Trump Administration Highlights: I.R.S. Nears Agreement to Confirm Immigrant Information for ICE

Many undocumented immigrants file tax returns with the I.R.S., giving the agency information about where they live, their families, their employers and their earnings. The I.R.S. has long encouraged undocumented immigrants to pay their taxes, giving people without Social Security numbers a separate nine-digit code called an individual taxpayer identification number to file their returns.

Tax information is closely guarded because federal law bars improper disclosure. I.R.S. officials had resisted earlier requests from the Department of Homeland Security to turn over information about unauthorized immigrants, warning that doing so could violate federal law.

But the Trump administration has since replaced the top I.R.S. lawyer, and the agreement now under discussion appears to be narrower than an earlier request, which asked the I.R.S. to hand over, rather than confirm, migrants’ addresses.

Officials were still finalizing the agreement, the terms of which were earlier reported by The Washington Post. A spokeswoman for the Treasury Department, which oversees the I.R.S., did not respond to a request for comment. ICE also did not respond to a request for comment.

The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly tried to enlist I.R.S. agents in its broad immigration crackdown, asking them to audit companies that might be hiring unauthorized immigrants.

Mr. Trump issued the order late Friday night, after a tumultuous week for the American legal community in which one of the country’s premier firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, struck a deal with the White House to spare the company from a punitive decree issued by Mr. Trump the previous week.

Vanita Gupta, who as a civil rights lawyer and a former Justice Department official has both sued the government and defended it in court, said Mr. Trump’s memo “attacks the very foundations of our legal system by threatening and intimidating litigants who aim to hold our government accountable to the law and the Constitution.”

In response to criticism of the memo, a White House spokeswoman, Taylor Rogers, said: “President Trump is delivering on his promise to ensure the judicial system is no longer weaponized against the American people. President Trump’s only retribution is success and historic achievements for the American people.”

The president has long complained that Democratic-leaning lawyers and law firms have pursued what he calls “lawfare” in the form of investigations and lawsuits against him and his allies that he claims are motivated by politics. Since being sworn into office he has targeted three firms, but the new memo seems to threaten similar punishment for any lawyer or firm who raises his ire.

After Mr. Trump issued an order suspending security clearances for Paul Weiss lawyers, and sharply limiting their employees from entering government buildings or getting government jobs, the firm agreed to a series of commitments to get the president to cancel the order.

As part of the deal, the firm said it would provide $40 million in legal services to causes Mr. Trump has championed, including his task force to combat antisemitism.

Perkins Coie, another firm targeted by Mr. Trump, chose a different tack — suing him in federal court and getting a temporary restraining order against the president.

Trump’s attacks on law firms, and Paul Weiss’s decision to cut a deal rather than fight it out in court, have sent shock waves through the legal community. The sweeping nature of the president’s latest demand comes as he has also stepped up his public attacks on judges and the very notion that the courts can tell him what to do or not do.

The executive branch “should neither fear nor punish those who challenge it and should not be the arbiter of what is frivolous — there are protections in place to address that,” Ms. Gupta said. “This moment calls for courage and collective action, not capitulation, among lawyers and the legal profession.”

It also comes amid a showdown between a federal judge in Washington and the administration over the president’s invocation a week ago of the Alien Enemies Act, which he used to immediately send more than 100 Venezuelan migrants he said were gang members to a large prison complex in El Salvador.

Civil rights activists say the deportations violated the law, and that the administration’s refusal to give clear answers on its conduct flouts the very premise of the U.S. court system.

One law firm that is suing the administration over its policies said it would not back down in the face of threats from the White House.

The leaders of Keker, Van Nest & Peters, a San Francisco firm that has sued over the Trump administration over its immigration raids, called Mr. Trump’s latest memorandum “inexcusable and despicable.”

“Our liberties depend on lawyers’ willingness to represent unpopular people and causes, including in matters adverse to the federal government,” the firm said in a statement. “Our profession owes every client zealous legal representation without fear of retribution, regardless of their political affiliation or ability to pay.”

The firm also encouraged other lawyers to join a nationwide effort to submit a “friend of the court” brief in the Perkins Coie lawsuit against Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump’s Friday night memo, titled “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court,” complains that lawyers have long engaged in unethical conduct in opposing him, or opposing deportations. The memo also suggests that the Trump administration will make disciplinary referrals against lawyers who pursue cases without merit “particularly in cases that implicate national security, homeland security, public safety, or election integrity.”

Mr. Trump also used the announcement to attack one particular lawyer by name, Marc Elias.

Mr. Elias previously worked at Perkins Coie, and has long represented Democrats. Mr. Trump blames Mr. Elias, among others, for a dossier of unsubstantiated allegations about his links to Russia that was investigated by the F.B.I. in 2016 and 2017.

“President Trump’s goal is clear. He wants lawyers and law firms to capitulate and cower until there is no one left to oppose his administration in court,” Mr. Elias said in a written statement. He added, “There will be no negotiation with this White House about the clients we represent or the lawsuits we bring on their behalf.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment Saturday, though one of the president’s close allies, Richard Grenell, said earlier this month that the Venezuelans had agreed to accept the flights.

Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, suspended the deportation cooperation after the Trump administration revoked a Biden-era policy that allowed more oil to be produced in Venezuela and exported.

Since the suspension of the flights, Mr. Maduro has come under intense pressure from the Trump administration, which has been pressing various Latin American nations to take in more deportees. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media that Venezuela would face new “severe and escalating” sanctions if it refused to accept its repatriated citizens.

Venezuelans have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in record numbers in recent years, in response to the economic and social crisis consuming the nation, which Mr. Maduro blames on U.S. sanctions against his regime.

The agreement to resume the deportation flights comes after the Trump administration invoked an obscure wartime authority from 1798 called the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, whose strongman leader agreed to accept the migrants, putting them in prisons where conditions are so nightmarish that many experts say they constitute human rights abuses.

The use of the wartime authority has emerged as a flashpoint in a broader struggle between federal judges across the country, who have sought to curb many of Mr. Trump’s recent executive actions, and an administration that has come close to openly refusing to comply with judicial orders.

Last week, a federal judge in Washington issued a temporary order blocking the government from deporting any immigrants under the wartime authority, saying he did not believe the law offered grounds for the deportation flights.

The Trump administration had claimed that the Venezuelan migrants who had been sent to El Salvador were all criminal gang members, but the families of some of those men, as well as immigration lawyers, argued that this was not the case for all the deportees sent to El Salvadoran prisons. And the administration provided little detail as to whom the individuals it sent there actually were. There seemed to be little to no due process at play.

Mr. Trump has appeared captivated by the ability to send people to the prison complexes in El Salvador, threatening on Friday that those caught vandalizing Teslas could be banished there for 20 years.

The president and allies, including Elon Musk, went to war with the judge over his order restricting deportations, calling for the judge’s impeachment. The rapidly escalating spat caused Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of the Supreme Court to weigh in with a rare statement, admonishing the calls for the judge’s impeachment. This spurred concerns of a constitutional crisis.

The Trump administration has continued to stonewall the judge’s questions about the deportations to El Salvador. “The government is not being terribly cooperative at this point,” said the judge, James E. Boasberg, at a hearing on Friday. “But I will get to the bottom of whether they violated my order and who was responsible.”

Saturday’s agreement could help Mr. Trump accelerate his plans for mass deportations, one of the central promises of his campaign. He has already enlisted military planes, sent people to third countries far from their homes and invoked the wartime law to achieve that goal. Arrests inside the country are up sharply relative to those in the Biden administration, but they are well below the levels Mr. Trump and his immigration advisers want.

The agreement to resume the deportation flights to Venezuela also comes a day after the Trump administration said that it would end a Biden-era program that allowed hundreds of thousands of people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the United States lawfully and work for up to two years.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Annie Correal contributed reporting.

The White House then released a fact sheet that included a bullet point stating that Mr. Trump would be “terminating proclamations” declaring monuments that safeguarded “vast amounts of land from economic development and energy production.”

The New York Times confirmed last Saturday that Mr. Trump had indeed rescinded that proclamation. But later that day, the bullet point listing termination of national monuments disappeared from the White House fact sheet.

A post on X sent by a verified White House account last week still included the terminations of national monuments, and has not been edited or removed as of Saturday morning.

The White House declined to answer questions about the discrepancy.

“We were obviously very disappointed to see that fact sheet go up and then confused to see it come back down,” said Mark Green, the executive director of CalWild, a nonprofit in California that advocates for wild spaces on public lands. “There’s very little clarity about what’s going on, and there’s such a lack of transparency with this administration that it’s just really hard to know what’s happening.”

Representative Raul Ruiz, Democrat of California, said his office was working to understand what was happening. He helped push for the creation of the Chuckwalla National Monument within his district.

“One thing is for sure,” Dr. Ruiz said. “If the designation is rescinded, we’re going to fight like hell to defend it.”

Mr. Biden designated the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla national monuments in January to protect wildlife habitats and ancestral lands, and to help prevent mining, drilling and energy development.

The Chuckwalla National Monument encompasses about 644,000 acres south of Joshua Tree National Park, and the Sáttítla National Monument north of Mount Shasta, near the Oregon border, is roughly 200,000 acres. The land includes mountain ranges, canyons, desert landscapes, and more than 50 rare species of plants and animals.

State lawmakers, conservationists, renewable energy companies and Native tribes had jointly advocated for the protection of the land.

Mr. Biden protected about 674 million acres of federal land, more than any other president. He was able to do so by using the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law that gives presidents unilateral power to protect lands and waters for the benefit of Americans.

But Mr. Trump said he would undo much of Mr. Biden’s environmental work when he was sworn into office — withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and ending climate regulations, to start — and in early January he said that he wouldn’t tolerate the withdrawal of waters from oil and gas drilling.

“I will reverse it immediately,” Mr. Trump said. “It will be done immediately and we will drill, baby, drill.”

The question is whether Mr. Trump has the authority to reverse the creation of a national monument that was created by a previous president.

During his first term, Mr. Trump shrunk the size of two national monuments — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah — by some two million acres. A lawsuit was filed arguing the Antiquities Act did not grant a president the power to reduce a national park, but the case was moot after Biden re-established and slightly expanded the national monuments.

Mr. Green is confident that rescinding Mr. Biden’s proclamations could place Mr. Trump in court.

“We believe that these monuments exist in a legal sense, and that there’s nothing the Trump administration will be able to do about that short of violating the law,” Mr. Green said.

In an interview with The New York Times on Saturday after the meeting with Mr. He, Mr. Daines, a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he urged China to take effective action to halt the export of chemical precursors for fentanyl.

“I met with President Trump a few days before I came over, and he was pleased that I was coming to communicate his ‘America First’ message and, importantly, to make sure that Chinese leaders knew the seriousness of the fentanyl issue, and the role that China can play in stopping the shipment of precursors to the Mexican cartels,” Mr. Daines said.

Chinese officials have said that the fentanyl crisis is rooted in an American failure to curb demand for the drug, and that Beijing has taken effective measures to limit shipments of fentanyl and its chemical precursors. China’s cabinet issued a report earlier this month on its fentanyl measures, and Mr. Daines said this was being studied by American officials.

Mr. Daines said he was trying to lay the groundwork for a meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. “This visit is the first step to arrange and set up the next step, which will be a very important meeting between President Xi and President Trump — when that occurs, I don’t know, where it occurs, I don’t know.”

The White House has not named Mr. Daines as acting on its behalf. But Mr. Daines is one of Mr. Trump’s top allies in Congress. He was the first member of the Republican leadership in the Senate to endorse Mr. Trump in 2023 for a second term at a time when many Republican senators were leery of seeing Mr. Trump return to the White House.

“Given Senator Daines’s relationship to Donald Trump, China certainly wants to learn from him about Trump’s China policy intentions — whether he still wants to make a deal with China, and if so, what the deal would look like,” said Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai.

China also wants Senator Daines to “bring a message to Donald Trump that China wants to sit down to talk with the U.S. side and to avoid further escalation of the tensions,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Trump has imposed 20 percent tariffs on goods from China and threatened more. China wants to head off further tariffs.

“There’s a window of opportunity before early April for China and the U.S. to engage each other, and Senator Daines’s visit could play a pivotal role,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Daines said that he was not focusing on tariffs with China, because the Office of the United States Trade Representative has not yet finished a policy review.

Mr. Trump has said he plans to meet with Mr. Xi, without specifying details. China has said nothing publicly about a meeting. But the contacts between working-level administration officials that typically precede such a meeting have been absent so far during Mr. Trump’s second term.

Mr. Xi makes all important decisions in China, particularly on foreign policy. That makes summits with American presidents particularly important in setting the trajectory of bilateral relations. The two leaders met in 2017 when Mr. Xi went to Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, and Mr. Trump went to China.

The lack of engagement with Washington until now has led some in Beijing to begin to doubt whether Mr. Trump is sincere in his expressed desire to meet Mr. Xi, said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center in Washington.

“They see him changing his position rapidly on a number of issues,” Ms. Sun said. “That translates into an almost fatalism for the Chinese, that they should aim to prepare for the worst case scenario, that’s their conclusion.”

Mr. Daines said he also expressed concern about China’s barriers to imports, beyond just tariffs, during his visit to Beijing. He declined to provide any specifics. But Montana politicians have long argued that China’s intermittent halts on imports of beef from the state are unfair trade barriers, and not the result of any actual concerns about mad cow disease, as Beijing contends.

Mr. Daines lived for six years in southern China in the 1990s as a project manager for Procter & Gamble, the American consumer products giant.

This weekend’s trip is Mr. Daines’s sixth to China since his election to the Senate in 2014, making him one of the few members of Congress who have continued traveling to the country even as relations have deteriorated.

As the Department of Government Efficiency roars through agencies across government, its targets have included some of the organizations that Beijing worried about most, or actively sought to subvert. And, as with much that Elon Musk’s DOGE has dismembered, there has been no published study of the costs and benefits of losing those capabilities — and no discussion of how the roles, arguably as important as a manned fighter, might be replaced.

On the list of capabilities on life support is Radio Free Asia, a 29-year-old nonprofit that estimates its news broadcasts reach 60 million people in Asia each week, from China to Myanmar, and across the Pacific islands where the United States has been struggling to counter China’s narratives about the world. It furloughed all but 75 of its Washington staff members on Friday, trying to stay on the air while court cases develop on Trump officials’ moves to defund U.S. government-supported media.

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Office of Net Assessment, an internal think-tank. With an annual budget that accounted for a few seconds of Pentagon spending each year, the office tried to think ahead about the challenges the United States would face a decade or two in the future — such as the new capabilities of artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons and the hidden vulnerabilities of supply chains for military contractors.

It was a revered institution, what a Wall Street Journal editorial this past week called “The Office that Won the Cold War.” Mr. Hegseth said in a statement that it would be reconstituted in some unspecified way “in alignment with the Department’s strategic priorities,” though its value was that it challenged conventional thinking about those priorities.

Over at the Department of Homeland Security, a series of cyberdefenses have been stripped away, at a moment when China’s state-backed hackers have been more successful than at any time in recent memory.

Among those dissolved, at least for the time being, is the Cyber Safety Review Board, created on the model of the National Transportation Safety Board, which examines aircraft accidents and tries to extract lessons learned. The cybersecurity board was just beginning to take testimony on how Chinese intelligence bored deep inside America’s largest telecommunications firms, including the system the Justice Department uses to monitor its “lawful intercept” system, which places wiretaps on people suspected of committing crimes or spying — including Chinese spies.

Now the board has been disbanded. No one at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency seems able to say what has happened to the investigation into one of the most successful penetrations of American networks, or who is now responsible for figuring out why American telecommunications firms were caught unawares, for more than a year, by China’s Ministry of State Security.

The list goes on, more evidence that in its first two months the new administration has been devastatingly efficient in tearing things down, but painfully slow to explain how their actions fit into their broader strategy.

All this has the Chinese celebrating. As the Voice of America was being dismantled and fell silent, The Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote that “the so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”

China is still trying to take its measure of the new administration, which is putting new sanctions on Chinese entities that buy Iranian oil, but is also talking about wiping out the CHIPS and Science Act. The law not only provided federal funding to jump-start the production of advanced semiconductors in the United States, but provided billions for advanced work in a range of key technologies, from batteries to quantum computing, that China is subsidizing.

“It’s a contradiction, as the Chinese say, that we are cutting back on our instruments of national power while saying that we are stepping up our competition with Beijing,” said Michael J. Green, chief executive of the United States Study Center at the University of Sydney in Australia. “When we reveal human rights abuses or Chinese misinformation, it’s another form of competition with China. And getting rid of it only creates a vacuum that Beijing is going to try to fill. And we are already seeing that happening.”

The speed of the dismantlement has left many Asia experts a bit stunned, because they know the new aircraft — which Mr. Trump said would be called the F-47, clearly in homage to his own second term — will not contribute to American deterrence for a decade, if it is on time.

“The charge for the United States is to deter war with China without capitulation and to compete effectively across all the areas of soft power,” Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former Republican aide to John McCain in the Senate, said on Friday. “The United States has an array of tools to do this, including humanitarian aid, development assistance, support for democracy abroad, and strategic communications efforts. Strangely, these are the efforts most under threat by the new cost-cutting teams.”

“If it goes too far,” he warned, “it will amount to unilateral disarmament in the world’s most important contest.”

It is hard to find an understandable theme to the cuts; some are based on perceived acts of disloyalty, or old grudges, or a sense that even state-financed media or think tanks are inhabited by anti-Trump liberals.

Sometimes it is especially mystifying. The Office of Net Assessment, for example, was mostly staffed by career civilians or uniformed military, who are asked to think outside the box: How would a prolonged economic downturn in China affect its leaders’ thinking about Taiwan? What happens to warfighting when manned aircraft — like the newly announced jet fighter — can be regularly outmaneuvered by autonomous weapons?

The cuts at Radio Free Asia, which broke many of the biggest stories about the internment camps China has built to “re-educate” Uyghurs in Xinjiang, are among the most mystifying. Its broadcasts have been attacked by Beijing, which has gone to great lengths to censor the reports and broadcast their own narrative, often on YouTube and X.

Bay Fang, the president of Radio Free Asia, a nonprofit that gets its $60 million budget from a congressionally approved disbursement, said in an interview that she doubted the organization was specifically targeted.

DOGE and the White House were gunning for Voice of America, which has hundreds of millions of listeners and readers, and which Mr. Trump has denounced as “the Voice of Radical America.” In one of his executive orders, he said he would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.” (Almost all of Voice of America’s staff of 1,300 journalists have been put on paid leave.)

“You have only to look at the way dictators in the region are celebrating our defunding,” Ms. Fang said in an interview. “We provide a voice that counters their propaganda and shines a light into dark corners they’d rather leave untouched.” The result, she said, is that “we are an essential way that America wins trust among the people living in these authoritarian countries. Shuttering RFA is not only their loss, but America’s.”

Winning trust, however, is hard to quantify. It takes years, and the results are not as easy to demonstrate as showing off a new fighter jet and, in the case of the new F-47, the semiautonomous attack drones that fly alongside.

Radio Free Asia’s budget is so small that Ms. Fang said she was pretty certain the nonprofit was “collateral damage” as the administration moved to defund the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which also supports Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.

The defunding is taking place even before the Senate has confirmed Mr. Trump’s choice to head the global media agency, L. Brent Bozell III, a conservative political activist. He has picked Kari Lake, the pro-MAGA former journalist who lost a Senate race in Arizona, as the new head of Voice of America, but for now she is only a “special adviser” because Mr. Trump fired the board members that could have replaced the current leader.

This administration clearly regards “soft power” as a largely irrelevant concept. But the lack of it leaves a vacuum that Beijing will happily fill.

“It seems self-defeating that while China mounts unrelenting cyberattacks, builds a Navy to defeat the U.S. Pacific fleet, sends ‘wolf-warrior’ diplomats far afield, and created alternatives to the dollar that America pulls inward and closes off avenues of information to the Chinese people,” said Paul Kolbe, a career C.I.A. officer who spent much of his career countering Soviet propaganda and covert operations.

Speaking from Jakarta, Mr. Kolbe answered his own question: “We affirm Chinese beliefs that they are ascendant, and that our decline is accelerating.”

While critics of Mr. Biden questioned his fitness for office, no evidence has emerged that he did not consent to any of the acts bearing his signature.

Yet by the time Mr. Howell landed, his post had gone viral. Within days, the notion that shadowy deep state operatives had been secretly running the country instead of Mr. Biden, using a mechanical contraption to achieve their diabolical aims, had erupted into a furor.

An autopen is a machine that uses a real pen to copy a person’s actual signature. Presidents and other politicians have used such devices for decades with little public interest. In the first two months of this year, the term was mentioned a total of 49 times on television, radio and podcasts in the United States, according to data from the media tracker Critical Mention.

It was uttered 6,188 times on March 17 alone.

Right-wing talk radio, podcasts and cable news shows have now devoted hundreds of segments to the arcana of wet signatures and autopen technology. They are particularly focused on Mr. Biden’s signatures on his pardons of political allies like Senator Adam Schiff, the California Democrat, as well as his son Hunter Biden. And they claim that the former president was mentally impaired and unaware of what documents he was being asked to endorse.

President Trump himself has brought the issue up repeatedly over the past week, decrying Mr. Biden’s use of the autopen. He claimed without providing evidence that Mr. Biden had not authorized the pardons, posting on Truth Social that they were “void, vacant, and of no further effect.”

Although Mr. Trump himself has acknowledged using an autopen at times, he raised the question again on Friday during an Oval Office news conference: “The person that operated the autopen, I think we ought to find out who that was because I guess that was the real president.”

Mr. Biden hasn’t commented on whether or not he personally signed every pardon, although Neera Tanden, a senior aide during his administration, posted online this week that “there’s a lot by autopen in every administration.” A spokeswoman for Mr. Biden did not respond to a request for comment.

There are no federal statutes that prohibit the use of the device, and two decades ago a Justice Department memo confirmed that presidents could “direct a subordinate to affix the president’s signature to” bills. A prior memo, from 1929, stated that a pardon “need not have the president’s autograph,” and legal experts have cast serious doubts on a president’s ability to rescind another president’s pardons.

The rapid transformation of a speculative and legally shaky hypothesis, concocted by pro-Trump activists into a talking point endorsed at the highest level of government, illustrates the extraordinary efficiency of today’s right-wing media environment.

“It does show how corrupted our information ecosystem is that something like this can gain attention,” said Welton Chang, co-founder and chief executive of Pyrra Technologies, a digital threat company that tracks trends on social media.

It is not exactly clear where the conspiracy theory took root, but Pyrra noticed a solitary posting on the 4chan message board referring to autopens and Mr. Biden back in October, even before he granted the pardons in question.

By then, Mr. Howell’s Oversight Project, started in 2022 by the Heritage Foundation with a mission of “increasing aggressive oversight of the Biden administration,” was already deep into its research.

Early last summer, Jason Chaffetz, a former congressman who is now a visiting fellow with the Oversight Project, floated the idea of gathering copies of presidential documents signed by Mr. Biden to see if the signatures matched up.

“It just was a suspicion that perhaps all of those were not authentic,” Mr. Chaffetz said in an interview. “This is the kind of thing we dive into.”

A dozen staff members began compiling documents from the Federal Register and requesting copies of resolutions and bills from Congress from the National Archives, Mr. Howell said. But after Mr. Biden dropped out of the race in late June, the project felt less urgent.

That changed when Andrew Bailey, the attorney general of Missouri, posted a three-page letter on X on March 5 calling for an “investigation into Mr. Biden’s mental capacity in his final days in office.” It suggested, without any direct evidence, that members of the former president’s staff exploited him and pushed through executive orders and pardons he wouldn’t have endorsed.

Mr. Howell said he didn’t know Mr. Bailey and had no warning the letter was coming. Still, it dovetailed so perfectly with the signature research he had already conducted that he couldn’t believe his luck.

“It was No. 8 on the to-do list,” Mr. Howell said. “Then A.G. Bailey drops his letter and it shoots to the top.”

Mr. Howell’s thread on X racked up more than three million views. Within hours, the subject was being widely discussed on conservative talk radio, which often mines social media for topics.

By the next day, it had leaped to popular podcasts such as the one hosted by Glenn Beck, who has 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube, and from there to cable news, with the Fox Business Network host Elizabeth MacDonald asking, “Should we figure out who controlled Biden’s autopen and who controlled Joe Biden’s presidency?”

With public interest growing, the Oversight Project pushed on. “We determined that the most legally vulnerable documents were the pardons,” said Mr. Howell, who published an analysis of signatures on five pardons late last week.

Those pardons, issued in the final full day of Mr. Biden’s term and designed to pre-empt potential prosecution, had infuriated Mr. Trump. The swirling questions about Mr. Biden’s signatures caught his attention.

“You don’t use autopen. No. 1, it is disrespectful to the office. No. 2, maybe it’s not even valid, because who is getting him to sign?” Mr. Trump said during a news conference at the Justice Department a day after the Oversight Project published its findings on the pardons.

Some critics, including the conservative legal scholar Jonathan Turley, have challenged the idea that the pardons could be nullified, noting that presidents are permitted to use autopen and that there has been no concrete evidence of a conspiracy to circumvent Mr. Biden’s will. “This dog will not hunt,” Mr. Turley wrote on X.

Mr. Howell said the only feasible way to test that question was in the courts, which would require the Justice Department’s charging someone who had received a pardon from Mr. Biden with a crime.

“It’s a rocket ship to the Supreme Court if that happens,” Mr. Howell said, adding that his work is far from over. This week, he published a 29-page legal memo on autopens. He also pledged to use the Freedom of Information Act to seek out more documents signed by Mr. Biden and is considering hiring forensic handwriting experts to review each one.

“We’re loading up the cannon for all sorts of things,” he said.

‘People like me are having conversations about tightening our purse strings.’

Veronica McCloud, 63, from Charleston, S.C.

Veronica McCloud, a retired teacher and Kamala Harris supporter, was trying to remain open — even agreeing that the federal government needed trimming.

Then came the bumps, that to her, struck a similar theme: drastic action without sufficient explanation.

She quickly grew frustrated with the handling of mass cuts to the federal work force and the lack of specifics about claims of government fraud and waste.

Ms. McCloud was also troubled by what she saw as Mr. Trump’s open defiance of federal deportation court orders. “I think that you should have to follow the judge’s orders. I would have to,” she said. “I think it is our civic duty.”

But her biggest fears centered on inflation and the uncertain economy, and were exacerbated in part by Mr. Trump’s new trade policies. She wasn’t sure his strategy would work in the long term and worried the country might plunge into a recession.

With a fixed retirement income, Ms. McCloud was reconsidering her spending habits. She started purchasing less expensive meats and snacks, and cooked more at home. And to save gas, she has canceled day trips to visit friends, catching up by phone instead.

She said Mr. Trump didn’t make “perfectly clear” what possible hardships the American people might face.

“People who are well off, they can handle it — but people like me are having conversations about tightening our purse strings,” she said, adding, “That’s causing anxiety.”

— Audra D. S. Burch

‘He’s not just treading water.’

Dave Abdallah, 59, from Dearborn Heights, Mich.

The abrupt end of the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and who was to blame were top of mind for Dave Abdallah.

“I’ll put it on the current administration,” he said, noting that he believed that the White House could have demanded the Israeli government not reopen hostilities that recently killed over 400 people in Gaza.

Mr. Abdallah, a real estate agent, didn’t see why Mr. Trump couldn’t have put the same kind of pressure on Israel that he was putting on allies like Canada and Mexico with tariffs.

The war pushed Mr. Abdallah to cast his vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, because he did not like how President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had backed Israel. He said he would have voted for Mr. Trump but didn’t trust him to handle things better.

This week, he said, proved that he was right.

What Mr. Abdallah does like so far, albeit with reservations, is that “he’s taking action.” He added, “He’s not just treading water.”

But Mr. Abdallah doesn’t like Mr. Trump’s battles against federal court rulings, noting that flights carrying migrants to Central America were not turned around midair, defying an order. The administration said the order came too late.

“When a president, or a judge, or a senator, or a congressman or woman, feels that they are above the law or above the country, that is wrong,” he said.

Mr. Abdallah is especially worried about the effect of tariffs on the automobile industry and Michigan’s economy.

“The tariffs are just too extreme,” he said.

— Kurt Streeter

‘I’m still not on board necessarily with how he’s addressing it.’

Darlene Alfieri, 55, from Erie, Pa.

Many of the glass vases in Darlene Alfieri’s flower shop come from China, so she has known the effects of tariffs firsthand. The higher costs are “not too God-awful bad” — about a 10 percent hike — but enough that she has asked people to return unused vases so she can keep prices down.

None of this was ideal but neither was the status quo, Ms. Alfieri said, when she felt that so many other countries were taking advantage of the United States in their trade policies.

“I think the things that he’s trying to address need to be addressed,” she said of Mr. Trump’s tariffs. “I’m still not on board necessarily with how he’s addressing it, because I don’t think they’re giving out enough accurate, detailed information. I am a person who needs the details.”

Ms. Alfieri said she understood that sacrifices were needed, and she was willing to endure some short-term disruption. But she would welcome a little more communication about what the country may be in for.

“I think he’ll end up making it better, but I think it’s gonna get worse before it gets better,” she said. Maybe not worse, she clarified, but certainly the country would be different. And sometimes, she said, it’s hard to know right away whether big changes were good or bad.

But the good thing about democracy, she felt, was that in four years, the country would get to assess matters. “We get to re-evaluate and say, ‘OK, so he’s done these things,’” she said. “‘Do we want to keep going with this?’”

— Campbell Robertson

‘Anything and everything he does, they’re against it. That probably bothers me more than anything.’

Perry Hunter, 55, from Sellersburg, Ind.

To Perry Hunter, people have been outraged over Mr. Trump’s recent actions just because they don’t like him, and not, he felt, over whether Mr. Trump had done something unconstitutional or unnecessary.

“The division is getting stronger because those that oppose him are so emotionally invested, and anything and everything he does, they’re against it,” he said. “That probably bothers me more than anything.”

Mr. Perry, a high school teacher, argued that there appeared to him to be gray areas in what Mr. Trump was doing, pointing to the president’s recent deportation, against a judge’s orders, of about 200 people, including members accused of being in a Venezuelan gang. Mr. Hunter said that he was struggling with the fact that those who were deported were most likely not being afforded due process, and he added that the administration needed to be transparent about the details so the public could consider whether it had done something wrong.

He felt strongly that Mr. Trump shouldn’t defy judges because separation of powers was important. The president needed to “go about doing it constitutionally,” he said.

There have been moments, though, when he has felt Mr. Trump was in the right. Mr. Hunter said that, in light of pro-Palestinian protests, he had been heartened to see how the administration punished Columbia University financially. That came after the administration accused the institution of failing to protect students and faculty members “from antisemitic violence and harassment.”

He said he thought Mr. Trump’s cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university made sense. (On Friday, Columbia agreed to yield to many of the administration’s most substantial demands.)

“That was one of the things that had me lean towards President Trump because I don’t like discrimination,” he said.

— Juliet Macur

‘The beauty of this country is, no matter what, everybody gets a fair chance.’

Hamid Chaudhry, 53, from Reading, Pa.

In the weeks after the election, Hamid Chaudhry saw a notable jump in traffic at the farmers’ market he runs. This burst of spending seemed to reinforce his decision to vote for Mr. Trump.

But more recently foot traffic has been down and people haven’t been spending as much as they were in December and January.

“It’s a little concerning but not the doom and gloom,” Mr. Chaudhry said. He was willing to wait and see.

He believed that the United States had long been exploited by other countries’ trade practices and that it was well past time to get tough, even if that meant risking a recession. “It’s a game of chicken,” he said.

But while his faith in Mr. Trump’s fiscal management remained, so did his concerns about his approach to immigration. Though he still supported Mr. Trump generally, Mr. Chaudhry was troubled by the news that scores of immigrants had been sent to a prison in El Salvador without the opportunity to contest the accusation that they were members of the Venezuelan gang.

“The beauty of this country is, no matter what, everybody gets a fair chance,” he said.

— Campbell Robertson

‘He’s not above the law.’

Tali Jackont, 57, from Los Angeles

The return of the dozens of Israeli hostages still held by Hamas was of primary concern for Tali Jackont, an educator in Los Angeles who was raised in Israel.

She appreciated that Mr. Trump recently hosted freed hostages at the White House and that he seemed to show a certain level of concern for them.

But she also linked Mr. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric against Hamas to how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, whom she opposes, later broke the cease-fire.

None of it was necessary, said Ms. Jackont, a longtime Democrat who voted for Mr. Trump partly in the hopes he would bring peace to the Middle East. And she felt that now the hostages were perhaps more endangered than ever.

The president had her worried about other issues, too. For example, she found troubling how Mr. Trump had blasted judges who had ruled against him.

“He’s not above the law,” she said.

But Ms. Jackont approved of his effort to streamline the federal government and felt good about his moves to upend the education system.

And the economy?

“I trust him,” she said, adding that she felt the president knew more about “the economy than any other area.”

Ms. Jackont said she could accept it if Mr. Trump’s plans led to a significant slowdown — but not for too long. She noted the economy began struggling years ago, during his first administration.

But if a recession lasted, for example, three years, she would feel differently.

“I’ll be very disappointed,” she said. “Super-disappointed. I mean, super, super, super.”

— Kurt Streeter

Idaho ranchers accused of polluting wetlands.

Under President Biden, the Environmental Protection Agency took a tough approach on environmental enforcement by investigating companies for pollution, hazardous waste and other violations. The Trump administration, on the other hand, has said it wants to shift the E.P.A.’s mission from protecting the air, water and land to one that seeks to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”

As a result, the future of long-running investigations like these suddenly looks precarious. A new E.P.A. memo lays out the latest changes.

E.P.A. enforcement actions will no longer “shut down any stage of energy production,” the March 12 memo says, unless there’s an imminent health threat. It also curtails a drive started by President Biden to address the disproportionately high levels of pollution facing poor communities nationwide. “No consideration,” the memo says, “may be given to whether those affected by potential violations constitute minority or low-income populations.”

Those changes, said Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, would “allow the agency to better focus on its core mission and powering the Great American Comeback.”

David Uhlmann, who led enforcement at the agency under the Biden administration, said the memo amounted to the agency announcing that “if companies, especially in the oil and gas sector, break the law, this E.P.A. does not intend to hold them accountable.”

That would “put communities across the United States in harm’s way,” he said, particularly poorer or minority areas that often suffer the worst pollution.

Molly Vaseliou, a spokesperson for the E.P.A., said she could not comment on ongoing investigations or cases. The Department of Justice, which has faced its own staff and budget cuts, declined to comment.

Conservatives have argued that E.P.A. regulations have hurt economic growth and investment. “Bold deregulatory action at E.P.A. will unleash American energy and reduce costs for American families,” said Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, the anti-tax organization, in a statement. “The government’s expensive web of overregulation is being unwoven.”

To be sure, enforcement cases brought by the Biden administration are still winding their way through courts. On Wednesday, the Japanese truck manufacturer Hino Motors pleaded guilty to submitting false emissions-testing data in violation of the Clean Air Act and agreed to pay more than $1.6 billion in fines stemming from a probe first opened by California in 2019.

At the same time, a wider reframing of the purpose of the E.P.A. is underway. The agency was created a half-century ago, during the Republican presidential administration of Richard M. Nixon, with a mandate to protect the environment and public health.

Last week, the Trump administration said it would repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, and protections for wetlands.

In a video posted to X, the social media site, Mr. Zeldin said his agency’s mission was now to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.”

Project 2025, a blueprint for overhauling the federal government that was produced by the Heritage Foundation and written by many who are serving in the Trump administration, goes further, seeking to eliminate the E.P.A. office that carries out enforcement and compliance work. Mr. Zeldin has also said he intends to cut the agency’s spending by 65 percent and eliminate its scientific research arm.

Some on-site inspections, which form a vital part of enforcement investigations, are already being delayed or suspended, according to two people who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are unauthorized to speak publicly. Investigations related to air pollution were particularly vulnerable, they said.

There has already been one significant reversal. This month the Trump administration dropped a federal lawsuit against Denka Performance Elastomer, a chemical manufacturer accused of releasing high levels of a likely carcinogen from its Louisiana plant.

The Biden administration filed the lawsuit after regulators determined that emissions of chloroprene, used to make synthetic rubber, were contributing to health concerns in a region along the Mississippi River with some of the highest cancer risk in the United States.

“I honestly wonder if the malefactors are going to give us more burning rivers,” said William K. Reilly, E.P.A. administrator under President George H.W. Bush, speaking to reporters this month. He was referring to a fire on the polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio in the late 1960s that helped galvanize environmental awareness.

And while the E.P.A. said it remained committed to addressing imminent health threats, the risks from pollution tend to play out over longer periods of time, in the form of increased rates of cancer, birth defects or long-term respiratory and cardiac harm, said Ann E. Carlson, a professor of environmental law at the UCLA School of Law.

“The memorandum is essentially a wink, wink to coal and oil interests that they can pollute with what may be close to impunity,” she said.

That would be a stark reversal after the Biden administration had worked to build up the agency’s enforcement work. In 2024, the E.P.A. concluded 1,851 civil cases and collected $1.7 billion in administrative and judicial penalties, both the highest levels since 2017. That same year, 121 criminal defendants were charged.

The agency had also prioritized policing greenhouse gas emissions, toxic “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, as well as the disposal of coal ash, the toxic material left over from burning coal.

The new Trump E.P.A. will pull back both from a focus on coal ash disposal, and from emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas facilities, the recent memo said.

Other Biden-era enforcement settlements are waiting to be finalized, including one involving the decades-old HF Sinclair refinery in Artesia, N.M., accused of causing some of the worst concentrations of cancer-causing benzene in the country.

The E.P.A., together with the Department of Justice and the state of New Mexico, proposed a $35 million settlement in the final days of the Biden administration as part of an effort to protect people living in Artesia, a city of 13,000 people with a long history of pollution. HF Sinclair, which processes about 100,000 barrels of crude oil a day in Artesia, was also required to invest in fixes at the refinery that would reduce emissions of hazardous air pollutants.

So far, the Trump administration has not moved to finalize that settlement.

In a statement, the Texas-based operator said it had already invested in fixes and monitoring to address the allegations.

The New Mexico Department of Environmental Quality said it supported moving forward with the settlement “as expeditiously as possible,” adding that, “due to the change in administration at the federal level, timing is unclear.”

Investigations just getting started face even greater uncertainties, because the agency has leeway not to follow up on violations.

In March 2023, E.P.A. officials discovered leaks and other alleged violations of pollution laws during an inspection at a refinery and chemicals plant operated in Norco, La., by Shell, the Dutch oil and gas giant.

According to a notice later issued by the E.P.A., and obtained by the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group, one chemical storage tank was found with “severe pitting across the entire fixed roof, as well as cracks/openings with detectable emissions.”

The E.P.A. has declined to say whether investigations were continuing. Shell declined to comment.

Some cases may be shaped by wider changes.

In 2021, E.P.A. inspectors found signs that a cattle ranch in Bruneau, Idaho, had disrupted protected wetlands by constructing road crossings and by mining sand and gravel from a local river. The agency sued, alleging violations of the Clean Water Act, in particular a bitterly contested rule adopted by the Obama administration known as “waters of the United States,” which extended existing federal protections to smaller bodies of water such as rivers, waterways and wetlands.

A federal judge dismissed the original case after a 2023 Supreme Court ruling curtailed the federal government’s authority to regulate smaller bodies of water. President Biden’s E.P.A. filed an amended lawsuit in September.

Last week, the E.P.A. said it would rewrite the rule to lower permitting costs for developers.

Ivan London, an attorney with the Mountain States Legal Foundation who is helping to defend the ranchers in the case, said that he expected his clients’ arguments to prevail regardless of the E.P.A.’s new rule-making. The ranchers argue that the E.P.A. has no authority to regulate the wetlands in question.

Still, the current Trump administration would certainly side more with the defendants, and that could affect the case, he said. “I’ve been surprised before, and I’m sure I’ll be surprised again,” he said.

This spring, Mr. Musk is returning to that Badger State playbook — in an entirely different political world.

Mr. Musk’s chosen candidate is a hopeful for the State Supreme Court, Brad Schimel, whom the billionaire barely knows. Mr. Musk has become a main character in the country’s politics as a White House super-aide. He is now subject to its ethics rules but is simultaneously throwing millions of dollars into pro-Trump causes. And Democrats are running hard against him and his government-gutting effort in the April 1 election.

If Mr. Musk succeeds, conservatives will retake a 4-to-3 majority on the court and put themselves in a position to push the battleground state rightward on issues like abortion rights, labor rights and congressional maps. In a sign of the race’s importance for conservatives, Mr. Trump endorsed Judge Schimel on Friday night.

“Musk saw the benefit of his involvement in Wisconsin” in 2024, former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, said in an interview.

Working with Keith Gilkes, the longtime head of Mr. Walker’s political operation who also oversaw Mr. Musk’s work in Wisconsin last year, the former governor said he had begun late last year to strategize on how to make the billionaire pay attention to the court race — and pay for part of it. He drafted a plan that he said Mr. Gilkes circulated to Mr. Musk’s team and others.

Those Wisconsin Republicans couldn’t have planned for the additional incentive that soon presented itself: A conservative-controlled court could be in a position to issue a Musk-friendly decision in a lawsuit from his electric-car company, Tesla, challenging Wisconsin’s law prohibiting vehicle manufacturers from owning dealerships. On social media, Mr. Musk began to show interest in the Wisconsin court election eight days after Tesla filed the lawsuit in January.

The pitch from Mr. Walker and Mr. Gilkes? Run it back. “You were effective in Wisconsin, and you can be effective in this race again in Wisconsin,” Mr. Walker said.

And so Mr. Musk is largely sticking with the formula that worked last time: door-knockers, lots of money and even a similar petition meant to identify and turn out conservative voters.

Mr. Musk’s super PAC, America PAC, has laid out $6.6 million so far. The group has assembled a canvassing operation of over 500 employees who have knocked on doors, with about 40 paid active canvassers in the Green Bay area, roughly 70 in the Madison area and more in Milwaukee and rural parts of the state, according to three people briefed on the operation. The super PAC has told its canvassing firms to cut their worst performers. The group declined to comment on its internal workings.

Canvassers, most of them paid about $25 an hour or $1.50 a door, have flooded Wisconsin neighborhoods wearing white “AMERICA” lanyards with a badge that shows a photo of Mr. Trump raising a fist after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., last summer.

The group has knocked on over a million doors during this blitz, some of the people said. This week, the super PAC informed several of its door-knocking firms that it was cutting back on its overall targets in what Mr. Musk’s group described to them as a reallocation of resources.

The race may be different, but the script is still Trumpy: Canvassers distribute literature that says a vote for Judge Schimel, who currently sits on a Waukesha County circuit court, would “keep President Trump’s agenda moving forward.” The brochures also feature a QR code that sends voters to a website where they can check their registration status, find early-voting locations and request mail-in ballots. Mr. Musk’s super PAC is again hoping to turn out voters who don’t always make it to the polls during early voting, which began Tuesday, or on Election Day.

The election is also more Musky: America PAC’s canvassers are leaning more into the billionaire’s celebrity than they did during the presidential race.

“I am with America PAC, an organization run by Elon Musk,” reads part of one question that Wisconsin canvassers are reciting, according to a script seen by The New York Times. Later, they ask, “Can President Trump and Elon Musk count on you to vote for Brad Schimel?”

People involved in Mr. Musk’s 2024 outreach considered their Wisconsin organization among their better-run efforts, and the field operation is led by the same strategists. But Mr. Musk’s group jumped into this year’s court contest months later than it entered the presidential race, giving itself only six weeks or so to help Judge Schimel.

One difference from 2024: A nonprofit group that Mr. Musk has previously backed, Building America’s Future, has spent about $4.5 million on the race, mostly on television. The group, which does not have to disclose its donors, claims to have improved Judge Schimel’s polling by enough that the conservative side’s ground game could tip the balance.

“With people like Elon coming in, we’re pretty much matching the Democrats dollar for dollar, and that never happens in Supreme Court races,” said Scott Presler, a conservative activist whose work Mr. Musk supported with $1 million in Pennsylvania in 2024 and who is now involved in Wisconsin. Mr. Musk’s first sign of interest in the race was his sharing of a social media post from Mr. Presler in January.

Mr. Presler added, “Elon is allowing for a playing field, which is all we ask for.”

Another, perhaps unsurprising, difference from 2024: Mr. Musk has not appeared quite as excited about Judge Schimel as he was about Mr. Trump.

On X, Mr. Musk has expressed alarm about the involvement of the liberal billionaire George Soros in Wisconsin politics, and about how a liberal-controlled court could force a redrawing of the state’s congressional map that would help Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections. When he shared the post from Mr. Presler, Mr. Musk said it was “very important” for conservatives to win “to prevent voting fraud” in future elections. The race is seen as a tossup, and there is no reliable public polling on such elections.

But Mr. Musk has not reposted viral content about Judge Schimel or his liberal opponent, Susan Crawford, and his posts about the race are far more sporadic. Democrats have tried to paint Judge Schimel as a stooge of the billionaire, and the judge has tried to distance himself from Mr. Musk.

Mr. Trump, of course, has kept Mr. Musk rather close.

And that is perhaps the most significant difference from last November: Mr. Musk is no longer a private citizen. He is Mr. Trump’s right-hand man in trying to dismantle significant parts of federal agencies, working as a “special government employee” in the White House.

Never before has a senior White House aide funded a super PAC that promotes the political agenda of his boss.

The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities while they are on the job, but it allows almost all of them to donate to political campaigns. White House aides also frequently play roles in presidents’ political operations, and doing so is legal as long as the work does not occur while they are acting in their official capacity, said Kedric Payne, a government ethics expert at the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group.

“There’s no law that prohibits somebody from their First Amendment right of giving a contribution,” Mr. Payne said. When Mr. Musk is not working for the White House, Mr. Payne added, “he is a citizen that can engage in this political and campaign activity.”

Since Mr. Musk joined the Trump administration, his super PAC has defended his government work and directed his supporters to follow his progress on his social media platform.

The super PAC sent two emails this week to its list of supporters encouraging them to look at the website and X account of the Department of Government Efficiency.

On Friday, the super PAC went a step further: It began selling DOGE-branded tumblers, hats and T-shirts for up to $35 a pop.

Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.