President Trump made an unusually sharp appeal to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday, calling on him to stop his bombing campaign in Ukraine and agree to a peace deal after the deadliest attack on Kyiv in nearly a year.

“Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE!” Mr. Trump wrote on social media.

Russia’s missile attack came a day after the Trump administration threatened to abandon peace talks if Ukraine did not accept a U.S. peace proposal that heavily favored Russia.

Mr. Trump’s comments were striking because he has mostly avoided even mild criticism of Mr. Putin in his handling of the talks so far. Instead, he has directed most of his anger toward President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, calling him a “dictator” and describing him as the main impediment to a peace deal.

While Mr. Trump made clear he was running out of patience for the two sides to agree on a peace deal, he also sought to pre-emptively divert blame should the negotiations fall apart, a sign that he is perhaps more pessimistic than he was when he regained the presidency brimming with confidence about his talent as a negotiator.

The Russia-Ukraine war, which Mr. Trump had previously said he could resolve in “24 hours,” was now, he suggested, a matter of great difficulty and complexity.

“This isn’t my war,” Mr. Trump said during a Thursday Oval Office meeting with Norway’s prime minister. “It’s Biden’s war.”

Mr. Trump refused to draw a moral distinction between Russia and Ukraine, or to blame Mr. Putin for his invasion — something he has repeatedly refused to do in his second term.

He reiterated, though, that he was “not happy” with Russia’s deadly attack on Kyiv overnight, which came as the Trump administration demanded that Mr. Zelensky accept a peace settlement that would grant Russia essentially all the territory it had gained in the war, while offering Ukraine tenuous security assurances from the Europeans.

The plan, which would also block Ukraine from ever joining NATO, was rejected by Mr. Zelensky, infuriating Mr. Trump.

Pressed about what concessions Russia had offered, Mr. Trump said that it had agreed to stop “taking the whole country.” Mr. Putin’s military has failed to make any significant territorial gains recently.

Mr. Trump added that it would be hard for Ukraine to gain back the territory it had lost during Russian invasions that took place during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. Ukraine getting back Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, would be “a very difficult thing to do,” he said. But Mr. Trump claimed that he was “using a lot of pressure” behind the scenes on both Russia and Ukraine.

Senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have signaled that Mr. Trump is getting impatient and might walk away from the negotiations if Russia and Ukraine do not come to an agreement soon. If the United States withdraws from the talks, and cuts off its supply of weapons to the Ukrainian military, Mr. Putin would have a greater chance of capturing more of the country.

When a reporter on Thursday asked Mr. Trump whether he would impose new sanctions on Russia after the overnight bombing of Kyiv, Mr. Trump declined to say, adding only that he should be asked again in a week. He said that he wanted to see what progress his team could make through negotiations.

Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, also met with Mr. Trump on Thursday at the White House, to discuss the war in Ukraine and an upcoming NATO summit. Mr. Rutte said afterward that he had a “very good meeting” with Mr. Trump, and that he did not think the United States would walk away from the Russia-Ukraine talks.

While Mr. Trump has said he believes Mr. Putin wants to make peace, Mr. Rutte said on Thursday that he did “not know” whether that was the case.

“There is something on the table now, I think, where Ukrainians are really playing ball, and I think the ball is clearly in the Russian court,” Mr. Rutte added.

Mr. Trump on Thursday also raised expectations for another difficult diplomatic effort his administration is undertaking this weekend with a hostile foreign government, when an American negotiating team begins technical talks with the Iranians in Oman.

“I think we’re doing very well on that, an agreement with Iran,” Mr. Trump said.

The Israeli government has been pushing Mr. Trump to support a military campaign that would destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. The president has so far withheld his support for Israel’s mission, preferring to give diplomacy a chance. But he has also insisted that he will never allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.

During President Trump’s first term, Ukraine worried that Mr. Trump might recognize Russian control over Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula Moscow forcibly seized in early 2014.

As a candidate, Mr. Trump had said he would “take a look” at the matter, even though the Obama administration and America’s Western allies had rejected Russia’s annexation of the strategic territory. Mr. Trump even mused that “the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia.”

But Mr. Trump never followed through and even doubled down against Moscow. In July 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued an official “Crimea Declaration” pledging that the nonrecognition policy would remain “until Ukraine’s territorial integrity is restored.”

Now, in his effort to negotiate an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, Mr. Trump is prepared to walk away from that declaration — and more than a decade of American policy.

A new peace proposal the Trump administration offered in London on Wednesday would include U.S. recognition that Crimea is part of Russia, American and European officials said.

Daniel Fried, a former diplomat with extensive experience with Ukraine and Russia, called it the worst element of the Trump proposal, which is widely seen as strongly favoring Moscow’s position in several ways.

It is one thing to halt the fighting along current battle lines without demanding that Russia withdraw from the vast swath of eastern Ukraine it now occupies, Mr. Fried said. Formally acknowledging Russia’s claim to Crimea would be much worse, he said.

“It is perfectly reasonable to accept the reality that for an indefinite period of time parts of Ukraine will be under illegal Russian occupation,” Mr. Fried said. “It is quite another thing to officially recognize a change of borders by force.”

That view echoed Mr. Pompeo’s declaration, which affirmed “a bedrock international principle shared by democratic states: that no country can change the borders of another by force.”

It is unclear how enthusiastic Mr. Trump ever was about such talk from Mr. Pompeo, who was notably more hawkish toward Russia than the president he served. But that view was widely shared in Washington, including by Mr. Pompeo’s eventual successor, Marco Rubio.

As a senator, Mr. Rubio cosponsored a measure in October 2022 barring the United States from recognizing Russian claims to any portion of Ukraine’s land, warning that doing so would “risk establishing a dangerous precedent for other authoritarian regimes, like the Chinese Communist Party, to imitate.” Mr. Rubio and others have long feared that China might be more likely to try taking over Taiwan if it sees the West conceding control of Ukraine to Russia.

The idea of recognizing Crimea as Russian is a total nonstarter for Ukraine and its defenders. On Wednesday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, ruled out the possibility, saying it would violate his country’s Constitution: “There is nothing to talk about. It is our land, the land of the Ukrainian people,” he said.

But Mr. Trump later appeared to draw a distinction between recognition of Crimea as Russian by Ukraine, where public opinion would make that step all but impossible, and by the United States. “Nobody is asking Zelenskyy to recognize Crimea as Russian Territory,” Mr. Trump wrote.

Some analysts believe that Mr. Zelensky and European officials might be able to tolerate such a U.S. position, however much they disagree, if they are not pressed to endorse it.

To some, Mr. Trump’s position — which remains one part of a proposal that could still change — may simply acknowledge facts on the ground.

Eleven years ago, Russian forces responded to a pro-Western revolution in Kyiv by taking over Crimea and staging a referendum there, widely denounced as illegitimate, that endorsed unification.

Since then, Moscow has only entrenched its control. It has built up its military presence, forced out residents opposed to its rule and even constructed a grand bridge connecting Crimea to mainland Russia.

Analysts say recapturing the peninsula would be extremely hard for Ukraine, particularly given that it has been unable to eject Russia from its eastern territories after more than two years of all-out combat.

Crimea is also of particularly high value to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Its port city of Sevastopol, where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based, is a major strategic asset, and was the site of epic battles during World War II and the Crimean War in the mid-19th century.

And while Mr. Putin has suggested that all of Ukraine belongs to Russia, he may feel particular indignant over Crimea, which was part of Russia’s empire for hundreds of years until 1954.

That’s when the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred its control to Kyiv as a gift for the 300th anniversary of Russia’s unification with Ukraine. It was a largely symbolic gesture at a time when Russia and Ukraine were fellow republics within the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991.

Samuel Charap, an analyst and Ukraine specialist at the RAND Corporation, said that Mr. Trump has a track record of granting recognition to long-disputed territorial claims. In 2019, he recognized his close ally Israel’s longtime occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights. And in 2020, Mr. Trump supported Morocco’s 45-year claim to rule Western Sahara in exchange for Morocco’s diplomatic recognition of Israel.

But Mr. Charap questioned the utility of making such a concession to Russia in the case of Crimea.

He cited the precedent of the July 1940 Welles Declaration, in which the acting secretary of state, Sumner Welles, said the United States would never recognize Soviet Russia’s occupation that summer of the Baltic States — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. (Mr. Pompeo cited that statement in his 2018 Crimea Declaration.)

“That didn’t prevent détente, or even a negotiated end to the Cold War,” Mr. Charap said.

Mr. Fried agreed, adding that many in the United States and Europe initially “sneered at the Welles Doctrine” as “a joke.” But he noted that the Baltics were eventually free again, after the Soviet Union collapsed.

“Oops! It turned out to be prescient,” he added.

President Trump issued an executive order on Thursday that will make it easier for the government to fire federal employees who are relatively new to their positions and in a probationary period. His efforts to fire probationary workers earlier this year have led to court-ordered reinstatements that were overturned on appeals. The workers have been in limbo for months. Most are getting paid but on administrative leave.

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For employees who still have jobs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency’s human resources division is offering “career support” sessions, according to a recent email obtained by The New York Times.

“This session is designed to meet you where you are,” the Housing and Urban Development notification said, hinting at the protracted uncertainty that has loomed over most federal employees since President Trump returned to the Oval Office.

The agency did notrespond to questions about how many employees would be offered this workshop or whether those who had been fired or left would be included.

The rapid, indiscriminate job cuts and efforts to pressure workers to resign made by the Trump administration and Elon Musk have rattled the federal work force rattled — which faces the prospect of yet more mass firings in the pursuit of Mr. Trump’s goal to shrink and overhaul the civil service.

The majority of government agencies have yet to announce their latest round of layoffs as part of the administration’s “reduction in force.” Those could come any day.

The Department of Transportation is offering similar workshops to its employees, Politico reported on Tuesday.

Some federal workers said they were insulted by the idea of such sessions, which they read as another attempt by the Trump administration to encourage them to quit their jobs.

One H.U.D. employee said it was disrespectful and confusing, asking why the agency would help its workers prepare to leave.

The employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution, said those who still had jobs had found themselves taking on extra work to cover for those who had left or been terminated.

According to the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources arm, the federal civilian work force had about 2.3 million employees at the beginning of the year. The personnel office has not said how many people are still employed after firings and resignations.

In its first major downsizing effort, the Trump administration abruptly fired around 25,000 probationary workers in February. Those workers have been in employment limbo for months, at the mercy of legal battles that have led to a confusing yo-yo of reinstatements and refirings.

Fired federal workers face a sluggish job market. Cory Stahle, an economist at the job search platform Indeed, said that applications from federal workers significantly increased between the beginning of the year and late March 2025.

“The biggest question surrounding the early efforts to reduce federal head count is whether the labor market can absorb these displaced workers,” Mr. Stahle wrote in an article last month on Indeed’s “Hiring Lab” website. A majority of federal workers are well-educated, he said, and the market has shown less job availability in areas that hire such candidates.

“This suggests that federal workers are likely to face greater challenges in their job search now than they might have a few years ago,” he wrote.

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced on Thursday a grant program to support President Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes, the first concrete step toward realizing one of his central priorities for the 250th anniversary of American independence.

The garden, which was announced during Mr. Trump’s first term, will feature life-size renderings of “250 great individuals from America’s past who have contributed to our cultural, scientific and political heritage,” according to a news release. The endowment is now requesting “preliminary concepts” for individual statues from artists who must be American citizens; those who are selected will receive awards of up to $200,000 per statue, which must be made of marble, granite, bronze, copper or brass.

All submissions must depict figures from a long, eclectic list issued in a previous executive order, which included traditional heroes like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Sacagawea, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Wright brothers alongside figures like Walt Whitman, Kobe Bryant, Julia Child, Johnny Cash and Hannah Arendt. Mr. Trump has also directed that subjects be depicted in a “realistic” manner, with no modernist or abstract designs allowed.

While no site for the garden has been determined, it will be “a public space where Americans can gather to learn about and honor American heroes,” the release said. According to an earlier executive order, responsibility for setting the final list of 250 people lies with Vince Haley, the chair of the president’s Domestic Policy Council, who is also overseeing broader White House efforts related to the 250th anniversary.

The agency’s release confirmed earlier reports that the program would be paid for in part with $34 million committed jointly by the N.E.H. and the National Endowment for the Arts, each of which had a budget of roughly $207 million last year.

The announcement came weeks after a major shake-up at the humanities endowment, which is currently led by Michael McDonald, a longtime employee who became interim director after the previous director, Shelly Lowe, left at Mr. Trump’s direction.

Following visits from employees of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the endowment laid off nearly two-thirds of its staff of about 180 and canceled most existing grants, which had supported museums, historical sites and community projects across the country. (The future of grants at the arts endowment remains unclear.)

The moves have stirred a broad outcry among humanities advocates, who warn that they could undermine state and local programming for the nation’s 250th anniversary. It has also prompted fears that some state humanities councils, particularly in rural states without a significant private philanthropic base, would be forced to shut downentirely.

Shortly before Thursday’s announcement about the Garden of American Heroes, the National Endowment for the Humanities issued a separate update on its funding priorities, saying it seeks to “return to being a responsible steward of taxpayer funds.” All future awards, it said, will be “merit-based, awarded to projects that do not promote extreme ideologies based upon race or gender, and that help to instill an understanding of the founding principles and ideals that make America an exceptional country.”

In another embrace of traditional symbolism, the agency has changed its logo. Instead of a sunburst design from recent years, it reverted to one derived from the Great Seal of the United States, showing an eagle clutching an olive branch and a bundle of arrows.

Ansel Adams, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Muhammad Ali, Luis Walter Alvarez, Susan B. Anthony, Hannah Arendt, Louis Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, Crispus Attucks, John James Audubon, Lauren Bacall, Clara Barton, Todd Beamer, Alexander Graham Bell, Roy Benavidez, Ingrid Bergman, Irving Berlin, Humphrey Bogart, Daniel Boone, Norman Borlaug, William Bradford, Herb Brooks, Kobe Bryant, William F. Buckley Jr., Sitting Bull, Frank Capra, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Carroll, John Carroll, George Washington Carver, Johnny Cash, Joshua Chamberlain, Whittaker Chambers, Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman, Ray Charles, Julia Child, Gordon Chung-Hoon, William Clark, Henry Clay, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Roberto Clemente, Grover Cleveland, Red Cloud, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Nat King Cole, Samuel Colt, Christopher Columbus, Calvin Coolidge, James Fenimore Cooper, Davy Crockett, Benjamin O. Davis Jr., Miles Davis, Dorothy Day, Joseph H. De Castro, Emily Dickinson, Walt Disney, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Jimmy Doolittle, Desmond Doss, Frederick Douglass, Herbert Henry Dow, Katharine Drexel, Peter Drucker, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, Jonathan Edwards, Albert Einstein, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Duke Ellington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Medgar Evers, David Farragut, the Marquis de La Fayette, Mary Fields, Henry Ford, George Fox, Aretha Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, Milton Friedman, Robert Frost, Gabby Gabreski, Bernardo de Gálvez, Lou Gehrig, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Cass Gilbert, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Glenn, Barry Goldwater, Samuel Gompers, Alexander Goode, Carl Gorman, Billy Graham, Ulysses S. Grant, Nellie Gray, Nathanael Greene, Woody Guthrie, Nathan Hale, William Frederick “Bull” Halsey Jr., Alexander Hamilton, Ira Hayes, Hans Christian Heg, Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Henry, Charlton Heston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billie Holiday, Bob Hope, Johns Hopkins, Grace Hopper, Sam Houston, Whitney Houston, Julia Ward Howe, Edwin Hubble, Daniel Inouye, Andrew Jackson, Robert H. Jackson, Mary Jackson, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, Steve Jobs, Katherine Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Chief Joseph, Elia Kazan, Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy, Francis Scott Key, Coretta Scott King, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Russell Kirk, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Knox, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, Harper Lee, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, Meriwether Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, Vince Lombardi, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Clare Boothe Luce, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, George Marshall, Thurgood Marshall, William Mayo, Christa McAuliffe, William McKinley, Louise McManus, Herman Melville, Thomas Merton, George P. Mitchell, Maria Mitchell, William “Billy” Mitchell, Samuel Morse, Lucretia Mott, John Muir, Audie Murphy, Edward Murrow, John Neumann, Annie Oakley, Jesse Owens, Rosa Parks, George S. Patton, Jr., Charles Willson Peale, William Penn, Oliver Hazard Perry, John J. Pershing, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Poling, John Russell Pope, Elvis Presley, Jeannette Rankin, Ronald Reagan, Walter Reed, William Rehnquist, Paul Revere, Henry Hobson Richardson, Hyman Rickover, Sally Ride, Matthew Ridgway, Jackie Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Caesar Rodney, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Betsy Ross, Babe Ruth, Sacagawea, Jonas Salk, John Singer Sargent, Antonin Scalia, Norman Schwarzkopf, Junípero Serra, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Robert Gould Shaw, Fulton Sheen, Alan Shepard, Frank Sinatra, Margaret Chase Smith, Bessie Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jimmy Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilbert Stuart, Anne Sullivan, William Howard Taft, Maria Tallchief, Maxwell Taylor, Tecumseh, Kateri Tekakwitha, Shirley Temple, Nikola Tesla, Jefferson Thomas, Henry David Thoreau, Jim Thorpe, Augustus Tolton, Alex Trebek, Harry S. Truman, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Dorothy Vaughan, C. T. Vivian, John von Neumann, Thomas Ustick Walter, Sam Walton, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, John Washington, John Wayne, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Roger Williams, John Winthrop, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright, Alvin C. York, Cy Young, and Lorenzo de Zavala.

President Trump has ordered the U.S. government to take a major step toward mining vast tracts of the ocean floor, a move that is opposed by nearly all other nations, which consider international waters off limits to this kind of industrial activity.

The executive order, signed Thursday, would circumvent a decades-old treaty that every major coastal nation except the United States has ratified. It is the latest example of the Trump administration’s willingness to disregard international institutions and is likely to provoke an outcry from America’s rivals and allies alike.

The order “establishes the U.S. as a global leader in seabed mineral exploration and development both within and beyond national jurisdiction,” according to a text released by the White House.

Mr. Trump’s order instructs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to expedite permits for companies to mine in both international and U.S. territorial waters.

Parts of the ocean floor are blanketed by potato-size nodules containing valuable minerals like nickel, cobalt and manganese that are essential to advanced technologies that the United States considers critical to its economic and military security, but whose supply chains are increasingly controlled by China.

No commercial-scale seabed mining has ever taken place. The technological hurdles are high, and there have been serious concerns about the environmental consequences.

As a result, in the 1990s most nations agreed to join an independent International Seabed Authority that would govern mining of the ocean floor in international waters. Because the United States isn’t a signatory, the Trump administration is relying on an obscure 1980 law that empowers the federal government to issue seabed mining permits in international waters.

Many nations are eager to see seabed mining become a reality. But until now the prevailing consensus has been that economic imperatives shouldn’t take precedence over the risk that mining could damage the fishing industry and oceanic food chains or could affect the ocean’s essential role in absorbing planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Mr. Trump’s order comes after years of delays at the I.S.A. in setting up a regulatory framework for seabed mining. The authority still has not agreed to a set of rules.

The executive order could pave the way for the Metals Company, a prominent seabed mining company, to receive an expedited permit from NOAA to actively mine for the first time. The publicly traded company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, disclosed in March that it would ask the Trump administration through a U.S. subsidiary for approval to mine in international waters. The company has already spent more than $500 million doing exploratory work.

“We have a boat that’s production-ready,” said Gerard Barron, the company’s chief executive, in an interview on Thursday. “We have a means of processing the materials in an allied friendly partner nation. We’re just missing the permit to allow us to begin.”

Anticipating that mining would eventually be allowed, companies like his have invested heavily in developing technologies to mine the ocean floors. They include ships with huge claws that would extend down to the seabed, as well as autonomous vehicles attached to gargantuan vacuums that would scour the ocean bottom.

Some analysts questioned the need for a rush toward seabed mining, given that there is currently a glut of nickel and cobalt from traditional mining. In addition, manufacturers of electric-vehicle batteries, one of the main markets for the metals, are moving toward battery designs that rely on other elements.

Nevertheless, projections of future demand for the metals generally remain high. And Mr. Trump’s escalating trade war with China threatens to limit American access to some of these critical minerals, which include rare-earth elements that are also found in trace quantities in the seabed nodules.

The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that nodules in a single swath of the Eastern Pacific, known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, contain more nickel, cobalt and manganese than all terrestrial reserves combined. That area, in the open ocean between Mexico and Hawaii, is about half the size of the continental United States.

The Metals Company’s contract sites are in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, where the ocean is on average about 2.5 miles deep. The company would be the first to apply for an exploitation permit under the 1980 law.

Mr. Barron blamed an “environmental activist takeover” of the I.S.A. for its delays in establishing a rule book that his company could have played by, leading it to apply directly to the U.S. government instead.

In a statement provided to The New York Times last month, a NOAA spokeswoman, Maureen O’Leary, said that the existing process under U.S. law provided for “a thorough environmental impact review, interagency consultations and opportunity for public comment.”

Under the 1994 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, nations have exclusive economic rights over waters 200 nautical miles from their coasts, but international waters are under I.S.A. jurisdiction. Since the Law of the Sea went into effect, the State Department has sent representatives to meetings at the Seabed Authority’s headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, creating the impression that the United States intended to honor the terms of the treaty, even though the Senate never formally ratified it.

More than 30 countries have called for a delay or moratorium on the start of seabed mining. An array of automakers and tech companies including BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Apple, Google and Samsung have pledged not to use seabed minerals. Representative Ed Case of Hawaii in January introduced the American Seabed Protection Act, which would prohibit NOAA from issuing licenses or permits for seafloor mining activities.

I.S.A. negotiators have spent more than a decade drafting the mining rule book, which would cover everything from environmental rules to royalty payments. Despite a pledge to finalize it by this year, negotiators seemed unlikely to meet that deadline.

Nevertheless, other major world powers including China, Russia, India and several European countries — which have generally supported moving quickly to mine in international waters — objected to the Metals Company’s intention to obtain a permit from the U.S. government.

Much of the hesitation to mine the seabed comes from how little it has been studied by scientists. Polymetallic nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, for instance, lie in a cold, still, pitch-black world inhabited by organisms that marine biologists have encountered only on infrequent missions.

“We think about half the species that live in that area are dependent on the nodules for some part of their development,” said Matthew Gianni, a co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition.

The ways companies are proposing to mine would essentially destroy those ecosystems, Mr. Gianni said, and the plumes of sediment caused by the mining could spread out over wider areas, smothering others.

The Metals Company, which has conducted its own environmental research for a decade, has said those concerns are overblown. “We believe we have sufficient knowledge to get started and prove we can manage environmental risks,” Mr. Barron said in the news release last month.

Reaching the deep ocean is expensive and technologically complex, not entirely unlike traveling to another planet. “Mankind has only scratched the surface,” said Beth Orcutt, a microbiologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. The deep sea covers roughly 70 percent of the Earth.

Disturbing deep-sea ecosystems, remote as they may seem, could have ripple effects far and wide.

“The ecosystems themselves are really important in the major global cycles that allow the ocean to be productive and to create fish and shellfish and feed people,” said Lisa Levin, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “And all of those ecosystems are interconnected, so if you destroy one, we still probably don’t even understand what happens to the others in many ways.”

The biggest consequence might be losing entire ecosystems before scientists have a chance to understand them. That would be a loss of the kind of science that can fuel unexpected discoveries, like new drugs or new insights into how life formed on Earth or could form on other planets.

“If we want to mine the deep sea, we have to be willing to give up those ecosystems,” Dr. Levin said.

Eric Lipton contributed reporting.

The National Weather Service will resume translating its forecasts into other languages, its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced on Thursday. A contract with a company that used artificial intelligence to translate critical warnings into Spanish, Chinese and several other languages lapsed earlier this month amid larger cuts across the department. The translations, which offered life-saving information in emergencies, are expected to be in operation again by Monday.

The director of the National Science Foundation, Sethuraman Panchanathan, announced his resignation on Thursday afternoon. In a statement, Panchanathan, who was nominated by President Trump in 2019 and served as director for five years, stopped short of directly addressing the turmoil that has plagued the agency in the weeks since President Trump’s inauguration.

Panchanathan has faced criticism for the flurry of changes in the agency under the Trump administration, including staff firings, fears of steep budget cuts and the termination of hundreds of research grants.

“I have done all I can to advance the critical mission of the agency and feel that it is time for me to pass the baton to new leadership,” Panchanathan said in his statement. “This is a pivotal moment for our nation in terms of global competitiveness,” he said, adding, “We must not lose our competitive edge.”

President Trump and Elon Musk promised taxpayers big savings, maybe even a “DOGE dividend” check in their mailboxes, when the Department of Government Efficiency was let loose on the federal government. Now, as he prepares to step back from his presidential assignment to cut bureaucratic fat, Mr. Musk has said without providing details that DOGE is likely to save taxpayers only $150 billion.

That is about 15 percent of the $1 trillion he pledged to save, less than 8 percent of the $2 trillion in savings he had originally promised and a fraction of the nearly $7 trillion the federal government spent in the 2024 fiscal year.

The errors and obfuscations underlying DOGE’s claims of savings are well documented. Less known are the costs Mr. Musk incurred by taking what Mr. Trump called a “hatchet” to government and the resulting firings, agencylockouts and building seizures that mostly wound up in court.

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that studies the federal work force, has used budget figures to produce a rough estimate that firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers will cost upward of $135 billion this fiscal year. At the Internal Revenue Service, a DOGE-driven exodus of 22,000 employees would cost about $8.5 billion in revenue in 2026 alone, according to figures from the Budget Lab at Yale University. The total number of departures is expected to be as many as 32,000.

Neither of these estimates includes the cost to taxpayers of defending DOGE’s moves in court. Of about 200 lawsuits and appeals related to Mr. Trump’s agenda, at least 30 implicate the department.

“Not only is Musk vastly overinflating the money he has saved, he is not accounting for the exponentially larger waste that he is creating,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service. “He’s inflicted these costs on the American people, who will pay them for many years to come.”

Mr. Stier and other experts on the federal work force said it did not have to be this way. Federal law and previous government shutdowns offered Mr. Musk a legal playbook for reducing the federal work force, a goal that most Americans support. But Mr. Musk chose similar lightning-speed, blunt-force methods he used to drastically cut Twitter’s work force after he acquired the company in 2022.

“The law is clear,” said Jeri Buchholz, who over three decades in public service handled hiring and firing at seven federal agencies, including NASA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. “They can do all the things they are currently doing, but they can’t do them the way they’re doing them. They can either start over and do it right, or they can be in court for forever.”

Harrison W. Fields, a White House spokesman, defended DOGE’s cuts and called the $150 billion that the administration had saved “monumental and historic.”

“It’s important to realize that doing nothing has a cost, too, and these so-called experts and groups are conveniently absent when looking at the costs of doing nothing,” he said.

On the I.R.S., he said, “Every single cut has been done to make the government more efficient and not to be a burden to the American people or cut any critical resources or programs they rely on.”

Based on the latest available information, the DOGE cuts have targeted at least 12 percent of the 2.4 million civilian employees in the federal work force. But a wide gap exists between DOGE’s planned cuts and the number of people who actually leave.

Buyouts and firings initially trimmed about 100,000 workers — thousands fewer people than those who typically retire in a year, according to Office of Personnel Management figures. At least one-quarter of those 100,000 workers have been rehired at full pay, most after judges ruled that their firings were illegal and some after Mr. Musk said DOGE had “accidentally” sacked workers safeguarding nuclear weapons, ensuring aviation safety and combating bird flu and Ebola.

When judges ordered that the workers be hired back, the government put them on paid leave, meaning taxpayers would foot the cost of rehiring them, plus the salaries they collected while staying home.

Layoffs of 10,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services wiped out the entire team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention combating H.I.V. among mothers and children around the world. In an interview, two public health physicians said they were caught off guard because the team’s work always had bipartisan support. They were facing termination on June 2 and said they wanted to return to work but did not know to whom to make their case.

Mr. Musk’s methods have cast a pall over the latest effort by an American president to trim the federal bureaucracy, as most Americans say they want. In congressional town halls and interviews, even Trump voters have said they are tired of Mr. Musk’s bloodletting. In a poll released this month, 58 percent of those surveyed said they disapproved of how Mr. Musk was handling DOGE’s work, and 60 percent disapproved of Mr. Musk himself.

A week after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the Office of Personnel Management sent a now infamous email to more than two million federal workers with the subject line “Fork in the Road.” They were told they could either resign and be paid through September or risk being sacked down the road.

The mass buyout did not favor highly rated performers nor distinguish crucial jobs from nonessential ones, practices that guided furloughs during past government shutdowns. Consequently, the administration wound up trying to reverse an exodus of people in vital roles.

“We will make mistakes,” Mr. Musk told cabinet members in February. After he boasted of feeding the United States Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” a move a judge later found violated the Constitution, Mr. Musk discovered that “one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.” But his claim to have swiftly repaired the damage was inaccurate.

Separately, a New York Times investigation into cuts to the National Nuclear Security Administration illustrate the effect of the buyouts on efforts to safeguard and modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons. Of more than 130 people who were fired or accepted DOGE’s invitation to quit, at least 27 were engineers, 13 were program or project analysts, 12 were program or project managers, and five were physicists or scientists.

Four of these employees were specialists handling the secure transport of nuclear materials, and a half dozen worked in the agency unit that builds reactors for nuclear submarines.

“Those are such hard jobs to fill, because people could make as much or more money working for the plant or laboratory itself,” said Jill Hruby, who led the National Nuclear Security Administration during the Biden administration.

Several people on the nuclear safety team found new jobs with the government contractors they once supervised. Across government, a disproportionate number of professionals in high demand by the private sector have quit, according to Mr. Stier.

“There are plenty of people who are best in class who are sticking it out because they’re so purpose-driven,” he said. “But it’s easier for someone who has options to say, ‘This is crazy, I’m not going to do this anymore,’ and go someplace else.”

In mid-February, the Office of Personnel Management targeted all 220,000 of the federal government’s probationary employees, who are new or newly promoted professionals serving a one- to two-year trial period with fewer worker protections. They included a cadre of younger, tech-savvy professionals hired at great expense to replace a wave of baby boomer retirees. Hiring and training them cost about $10,000 for a clerical worker to more than $1 million for an elite spy.

“This is the equivalent of a major-league baseball franchise firing all of their minor-league players,” said Kevin Carroll, a former C.I.A. officer and lawyer who represents some of the fired workers. “It’s a huge amount of money being deliberately wasted.”

About 24,000 probationary employees across nearly 20 agencies had been fired by March 13, when a federal judge in Maryland ruled that the cuts were illegal and ordered the agencies to rehire the workers, but the government appealed and the legal wrangling continues. By law, probationary employees can only be fired for cause, typically for poor performance, Judge James K. Bredar of the Federal District Court in Maryland said in a lengthy ruling.

He ordered the government to recall the fired workers, including 7,600 from the Treasury Department, 5,700 at the Agriculture Department and more than 3,200 at the Department of Health and Human Services, according to court filings. But the administration instead put them on paid leave, where they collect annual salaries averaging $106,000 while waiting in limbo.

For each probationary worker DOGE idled, the government lost thousands of dollars it spent on recruitment, hiring incentives, security clearances and training, an investment normally recouped over years of service. In one case, a fired probationary employee with the Department of Health and Human Services received a pay raise after she was reinstated and put on paid leave.

The administration cut about 400 probationary workers at the Federal Aviation Administration after multiple plane crashes, including one in Washington in January that killed 67 people. The layoffs included maintenance mechanics and aviation safety assistants.

The C.I.A. confirmed last month that some officers hired in the past two years had been summoned to a location away from the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., and asked to surrender their credentials to security personnel. About 80 officers were let go.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said it cost $400,000 to get a C.I.A. recruit through the security clearance process and specialized training.

The theatrics around the firings, including an appearance by Mr. Musk at a conservative political convention waving a chain saw, suggest they are also about inflicting pain on a bureaucracy Mr. Trump perceives as a subversive “deep state.”

That was a goal for federal employees set by Russell T. Vought, who now leads the Office of Management and Budget. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” Mr. Vought told a conservative gathering in 2023.

Ms. Buchholz and Mr. Stier emphasize that the government is indeed inefficient and needs reform. But by “gleefully torturing people,” Ms. Buchholz said, DOGE has hurt the government’s ability to recruit young, talented workers to lead a modernization.

“This country historically has had an independent public service that attracts people focused on service to Americans,” Ms. Buchholz said. “But this administration values the kind of service you get from political appointees, who serve at the president’s pleasure.”

Reporting was contributed by Eileen Sullivan, Andrew Duehren, Sharon LaFraniere, Minho Kim, Julie Tate, Zach Montague and Adam Goldman from Washington. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the government from enforcing part of one of President Trump’s executive orders that directs agencies to withhold funds from cities and counties that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

In a brief order, the judge, William H. Orrick of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California, found himself retreading old ground, intervening to stop a tactic he described as nearly identical to one Mr. Trump tried early in his first term.

“Here we are again,” he wrote.

As he did eight years ago, Judge Orrick prohibited the government from “taking any action to withhold, freeze, or condition federal funds” based on the president’s order or a related memo Attorney General Pam Bondi sent on Feb. 5 to outline ways agencies could suspend federal payments.

Mr. Trump’s directive inspired a legal challenge from 16 city and county governments. They argued that the order violated the Constitution’s spending clause, which vests in Congress the power to finance programs and sway state behavior through federal funding.

After Judge Orrick issued his ruling in 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit quickly upheld it, creating a straightforward precedent for him this time around.

As in many similar cases involving the freezing of federal funds, the Trump administration’s rapid-fire approach has left it on shaky footing in court. Decisions to abruptly terminate federal programs Mr. Trump has described as wasteful, or to withhold them as leverage to force local governments to fall in line with his political agenda, have repeatedly left the government vulnerable to lawsuits claiming that the sudden changes had been made without due process or otherwise infringed on Congress’s authority.

Judge Orrick wrote that the move threatened to disrupt local governance, harming residents in the process.

“The threat to withhold funding causes them irreparable injury in the form of budgetary uncertainty, deprivation of constitutional rights, and undermining trust between the cities and counties and the communities they serve,” he wrote.

The ruling was limited to the 16 cities and counties involved in the lawsuit. The plaintiffs are mostly in California, but they also include Minneapolis; Santa Fe, N.M.; and New Haven, Conn.

As with much of Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda, the immigration policies his administration has pursued have been notably bolder and more explicit this time around, which Judge Orrick noted in the order. Reflecting on the similarities between the current case and the one he considered in 2017, he wrote that the harms facing the cities and counties had grown only more concrete and serious as the Trump administration has ratcheted up its enforcement efforts.

But in granting the injunction, which will last through the duration of the lawsuit, he noted that as the retaliatory posture toward those cities and counties had crystallized, their case against the government had grown stronger in kind.

“Their well-founded fear of enforcement is even stronger than it was in 2017,” he wrote.

A federal judge blocked part of an expansive executive order signed last month seeking to overhaul election laws, writing on Thursday that President Trump did not have the authority to require documentary proof of citizenship for all voters.

“Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the states — not the president — with the authority to regulate federal elections,” wrote Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the Federal District Court in Washington. She pointed to federal voting legislation being considered in Congress, adding that the president could not “short-circuit Congress’s deliberative process by executive order.”

But the judge did not block another key part of the executive order that sought to force a deadline for mail ballots in federal elections by withholding federal funding from states that failed to comply with the deadline. She found that the Democrats who brought the legal challenge did not have standing to do so. The legal concerns with this provision, Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote, are being considered in other cases brought by state attorneys general.

The executive order, signed in early March, sought to direct the federal Election Assistance Commission to amend its voter registration form and require any potential voter to show documentary proof of citizenship to register. Acceptable documents included passports, military IDs or other state-issued identification that clarified citizenship. The executive order did not directly mention birth certificates as a valid way to prove citizenship.

In a statement, the Trump administration vowed to continue the legal battle in court.

“President Trump will keep fighting for election integrity, despite Democrat objections that reveal their disdain for common-sense safeguards like verifying citizenship,” said Harrison Fields, a spokesman for the White House. “Free and fair elections are the bedrock of our constitutional republic, and we’re confident in securing an ultimate victory in the courtroom.”

Democrats celebrated the ruling.

“Today’s court victory represents a huge step in the fight to protect our democracy,” the party said in a statement. “Without this decision, Americans across the country — including married women who changed their last name and low-income individuals — could have been unable to register to vote.”

About 21.3 million people do not have proof of citizenship readily available, according to a 2023 study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights and democracy group, and the University of Maryland. Nearly four million people do not have the documents at all because they were lost, destroyed or stolen.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly, noting that the Election Assistance Commission was “a bipartisan, independent regulatory commission,” wrote that the president could not force the commission to change procedures without a vote by members, as required by the law establishing the commission.

The executive order amounted to an aggressive attempt to give the executive branch unprecedented influence over how federal elections are run, as the Constitution gives the president no explicit authority to regulate elections. And it was another example of how Mr. Trump is trying to expand his presidential power.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly made repeated reference to the separation of powers regarding elections, making it clear that the Constitution offered no room for the president to interfere or create rules or regulations that apply to elections.

“The states have initial authority to regulate elections,” the judge wrote. “Congress has supervisory authority over those regulations. The president does not feature at all. In fact, executive regulatory authority over federal elections does not appear to have crossed the framers’ minds.”

Judge Kollar-Kotelly was nominated to a lower court in the District of Columbia by President Ronald Reagan and was named to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Trump’s order also aimed to create a federal deadline for mail-in ballots, requiring that they arrive by the time polls close on Election Day. (At least 17 states currently allow mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive soon afterward.)

Judge Kollar-Kotelly declined to block this provision solely because the parties bringing the legal challenge — the Democratic Party, Senator Chuck Schumer, Representative Hakeem Jeffries and voting groups — were not able to show that they would be harmed by the provision. Individual states, however, could “challenge the validity of that provision in court.”

But the judge was also clear that the decision regarding the mail-ballot deadline was not one on the merits of the argument.

“The court’s analysis should not be taken to decide any issue more broadly than that,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote. Legal arguments from states “that stand to lose federal funding for their election programs” if they accept late-arriving ballots “is a question for another day.”

The U.S. Department of Transportation on Thursday said it took the extraordinary step of replacing the federal lawyers defending it in a lawsuit over New York City’s congestion pricing program, after accusing them of undermining the department’s bid to end the toll.

The move came after the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District, which had been handling the case, said it mistakenly filed in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday night a confidential memo that questioned the department’s legal strategy and urged a new approach.

In response, however, the department raised the possibility that the disclosure attempted to sabotage its efforts to halt congestion pricing. Transportation officials said they would transfer the case to the civil division of the Justice Department in Washington. The memo has since been removed from the public docket.

In the letter, dated April 11, the three assistant U.S. attorneys on the case warned that Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, was using a shaky rationale to end the tolling plan and was “exceedingly likely” to fail, the lawyers wrote.

The 11-page letter instead suggested that the department could build a stronger case if it sought to terminate the federal government’s approval of the tolling program “as a matter of changed agency priorities,” rather than stick with the previous tactic of questioning the legality of the toll. The existence of the document was reported earlier by Streetsblog.

It’s not unusual for lawyers to advise their clients confidentially in this way. But the filing telegraphed the government’s legal weaknesses in the middle of a tense fight with Gov. Kathy Hochul and transit leaders who have vowed to keep the tolling program running.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates mass transit in New York City and the toll program, sued the Department of Transportation in February to prevent its interference.

In a statement on Thursday, the Department of Transportation called the filing of the memo “legal malpractice.”

“Are S.D.N.Y. lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST?” a spokeswoman for the department wrote.

Nicholas Biase, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, said in a statement that the filing “was a completely honest error and was not intentional in any way.” He said that the Southern District lawyers took immediate steps to remove the memo, which is subject to attorney-client privilege, from the docket.

“We look forward to continuing to vigorously advocate in the best interest of our clients,” Mr. Biase added, referring to the Transportation Department and the Federal Highway Administration. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Transportation Department’s assertion that it is having the case moved to the Justice Department in Washington. The Justice Department had no comment except to acknowledge that the case was now being handled by the department’s civil division.

The public release of the letter was another setback in Mr. Duffy’s war on the congestion pricing toll, which he has ordered New York to stop collecting three times since February. President Trump has promised for months to kill the congestion pricing toll — claiming, without evidence, that it was bad for the local economy.

The program, the first of its kind in the nation, charges most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street during peak traffic, to both reduce gridlock and pollution and raise much-needed funds for the region’s mass transit system. After years of federal, state and local review, the plan was approved under the Biden administration in November 2024, and tolling began on Jan 5.

But the letter also suggests that, even if the Transportation Department’s legal argument is unconvincing, the agency could seek other means of ending the toll program. Mr. Duffy has already threatened to withhold federal funding and approval for a number of transportation projects in the city and state, if Ms. Hochul does not comply with his demands.

The Transportation Department, in its statement attacking the lawyers with the Southern District, added, “It’s sad to see a premier legal organization continue to fall into such disgrace.”

The assertion echoed recent criticism from Trump Justice Department officials about the Southern District’s handling of another prominent case, the prosecution of Mayor Eric Adams of New York. That case was also moved to the Justice Department in Washington and was dismissed, and several Southern District prosecutors, including an interim leader of the office, resigned.

Both the governor’s office and the M.T.A. said they were aware of the congestion pricing filing, but did not comment directly on it. Several legal observers, however, were already discussing the revealing legal document Thursday morning.

“Oh, my God — very embarrassing,” said Roderick M. Hills Jr., a professor at New York University Law School who has written a legal brief in support of congestion pricing. “It’s a gigantic, obvious, objective blunder,” he added.

There is mounting evidence that the program is working. In the plan’s first three months, about 5.8 million fewer vehicles entered the tolling zone compared with the same time period in recent years, representing a 12.5 percent drop in traffic, according to court documents filed by the M.T.A.

But the tolling program has continued to draw opposition from many drivers who say that it has been a financial burden. Some Manhattan residents and businesses in the congestion pricing zone have also criticized the tolls, saying it has raised their costs. The program has faced several federal lawsuits seeking to halt it.

Mr. Duffy has argued that New York must shut off the toll for two reasons, the letter from the U.S. attorney’s office said. First, he contended that the toll exceeded the scope of the 1990s federal program used to authorize it, because the plan didn’t offer drivers a toll-free option into the zone; second, that the toll should not prioritize the transit authority’s infrastructure upgrades over the goal of reducing traffic.

“Neither of these arguments is likely to convince the court,” the assistant U.S. attorneys who were representing Mr. Duffy wrote. The federal judge presiding over the case, Lewis J. Liman, has already rejected key elements of those theories in other suits related to congestion pricing.

Michael Gerrard, a professor at Columbia Law School who supports congestion pricing, said the letter also suggests that the federal government has no quick legal remedy to kill the program.

The M.T.A. has already challenged the premise that the Transportation Department can simply back out, arguing that the program underwent years of public review.

Jack L. Lester, a lawyer who represents New Yorkers Against Congestion Pricing Tax, a coalition suing over the tolls, said the federal government could look to other avenues to stop the program. He urged federal officials to hold public hearings to establish a record of what he called its “negative socioeconomic impacts upon small businesses and wage-earners.”

The M.T.A. said last month that the program was on track to raise $500 million in toll revenue in its first year, a major step toward financing $15 billion for critical repairs and improvements to the subway, buses and commuter railroads.

The federal government has inserted itself in recent months in a number of New York transportation projects. Last week, the Trump administration said it would take over the M.T.A.’s renovation plans for Pennsylvania Station, one of the busiest train hubs in the world. And Mr. Duffy has been a vocal critic of the subway, where he has claimed that crime is out of control, despite police reports showing otherwise.

Winnie Hu and Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.

President Trump on Thursday directed the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the fund-raising platform that powers virtually every Democratic candidate and cause. The move steps up Republicans’ effort to cripple their opponents’ political infrastructure.

It was the third time in three weeks that Mr. Trump has directed the government to target a perceived political enemy. He has drastically expanded the use of his powers to try to damage domestic opponents, eroding a post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence far more than he ever did in his first term.

Mr. Trump called for an investigation by Attorney General Pam Bondi into ActBlue, which is used across the Democratic Party’s ecosystem to collect donations online. The inquiry is ostensibly meant to look into possible illegal donations made by people in someone else’s name, known as straw donations, as well as hard-dollar contributions from foreign donors. Mr. Trump asked for a report on the results of Ms. Bondi’s investigation within 180 days.

Mr. Trump’s action represents a threat to one of the key financial cogs of the left, potentially hindering Democrats’ ability to compete in elections. It is likely to please elements of his base, for whom ActBlue has become a top target. Congressional Republicans have separately been investigating what they claim are the platform’s insufficient security provisions.

For days, Democratic groups had worried that the White House was planning executive orders or memorandums that would target an array of nonprofit organizations. White House officials insisted no such orders were being drafted and maintained that stance for days.

Just over two weeks ago, Mr. Trump signed memorandums targeting two officials from his first term for investigation. One, Miles Taylor, has been deeply critical of the president. The other, Chris Krebs, was targeted for rejecting Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud involving voting machines.

The Republican scrutiny of ActBlue has focused on claims — thus far unsubstantiated — that it allows straw and foreign donations. Federal election law bars straw donations, and it prohibits foreign citizens without permanent residency from donating directly to federal political candidates or political action committees.

A Justice Department investigation into ActBlue is likely to create vulnerabilities for the entire Democratic fund-raising apparatus. Party consultants have relied on ActBlue to bring in donations. Candidates, committees for federal and state legislative chambers, and liberal caucuses use the platform as their primary mechanism to process donations.

“ActBlue plays a vital role in enabling all Americans to participate in our democracy, and the organization strictly abides by all federal and state laws governing its activities,” said Megan Hughes, an ActBlue spokeswoman. “We will always stand steadfast in defending the rights of all Americans to participate in our democracy, and ActBlue will continue its mission undeterred and uninterrupted, providing a safe, secure fund-raising platform for the millions of grass-roots donors who rely on us.”

The leaders of the Democratic National Committee and the party’s campaign committees for governors, the House and the Senate released a joint statement saying Mr. Trump’s action was “designed to undermine democratic participation.”

“He’s trying to block lawful grass-roots donations from supporters giving just $5 or $10 to candidates who oppose him while further empowering the corrupt billionaires who already control his administration,” they said.

There is great fear across the Democratic Party that any entity that has used ActBlue could soon find itself enmeshed in an investigation from a hostile Justice Department.

As word of the impending Trump memorandum circulated in political circles, panicked Democrats blasted fund-raising appeals.

“Please, while we still can, make a donation to my campaign’s emergency fund through ActBlue,” Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona wrote to supporters on Thursday afternoon. “Any amount at all. We’ve got to be ready for any outcome, and we’ve got to start preparing now.”

ActBlue itself got into the fund-raising game. Regina Wallace-Jones, the platform’s chief executive, wrote to Democratic partners late Wednesday asking for money to help “fight against the creeping despotism of the right, and to win back power in Washington, D.C., and the halls of government across the country.”

She wrote that the looming threat of an executive order or memorandum from Mr. Trump had already damaged ActBlue and its allies.

“The current strategy of distraction and exhaustion is effective,” she wrote. “We see this across the country and are not immune to this ourselves. The flow-on effect from the initial innuendo of the E.O. caused many in the ecosystem anxiety and distress.”

ActBlue has faced internal turmoil since Mr. Trump won the presidential election in November. At least seven senior officials quit the organization in late February, prompting two employee unions to warn of an “alarming pattern” of departures that was “eroding our confidence in the stability of the organization.”

Republicans have been encouraging the Trump administration to investigate ActBlue.

This month, the leaders of three Republican-led House committees accused the group of not doing enough to prevent fraud and demanded more information about the recent resignations. Last week, several of the people who left ActBlue received their own letters asking them to appear before Republican congressional investigators.

Last month, several Republican lawmakers urged Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to investigate ActBlue or to help them do so.

And Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona asked the F.B.I. to investigate whether ActBlue had allowed Democrats “to skirt the integrity of federal campaign finance laws,” including by processing donations that originated in hostile foreign countries.

Elon Musk, the president’s billionaire adviser who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the 2024 election, has criticized ActBlue for weeks, claiming without evidence that the organization was funded by Democratic megadonors including Herb Sandler, who died in 2019. On Thursday, Mr. Musk wrote on his social media platform, “ActBlue is guilty of widespread criminal identity theft.”

Last month, the White House brought in Scott Walter, the president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which has investigated ActBlue, to brief senior officials on the organization and other aspects of Democratic political financing.

On Thursday, Mr. Walter suggested that the memorandum was about compliance with election law, and was not an effort to undermine Democrats’ electoral prospects.

“Liberal funding schemes for political and charitable giving have drawn criticism from left- and right-leaning watchdogs,” he said in a statement.

Democrats and their allies reject that.