membership. “To dismantle any cabinet-level federal agency requires congressional approval, and we urge lawmakers to reject misleading rhetoric in favor of what is in the best interests of students and their families.”

Lawyers for supporters of the Education Department anticipated they would challenge Mr. Trump’s order by arguing that the administration had violated the Constitution’s separation of powers clause and the clause requiring the president to take care that federal laws are faithfully executed.

These lawyers, who requested anonymity to describe private deliberations about impending litigation, have also discussed the possibility of using a Supreme Court ruling from June 2024 to block Mr. Trump’s action. That ruling, 6 to 3 with all the conservative justices in the majority, swept aside a long-established precedent by limiting the executive branch’s ability to interpret statutes and transferring power to Congress and the courts.

“See you in court,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the trade union for educators. Her group is among those that intend to sue.

While many conservatives support Mr. Trump’s desire to close the agency, the order presents a predicament for congressional Republicans, who must balance their eagerness to please Mr. Trump and their constituents’ wishes. Public opinion polls for the past two months have consistently shown nearly two-thirds of voters oppose closing the department.

While local education departments primarily control how their schools are run already, the federal department has been influential in setting academic standards, guiding schools through regulatory compliance and interpreting civil rights laws.

Mr. Trump told the audience, which included several Republican governors, that the order’s goal was to “return our students to the states.”

“Democrats want federal bureaucrats to control your child’s school,” Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said Thursday on social media. “Republicans want to give parents the choice to do what’s best for their children.”

Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican who chairs the chamber’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he would submit legislation to eliminate the Education Department.

“I agree with President Trump that the Department of Education has failed its mission,” Mr. Cassidy said in a statement. “Since the department can only be shut down with congressional approval, I will support the president’s goals by submitting legislation to accomplish this as soon as possible.”

In remarks before signing the order, Mr. Trump signaled he might press lawmakers to move on the issue, adding that he hoped Democrats would join Republicans in supporting the department’s elimination.

But any Democratic support appears unlikely. And in the last session of Congress, one-fourth of House Republicans voted against a measure that would have eliminated the agency.

“I hope they’re going to be voting for it,” Mr. Trump said, “because ultimately it may come before them.”

Mr. Trump’s plans to gut the department have drawn fierce criticism from Democrats and education advocacy groups who say that the measure — even if largely symbolic — signals the federal government’s retreat from its duties of protecting and serving the most vulnerable students.

“Let’s be clear: Before federal oversight, millions of children — particularly those with disabilities and those from our most vulnerable communities — were denied the opportunities they deserved,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union.

Representative Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, urged his Republican colleagues to join him in opposing the changes in the order.

Mr. Trump, he said, was “implementing his own philosophy on education which can be summed up in his own words, ‘I love the poorly educated,’” Mr. Scott said in a statement, referring to a remark Mr. Trump made in 2016.

Mr. Trump has gone further than any president in seeking to overhaul what Republican administrations have long bemoaned as a bloated bureaucracy. Mr. Trump’s order also amplifies an argument that stagnant student test scores demonstrate that billions in federal spending have not yielded results.

“The status quo has very clearly failed American children and done little more than line the pockets of bureaucrats and activists,” Nicole Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, said.

While it is true that reading scores for 13-year-olds are about the same as they were in the 1970s and math scores are only slightly better, this is because of recent, sharp declines that accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.

Under the Biden administration, the department was fiercely criticized as being overly deferential to teachers’ unions and overreaching on certain issues, such as student loan forgiveness and its interpretations of civil rights laws on behalf of transgender students.

Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think-tank, said that he believes both the right and the left exaggerate the department’s influence, but that the order does little to address the issues like overreach and red tape that drove the movement to rein in the department.

“We’re going to have this whole huge national debate and not solve the practical problems along the way,” he said. “Because we’re so focused on the 30,000-foot conversation that we’re not changing, that we’re not fixing, the stuff that’s actually making life tougher for educators and parents.”

Sarah Mervosh contributed reporting.

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Two of the three arrests, in fact, happened weeks ago, and the other happened one week ago. But Ms. Bondi’s statement underscored the extent to which the administration has publicly defended and embraced Mr. Musk, one of President Trump’s chief allies and the billionaire leading efforts to slash the federal bureaucracy.

Ms. Bondi has called such destruction at company dealerships a form of domestic terrorism. Her assessment roughly corresponds to how federal law enforcement officials have characterized attacks by animal rights activists on testing laboratories as a niche form of terrorism.

But Ms. Bondi has also gone further, suggesting that these are not isolated attacks by like-minded people but rather part of a larger plot by people “operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”

The announcement did not identify the individuals or the charges they faced, but law enforcement officials have said they were: Adam Lansky in Salem, Ore., who was charged by federal authorities two weeks ago; Lucy Nelson, who was arrested in February in Loveland, Colo.; and Daniel Clarke-Pounder in Charleston, S.C., who was charged a week ago.

The individuals have been charged with arson or attempted arson that affects interstate commerce.

Over the last few weeks, several acts of vandalism and arson have been committed against Tesla property. Law enforcement officials said none have caused serious injuries.

The attacks have coincided with Mr. Musk’s efforts to drastically shrink the federal government, firing tens of thousands of federal employees and shutting down entire agencies.

Mr. Trump had called the judge, James E. Boasberg, a “Radical Left Lunatic” in a social media post and said he should be impeached. On Saturday, Judge Boasberg ordered the administration to return planes carrying migrants said to be members of a Venezuelan gang to the United States while he considered whether their removal was lawful. The planes did not turn around.

The case has emerged as a flashpoint in a larger debate over presidential power and the role of the courts in reviewing the actions of the executive branch. The chief justice’s statement did not take sides on that debate, and he has often taken a broad view of the president’s authority, notably in his majority opinion in July granting Mr. Trump substantial immunity from prosecution.

His statement instead made a modest point. But it came in the face of rising calls for impeachment not just by Mr. Trump but also by his network of supporters, which has complained that judges have blocked a series of the president’s initial policy moves.

The correct reaction to a ruling that a party disagrees with, the chief justice wrote, is to file an appeal.

Just weeks ago, Chief Justice Roberts’s point would have been uncontroversial. There is no modern tradition of impeaching judges for their rulings. Just eight federal judges have been impeached, convicted and removed in the history of the country, most for egregious criminal and personal behavior.

It takes just a majority vote in the House of Representatives to impeach a judge or other official. But two-thirds of the Senate must vote to convict, meaning its Republican members would need substantial support from Democrats.

That math makes clear that the talk of impeachment is largely performative.

Still, Representative Brandon Gill, Republican of Texas, said on social media on Tuesday that he had filed articles of impeachment against Judge Boasberg, asserting that the judge’s rulings amounted to “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Chief Justice Roberts’s statement on Tuesday was reminiscent of two earlier ones.

In 2018, he defended the independence and integrity of the federal judiciary after Mr. Trump called a judge who had ruled against his administration’s asylum policy “an Obama judge.”

The chief justice said that was a profound misunderstanding of the judicial role.

“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said in a statement then. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”

Two years later, he denounced Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, for comments at a rally outside the Supreme Court.

Mr. Schumer, speaking while the court heard arguments in a major abortion case, attacked two of Mr. Trump’s appointees, Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh. “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” Mr. Schumer said. “You will not know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Chief Justice Roberts condemned those remarks.

“Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous,” he said in a statement. “All members of the court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”

Mr. Schumer walked his comments back the next day, saying he had meant there would be political consequences.

In his year-end report on the state of the federal judiciary, issued weeks before Mr. Trump took office, the chief justice seemed to anticipate some of what was coming.

“Attempts to intimidate judges for their rulings in cases are inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “Public officials certainly have a right to criticize the work of the judiciary, but they should be mindful that intemperance in their statements when it comes to judges may prompt dangerous reactions by others.”

Mr. Trump did not square his attack on Judge Boasberg with comments he made last week while visiting the Justice Department. Then, he complained about people who have criticized judges, declaring that “it has to stop, it has to be illegal, influencing judges.”

In that case, he was complaining about criticisms of Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who had dismissed one of the criminal cases that had been pending against him.

Later Tuesday, Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host, taped a segment with President Trump to air on her nightly show. Ingraham asked the president about the chief justice’s statement. “Well, he didn’t mention my name in the statement,” Trump said. “I just saw it quickly. He didn’t mention my name.”

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“I am a political prisoner,” Mr. Khalil wrote in a letter shared by several groups including the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Visa holders, green card carriers and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs.”

Mr. Khalil, a green card holder and legal permanent resident, emerged as a lead spokesman for students during the demonstrations that engulfed Columbia’s Manhattan campus last spring. He was arrested on March 8 upon returning home from dinner with his wife, a U.S. citizen.

In his letter on Tuesday, Mr. Khalil said that he did not know what was happening as he was handcuffed and “forced” into an unmarked car by federal authorities, who “refused to provide a warrant.” He said that he feared his wife “would be taken, too,” and that he waited hours to learn the reason for his arrest or whether he would face immediate deportation.

Mr. Khalil, who is of Palestinian heritage, described his birth in a refugee camp in Syria to a family that “has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba.” That term is used by Palestinians to refer to their people’s expulsion and mass flight amid Israel’s declaration of independence almost 77 years ago.

“I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear,” Mr. Khalil wrote.

The White House has accused Mr. Khalil of siding with terrorists and has said that it plans to detain and deport many other current and recent students. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers have denied the accusation, and Mr. Khalil has not been charged with any crime.

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“The ban at bottom invokes derogatory language to target a vulnerable group in violation of the Fifth Amendment,” Judge Reyes wrote.

The government had argued that courts must defer to military judgment, but in a 79-page opinion, the judge said the government had thrown together a ban based on next-to-no evidence and that “the law does not demand that the Court rubber-stamp illogical judgments based on conjecture.”

According to the Defense Department, about 4,200 current service members, or about 0.2 percent of the military, are transgender. They include pilots, senior officers, nuclear technicians and Green Berets as well as rank-and-file soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Despite their relatively small numbers, they have been a disproportionate focus of the Trump administration.

In January, President Trump signed a caustically worded executive order saying that trans troops had afflicted the military with “radical gender ideology,” and that the “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”

In February, the Defense Department issued new policies that included the same language, and said that all trans troops, regardless of merit, would be forced out of the military.

Several service members immediately sued, saying the policy amounted to illegal discrimination that violated their Constitutional right to equal protection under the law.

The military was still finalizing its plans for putting the ban into effect, and had not yet forced any trans troops out, though it had encouraged them to “voluntarily separate,” and had even offered payments to encourage their fast departure. The Navy had set a deadline of March 28 for trans sailors to request voluntary separation.

In the six weeks since Mr. Trump’s executive order was signed, troops say, they have been forced to use the pronouns and conform to the grooming standards of their birth sex, and have been denied medical care, passed over for assignments sent home from deployments and put on administrative leave.

“Their lives and careers are completely disrupted,” said Shannon Minter, a lawyer who represents the service members and is the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “That’s why getting them immediate relief is so important.”

Mr. Minter said Mr. Trump’s executive order was so loaded with illegal ill will — known in the legal world as animus — toward a specific group of people that he felt it was unlikely to survive the scrutiny of a federal court.

At a contentious hearing on March 12, Judge Reyes, who was appointed by President Biden in 2023, spent a full day firing questions at Justice Department lawyers who were defending the policy, and she often showed frustration with their responses

The judge went line by line through reports on transgender service members that the government had cited when the ban was issued, noting that data were years out of date and that the Defense Department’s conclusions were “totally, grossly misleading,” because they “cherry-picked one part, and misrepresented even that.”

The evidence presented was so thin, she said at one point, that the Defense Department might have well cited the latest Beyoncé album.

“How can you even say that — that a whole group of people lack humility?” the judge said to the government’s lawyers about one claimed justification for the ban. “It just makes no sense.”

One of the government lawyers, Jason Manion, argued in the hearing that federal law gives special leeway to the military to make decisions, and that it was not the court’s job to decide on the merit of the Defense Department’s evidence. “At the end of the day we are asking you to defer to military judgment,” Mr. Manion said.

“You keep assuming that judgment is embedded in this,” the judge responded. “The only judgment in this case, far as I can tell,” she said, is that the administration believed that transgender people lack integrity, humility, judgment and a warrior ethos.

The judge repeatedly hinted that the apparent lack of evidence that trans troops in the ranks had any negative effect suggested that the administration’s policy was driven by animus.

Mr. Manion argued that showing that animus influenced the policy would not be enough to justify finding it illegal. Citing a Supreme Court ruling that upheld President Trump’s 2017 executive order banning travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations, he said the order regarding trans troops would be illegal only if it were based solely on animus, and nothing else.

“Just having evidence of animus,” he said, “doesn’t get over the hump.”

Trans troops have already prevailed in court once against a similar order. Early in his first term in office, President Trump announced a transgender ban on Twitter, but the policy was quickly blocked by two federal judges.

The resulting injunction remained in place for two years, until a 2019 ruling by the Supreme Court allowed a reconfigured ban to take effect while the court considered the constitutionality of the policy. The case was dropped after President Joe Biden rescinded Mr. Trump’s ban in 2021, leaving unsettled the question of whether a ban on transgender service members would be constitutional.

The Trump administration’s latest effort is a remarkable departure from a 77-year trend in the military toward welcoming an increasingly diverse variety of Americans. Over that time, it was generally the White House that was pushing for more inclusion, and the military that was resisting. Now the roles have flipped.

Military leaders have repeatedly opposed the transgender ban.

The transgender order is part of a sweeping effort to roll back diversity efforts in the military. efforts that the Trump administration sees as counterproductive. The rollback has included firing some top military leaders, ending recognition of Gay Pride and Black History months, and purging content mentioning diversity and inclusion efforts from Defense Department websites — even removing a photo of the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb, presumably because its name, Enola Gay, was flagged in a search for words the department wanted to scrub.

This week the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it would end gender affirming care for trans veterans.

“If veterans want to attempt to change their sex, they can do so on their own dime,” Doug Collins, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs said Monday.

Though the new injunction has spared trans service members from dismissal for now, many say it will be difficult to go on with their careers as if nothing had happened.

Sgt. First Class Julia Becraft, assigned to an Army armor battalion in Texas, was slated to be promoted to platoon leader this coming July, but since the ban was announced, the promotion has been put on hold.

She was so distraught over the president’s order that she decided to take vacation time to focus on her mental health, and has been attending therapy sessions.

“Everyone in my unit has been really supportive, but my world has been turned upside down,” she said.

Sergeant Becraft has served in the Army for 14 years, deployed to Afghanistan three times, and been awarded a Bronze Star. Now she faces being forced out of the service with no retirement benefits.

Even if she is ultimately allowed to stay, she said, the actions of the president have her wondering whether she can still commit to serving her country.

“It’s not just because they came after me and want me out,” she said. “It’s a culmination of all the other things they are doing: take down the D.E.I. efforts, firing of all these great leaders for no reason. I wish I could stay strong and fight, but, honestly, I’m just scared.”

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On March 5, however, the group removed those identifiers from the code, while also adding thousands more grants, making it very difficult to verify the figures provided. A White House official said the group had withheld identifying information “for security purposes.”

On Tuesday, the group added some of the missing details, providing links to many of the grants’ entries in a federal spending database, USAspending.gov. Now, fact-checkers will have the ability to match the claims with other sources.

The White House did not respond to a question about the change.

The new details provided by the group made clear that its claims about these canceled grants also contained the same kind of errors that had marred its previous work.

For instance, the group said that it had saved $1.75 billion by cutting a U.S. Agency for International Development grant to a nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

The New York Times reported last week that Gavi had said that the website’s claims were wrong. The nonprofit said that its grant had not been canceled and that, even if it was, all the money it was owed had already been paid. So canceling the grant would save nothing.

The Times had identified that grant using the details that Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded in the source code of its website.

On Tuesday, that erroneous claim about the $1.75 billion grant was still on DOGE’s website, which the group calls its “wall of receipts,” — its line by line accounting of the group’s purported cost savings.

Judge James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington had ordered a halt to deportations carried out under the executive order signed by President Trump invoking wartime powers on Saturday. From the bench, he verbally ordered planes that were already in the air to return the detainees to the United States.

In a declaration filed Tuesday, Robert L. Cerna, the acting field office director for enforcement and removal operations at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the third flight had not violated the judge’s order because all migrants on the flight had already received their due process rights. Immigration courts had already approved their removals from the country, he said.

In the filing, Mr. Cerna acknowledged the third flight removed migrants from the country after the judge’s written order.

Mr. Cerna said he understood Mr. Trump’s invocation of wartime powers targeting Venezuelan members of the Tren de Aragua gang took effect around 3:53 p.m. on March 15 when it was posted to the White House website. He noted that the judge’s written order halting the deportation flights was posted around 7:25 p.m. that day.

“After the Proclamation was publicly posted and took effect, three planes carrying aliens departed the United States for El Salvador International Airport (SAL),” Mr. Cerna wrote. “Two of those planes departed U.S. territory and airspace before 7:25 PM EDT. The third plane departed after that time, but all individuals on that third plane had Title 8 final removal orders and thus were not removed solely on the basis of the Proclamation at issue.”

Mr. Cerna’s statement refers to the authority of immigration judges, under U.S. code, to order the removal of migrants from the United States. He said those on the third plane had been ordered to be removed.

Mr. Cerna said his agency “carefully tracks” which detainees are subject to the president’s order to expedited removal.

He said the administration is poised to remove more than 200 additional Venezuelans covered by Mr. Trump’s order should the judge allow the removals to proceed.

The White House says that President Trump just signed a memorandum directing the secretary of state to remove all diversity, equity and inclusion policies from the Foreign Service. The memo goes on to say that “Biden’s State Department conditioned eligibility for promotions on an employee’s ability to pass a D.E.I. loyalty test,” citing specific policies and iniatives enacted under the last administration. This memo signed by Trump effectively merges two of his priorities since returning to office: eliminating D.E.I. from government and reforming the Foreign Service.

The order also calls for “appropriate action” against any officials found to have taken actions motivated by “discriminatory equity ideology.” It adds that federal policy toward “hiring in foreign policy positions, like hiring in all other parts of the Government, shall be based solely on merit.” The order was directed to other federal offices that employ Foreign Service workers, including the departments of commerce and agriculture.

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Members of the F.T.C. and other independent regulatory boards are protected from removal under a 1935 Supreme Court precedent that says the president may not fire them solely over policy disagreements. Ms. Slaughter and Mr. Bedoya said they planned to challenge Mr. Trump’s decision in court.

“Today the president illegally fired me from my position as a federal trade commissioner, violating the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent,” Ms. Slaughter, whom Mr. Trump nominated to the F.T.C. during his first term in 2018, said in a statement. “Why? Because I have a voice. And he is afraid of what I’ll tell the American people.”

In an interview, Mr. Bedoya, who became a commissioner three years ago, said he was worried that an F.T.C. without independence from the president would be subject to the whims of Mr. Trump’s business world allies.

“When people hear this news, they need to not think about me,” he said. “They need to think about the billionaires behind the president at his inauguration.”

The firings are Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to assert the power of the presidency over independent regulators at agencies inside the U.S. government, including those that Congress set up to be independent from direct White House control. While regulators are appointed by the president, many of them have traditionally held wide latitude to determine the direction of their agencies.

But the Trump administration has disregarded their traditional protections.

“I am writing to inform you that you have been removed from the Federal Trade Commission, effective immediately,” said a letter sent to one of the commissioners, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “Your continued service on the F.T.C. is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.”

The Republican chairman of the F.T.C., Andrew Ferguson, said in a statement on Tuesday that the agency would continue protecting consumers but backed Mr. Trump’s authority to fire the commissioners.

“President Donald J. Trump is the head of the executive branch and is vested with all of the executive power of our government,” Mr. Ferguson said. “I have no doubts about his constitutional authority to remove commissioners, which is necessary to ensure democratic accountability for our government.”

A spokesman for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The firings followed an executive order from Mr. Trump last month that sought greater authority over the F.T.C., the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the National Labor Relations Board.

The order required the independent agencies to submit their proposed regulations to the White House for review, asserted a power to block such agencies from spending funds on projects or efforts that conflict with presidential priorities, and declared that they must accept the president’s and the Justice Department’s interpretation of the law as binding.

In January, Mr. Trump fired Gwynne A. Wilcox, a Democratic member of the N.L.R.B. She sued to challenge her dismissal, and a judge reinstated her early this month. The administration has appealed that ruling.

The Justice Department no longer plans to defend as constitutional the Supreme Court precedent on firing regulators only for cause, according to a Feb. 12 letter that the acting solicitor general, Sarah M. Harris, sent to Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. The department’s analysis applies to the F.T.C., the N.L.R.B. and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, according to the letter, which was first reported by Reuters.

The letter sent to one of the F.T.C. commissioners on behalf of Mr. Trump on Tuesday reiterated that position. The Supreme Court protections do not fit “the principal officers who head the F.T.C. today,” the letter said.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School who studies antitrust, said the F.T.C. had been established as an independent agency in 1914 “on the theory that consumer protection and the various goals of the F.T.C. were better addressed through less political means.”

“If we introduce the idea of political hirings and firings there, that serves to really undermine both the things the F.T.C. can do and also its legitimacy as a bipartisan institution,” she said.

Corporate executives and their advisers are closely watching the direction of the F.T.C. under Mr. Ferguson, its new chairman. During the Biden administration, the F.T.C. sued to block corporate mergers, aggressively punished companies for user-privacy failures and filed a sweeping lawsuit accusing Amazon of squeezing small businesses. It is set to face off with Meta during a trial in April scrutinizing the social media company’s strategy in acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp to cement its dominance.

Ms. Slaughter and Mr. Bedoya have consistently voted in favor of actions to rein in the power of the tech giants.

After Mr. Trump nominated Ms. Slaughter to the majority-Republican commission in 2018 to fill an unexpired term, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. nominated her for a full seven-year term in February 2023. She previously served as chief counsel to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the current minority leader, and led his congressional work on telecommunications and tech legislation.

Mr. Bedoya, a former head of a tech and privacy center at Georgetown University and Senate aide, joined the F.T.C. in May 2022 after Mr. Biden nominated him.

Mr. Bedoya said in the interview that he had learned of Mr. Trump’s decision when he received a call from Ms. Slaughter while at his daughter’s gymnastics class.

“He’s trying to fire me,” Mr. Bedoya said. “I am still an F.T.C. commissioner, and I am going to go to court to make sure that’s clear to everybody.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, called the firings “outrageous” and “illegal,” and warned that the actions would harm consumers. The agency’s 2023 orders on hidden and junk fees resulted in a return of $330 million to consumers, she said.

“Illegally gutting the commission will empower fraudsters and monopolists, and consumers,” said Ms. Klobuchar, who serves on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust and consumer rights.

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Judge Chuang wrote that a group of unnamed aid workers who had sued to stop the demolition of U.S.A.I.D. and its programs was likely to succeed in the lawsuit. He agreed with the workers’ contention that Mr. Musk’s rapid assertion of power over executive agencies was likely in violation of the Constitution’s appointments clause.

The judge also ordered that agency operations be partially restored, though that reprieve is likely to be temporary. He ordered Mr. Musk’s team to reinstate email access to all U.S.A.I.D. employees, including those on paid leave. He also ordered the team to submit a plan for employees to reoccupy a federal office from which they were evicted last month, and he barred Mr. Musk’s team from engaging in any further work “related to the shutdown of U.S.A.I.D.”

Given that most of the agency’s work force and contracts were already terminated, it was not immediately clear what effect the judge’s ruling would have. Only a skeleton crew of workers is still employed by the agency.

And while the order barred Mr. Musk from dealing with the agency personally, it suggested that he or others could continue to do so after receiving “the express authorization of a U.S.A.I.D. official with legal authority to take or approve the action.”

As early as Feb. 3, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had assumed control of the agency and had directed a variety of cuts in his own authority. The judge noted that Mr. Rubio could declare his intent to permanently close the agency’s headquarters within 14 days of his order, and the offices would remain closed.

Last week, Mr. Rubio said in an announcement on social media that he had canceled 83 percent of the agency’s programs, and that the State Department would administer the roughly 1,000 grants and contracts remaining.

“Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform,” he wrote.

Judge Chuang said that it appeared clear that Mr. Rubio had effectively surrendered control over the agency’s operations to Mr. Musk in a move that essentially resulted in the elimination of the agency.

“Defendants also likely lack congressional authorization to take even the primary specific steps toward abolition of U.S.A.I.D. already conducted,” he wrote. “In relation to the most recent appropriation for U.S.A.I.D., Congress placed certain restrictions on any ‘reorganization, redesign or other plan’ relating to U.S.A.I.D., which consists of any actions to ‘expand, eliminate, consolidate or downsize’ the agency or its bureaus or offices.”

The finding that Mr. Musk had personally, and unlawfully, overseen the dismantling of the agency offered a firm rejection of his operation’s authority. In the sternly worded order, Judge Chuang warned that any skirting of its requirements could result in him holding Mr. Musk or members of his team in contempt.

“Today’s decision is an important victory against Elon Musk and his DOGE attack on U.S.A.I.D., the U.S. government and the Constitution,” said Norm Eisen, executive chair of State Democracy Defenders Fund, a group representing the aid workers. “They are performing surgery with a chain saw instead of a scalpel, harming not just the people U.S.A.I.D. serves but the majority of Americans who count on the stability of our government. This case is a milestone in pushing back on Musk and DOGE’s illegality.”

Lawyers representing the government had previously argued in that case that the Department of Government Efficiency, or the U.S. DOGE Service, was in fact not headed by Mr. Musk and that he and his associates were serving in an advisory capacity only. They said Mr. Musk had no authority to steer decisions on his own.

But Judge Chuang appeared to dismiss those claims entirely, noting that Mr. Musk had targeted and celebrated actions to dramatically downsize U.S.A.I.D., including the firing of a vast majority of its workers and the cancellation of most of its contracts and grants.

“DOGE has taken numerous actions without any apparent advanced approval by agency leadership,” the judge wrote, reeling off a list of examples at the Education Department, the National Institutes of Health and the Energy Department, where Mr. Musk’s associates apparently recommended cuts on their own.

The judge noted that Mr. Musk, during a cabinet meeting he attended at the White House last month, acknowledged that his team had accidentally slashed funding for Ebola prevention administered by U.S.A.I.D. He also cited numerous instances in which Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have both spoken publicly about their reliance on Mr. Musk’s team to effectuate goals like eliminating billions in federal contracts.

And he cited Mr. Musk’s own comments on social media taking credit for the aid agency’s dismantling. On X, the social media platform he owns, Mr. Musk wrote in February that it was time for U.S.A.I.D. to “die,” that his team was in the process of shutting the agency down, and that he had “spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.”

The judge also quoted Mr. Musk talking about the need to “delete entire agencies” and pointed to a post Mr. Musk shared stating “DOGE can now DISMANTLE U.S.A.I.D.” after a judge lifted an order blocking the agency from carrying out mass firings.

“Taken together, these facts support the conclusion that U.S.A.I.D. has effectively been eliminated,” Judge Chuang wrote.

“Based on the present record, the only individuals known to be associated with the decisions to initiate a shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. by permanently closing U.S.A.I.D. headquarters and taking down its website are Musk and DOGE team members,” he added.

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The grants fund programs that train and certify teachers to work in struggling districts that otherwise have trouble attracting talent. The programs cited goals that included training a diverse educational work force, and provided training in special education, among other areas.

The department, led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, argued that the grants trained teachers in “social justice activism” and other “divisive ideologies” and should be eliminated.

A coalition of educator organizations sued to stop the Education Department from terminating the grants. The coalition included groups, such as the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education and the National Center for Teacher Residencies, whose members depend on the grants at issue.

The judge found that the loss of the federal dollars would harm students and schools with the fewest resources.

“The harms plaintiffs identify also implicate grave effect on the public: fewer teachers for students in high-need neighborhoods, early childhood education and special education programs,” she wrote. “Moreover, even to the extent defendants assert such an interest in ending D.E.I.-based programs, they have sought to effect change by means the court finds likely violate the law.”

In early February, schools involved in the programs received a letter from the Education Department notifying them that the grants had been canceled as part of the agency’s initiative to “eliminate discrimination in all forms of education throughout the United States.”

The grants, made through the Supporting Effective Educator Development, or SEED, program and the Teacher Quality Partnership Program, among others, are competitive for the states and school districts seeking the assistance. The grants also help states set up specialized college programs to train educators with the goal of placing them in schools where literacy rates or performance gaps are deemed key issues.

For example, last year, Miami-Dade County received a nearly $10 million grant to set up a partnership between Miami Dade College and Miami-Dade County Public Schools through which the college would help train 180 teachers to “break the cycle of teacher shortages” and help prepare future educators for work in high-need schools over five years.

In another case last year, Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, where Ms. McMahon previously served on the board of trustees, received nearly $3.5 million to enroll around 20 teaching residents per year, who would team up with mentors and help staff local schools facing teacher shortages. The grant noted a focus on “emphasizing outreach to recruit teachers of color.”

The preliminary injunction issued on Tuesday also covered the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Program, which provided performance-based financial incentives for teachers and principles who were able to close achievement gaps in high-need schools. It stopped short of a nationwide injunction, but required the department to reinstate the funding that was previously awarded to any members of the groups behind the lawsuit.

Taken together, Congress had appropriated well over $200 million to fund the three programs in past years. The continuing resolution, passed last week, provides less clarity than a full budget on specific grant programs, giving the Education Department more discretion in how to spend congressionally appropriated funds.

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The R.N.C. said that Mr. Vance would be the first sitting vice president to serve in that role. In a statement, President Trump praised Mr. Vance as someone who “knows how to fight and win tough races” and said he would do a “fantastic job.”

“To fully enact the MAGA mandate and President Trump’s vision that voters demanded, we must keep and grow our Republican majorities in 2026,” Mr. Vance said in a statement. He pledged to “build the war chest we need to deliver those victories next November.”

At this early juncture, Mr. Vance is widely considered one of the strongest contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028. His new fund-raising role will give him a great deal of face time with the sort of heavyweight Republican donors who could bankroll a national campaign.

Mr. Vance has had significant relationships with some conservative donors, particularly in Silicon Valley, including Peter Thiel, who was also at one point Mr. Vance’s employer. But he has not always been universally embraced by the party’s contributor class: Some G.O.P. donors have recoiled from some of his positions on foreign affairs and trade.

Still, Mr. Vance was a workhorse for Mr. Trump on the fund-raising trail after he joined the national ticket, headlining many events in smaller cities that would not raise enough to be worth Mr. Trump’s time as the presidential nominee.

Mr. Trump has not wanted for cash since his victory. He has continued to raise money for his political committees and presidential library, including from business leaders eager to get on the good side of his administration.

Mr. Vance will take over as finance chairman from Duke Buchan III, an investment banker and early Trump backer who served as ambassador to Spain in the first Trump administration and was nominated this month to serve as ambassador to Morocco.

There has been another update on how a federal judge in Washington intends to handle the Trump administration’s reluctance to provide key facts about two planes carrying suspected members of a Venezuelan street gang from the United States to El Salvador on Saturday.

The judge, James E. Boasberg, ordered the Justice Department to send him a sealed declaration by tomorrow at noon detailing the times the planes took off, left U.S. airspace and landed.

Judge Boasberg is trying to figure out if the immigrants were flown out of the United States after he issued his order stopping them.

The Justice Department has repeatedly said that the flights left before a written version of the order was posted at 7:25 p.m. on Saturday night. But department lawyers have so far refused to give any additional details about the timing of the flights.

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The I.R.S. officials accused the Justice Department of holding back on the Hunter Biden case, an allegation that prosecutors have denied. Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler have also said that the I.R.S. retaliated against them for airing their concerns about Hunter Biden’s tax case, including by taking them off the investigation.

Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges last year. The former president later pardoned his son.

It was unclear exactly what positions Mr. Shapley and Mr. Ziegler will play within Treasury. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement announcing them as senior advisers that the two men will “drive much-needed cultural reform within the I.R.S.”

“These veteran civil servants join us to help further the agency’s focus on collections, modernization, and customer service, so we can deliver a more effective and efficient I.R.S. experience for hardworking American taxpayers,” Mr. Bessent said.

The Trump administration has been undertaking an aggressive overhaul of the I.R.S., pushing to dramatically slash its staff and instead rely on automated technology to run the agency.

Many top leaders at the typically apolitical agency have left or been demoted under President Trump, who has nominated Billy Long, a former Republican congressman with little background in taxes, to run the I.R.S.

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Over the weekend, the Trump administration sent three planes carrying 238 migrants from Venezuela to El Salvador, even as Judge Boasberg ordered a halt to the deportations and to turn the planes around. Shortly before the migrants were expelled, Mr. Trump signed an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a law from 1798 that gives the president power to deport citizens and subjects of any foreign nation with which the United States is at war or which are in the process of an invasion. Mr. Trump’s order justified the deportations by accusing the migrants of being members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that he charged with “conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise,” of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela.

On Monday, the threat of a showdown between the executive and the judicial branches appeared to grow, as Justice Department lawyers stonewalled Judge Boasberg and tried to get him removed from the case, refusing to answer any of his questions about the deportation flights and claiming Mr. Trump had unfettered power to remove immigrants from the United States that could not be questioned by the courts. It worsened still after Mr. Trump called for Judge Boasberg’s impeachment on his social media platform, Truth Social, and the Supreme Court’s chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., rebuked the idea in a public statement.

Here’s more about Judge Boasberg, the jurist going toe-to-toe with the Trump administration.

Who is Judge Boasberg?

Judge Boasberg, who goes by the nickname Jeb, spent his formative years in Washington, D.C., while his father worked for Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. He went to St. Albans, an all-boys prep school, and attended Yale University, where he played basketball and was a member of the secretive Skull and Bones club. During law school at Yale, he lived with Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice.

Before Judge Boasberg wore robes, he was a homicide prosecutor in Washington, D.C. President George W. Bush, a fellow Yale and Skull and Bones member, gave him his first job on the bench in 2002, as an associate judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Nine years later, former President Barack Obama nominated him to the federal bench in the capital, a position for which he was unanimously confirmed.

In the years since, Judge Boasberg has served on a number of specialized courts. He was on the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves surveillance warrants, for seven years, rising to become its presiding judge during the first Trump administration. During the first Trump administration, he was also appointed to the U.S. Alien Terrorist Removal Court as its chief judge, a term that ended earlier this year. He took over as chief judge for the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia in 2023, succeeding Beryl A. Howell.

What are some of his notable rulings?

Judge Boasberg has fielded several polarizing cases that were significant for Mr. Trump. In 2016, he ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to release nearly 15,000 emails belonging to Hillary Clinton, the former senator and presidential candidate. But he also dismissed lawsuits trying to force the State Department to recover more of her correspondence, upsetting Mr. Trump.

The following year, Judge Boasberg ruled against a group seeking the release of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, stating that only Congress or Mr. Trump could choose to publicize them.

He is also the judge that ruled in 2012 against the public release of photos of a deceased Osama bin Laden, finding there were reasonable national security grounds to keep them private.

As the chief judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Judge Boasberg was also responsible in 2020 for handling the fallout of the F.B.I.’s wiretapping of Carter Page, who had once been an adviser to the Trump campaign. He delivered an opinion that effectively barred the F.B.I. officials who had worked on Mr. Page’s case from pursuing other national security wiretaps.

Why is Judge Boasberg in conflict with the administration?

Judge Boasberg delivered the order that prompted the standoff with the Trump administration on Saturday night, stating from the bench that the deportations of Venezuelans should be stopped and the planes brought back to the United States. He made the ruling during a swiftly organized hearing to challenge Mr. Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. Less than an hour later, he delivered a written ruling following up on that order, though the instruction to turn back planes was left out.

The Trump administration maintains that it did not flout a court order because the written order — which they argue is the important one — came only after the flights of migrants had already taken off for El Salvador. They have also argued that the judge has no power to question the president’s deportation authority.

On Monday, Justice Department lawyers wrote a letter to the federal appeals court asking it to remove Judge Boasberg from the case, and arguing that he had engaged in “highly unusual and improper procedures.” They also refused to answer several of Judge Boasberg’s questions regarding the flights in question, asserting that they could not for national security reasons.

What happens next?

Members of the Trump administration, including Tom Homan, his border czar, have promised to continue the deportations, regardless of court rulings. But the case against Mr. Trump’s efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act, in a case brought by five Venezuelan migrants in federal custody who fear they could be among the administration’s targets, continues.

Judge Boasberg gave the administration a Wednesday deadline to detail in a sealed declaration specifics about the flights that carried Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, which the administration had refused to disclose. The judge also has asked Justice Department lawyers how many migrants could theoretically be covered under the Alien Enemies Act. The parties are due in court again on Friday to argue the merits of the case.

It is unclear what may flow from Mr. Trump’s Tuesday morning post asserting that Judge Boasberg “should be impeached.” One House Republican, Representative Brandon Gill of Texas, filed an article of impeachment Tuesday accusing Judge Boasberg of abusing his power by overstepping his authority and interfering with the president’s constitutional prerogatives.

Mr. Trump’s demand prompted a rare statement from Chief Justice John G. Roberts of the Supreme Court, who admonished the idea in a statement saying, “For more than two centuries it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”