Trump Proposes the U.S. Take Over Gaza

“Saudi Arabia is going to be very helpful, and they have been very helpful. They want peace in the Middle East,” Mr. Trump added later, during a joint news conference with Mr. Netanyahu.

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Mr. Trump said. He added that the United States would dispose of unexploded munitions and rebuild Gaza, which he described as a “demolition site.”

A sweeping deal that would see Saudi Arabia normalize relations with Israel is one of the Trump administration’s top goals in the Middle East. During Mr. Trump’s first term, the United States brokered the Abraham Accords, under which the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain normalized ties with Israel.

Before the war in Gaza began in 2023, Saudi Arabia appeared close to setting up diplomatic relations with Israel without meeting the precondition of a Palestinian state. But Saudi statements since then have indicated that such a deal is a long way off.

On Wednesday, the kingdom reiterated its “unequivocal rejection” of any infringement on the rights of the Palestinian people, including attempts to displace them.

The Geneva Conventions, which the United States and Israel both ratified, prohibit the forcible relocation of populations.

The war in Gaza began after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in which the Israeli authorities say about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 were taken hostage. The Israeli assault on Gaza has killed at least 45,000 people, according to the enclave’s health officials. Much of Gaza has been destroyed.

A lasting end to the fighting in Gaza is seen as crucial to the Trump administration’s ambitions in the Middle East.

“I think that peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia is not only feasible, I think it’s going to happen,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the White House news conference. Facing Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu said: “I think that if we had another half a year in your first term, it would have already happened.”

Riyad Mansour, the leader of the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations, said on social media that instead of being relocated to other countries, the Palestinians in Gaza should be allowed to reclaim what were once Palestinian homes in Israel.

“For those who want to send” Gazans “to a happy ‘nice place,’” Mr. Mansour said, using language that Mr. Trump had employed, “let them go back, you know, to their original homes inside Israel. There are nice places there, and they will be happy to return to these places.”

He added that Palestinians wanted to rebuild Gaza themselves, and he urged world leaders to respect their wishes.

The foreign ministry of Saudi Arabia issued a statement that did not directly refer to Mr. Trump’s remarks, though the timing suggested that it was a response to his proposal. The ministry said it was reaffirming its “complete rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, whether through Israeli settlement policies, annexation of Palestinian lands or attempts to displace the Palestinian people from their land.”

“The duty of the international community today is to work to alleviate the severe human suffering that has been inflicted upon the Palestinian people, who will remain committed to their land and will not move from it,” the ministry said.

In the United States, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said that Mr. Trump’s proposal — which flies in the face of decades of debate over how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — was meant to distract people from Elon Musk’s sweeping attempts to downsize the U.S. government on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

“I have news for you — we aren’t taking over Gaza,” Mr. Murphy said on social media. “But the media and the chattering class will focus on it for a few days and Trump will have succeeded in distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”

Another Democratic senator, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, called Mr. Trump’s proposal “ethnic cleansing by another name,” adding, “This declaration will give ammunition to Iran and other adversaries while undermining our Arab partners in the region.”

A former Republican congressman from Michigan, Justin Amash, whose family is of Palestinian origin, also compared Mr. Trump’s proposal to ethnic cleansing. “If the United States deploys troops to forcibly remove Muslims and Christians — like my cousins — from Gaza, then not only will the U.S. be mired in another reckless occupation but it will also be guilty of the crime of ethnic cleansing,” he said. “No American of good conscience should stand for this.”

On Saturday, a broad group of Arab nations had rejected an earlier suggestion from Mr. Trump that Gazans to be moved to Egypt and Jordan — a proposal that did not mention the United States taking over the enclave. In a joint statement, the countries said that such a plan would risk further expanding the conflict in the Middle East.

The statement, signed by officials from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, said that any plan encouraging the “transfer or uprooting of Palestinians from their land” would threaten stability in the region and “undermine the chances of peace and coexistence among its people.”

Nihad Awad, the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, rejected Mr. Trump’s Tuesday proposal in a statement, saying that forcible expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza would spark conflict, mar the United States’ reputation and render international law meaningless. (When asked on Tuesday whether he would force Palestinians to leave, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think they’re going to tell me no.”)

“Gaza belongs to the Palestinian people, not the United States, and President Trump’s call to displace Palestinians from their land either temporarily or permanently is an absolute non-starter,” Mr. Awad said in his statement. “Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the entire Muslim world have made it clear that this delusional idea is unacceptable.”

Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who argues that Israel should annex Palestinian territories, appeared to delight in Mr. Trump’s proposal. In a social media post after Mr. Trump’s remarks, he thanked the president in Hebrew without specifying what he was thanking him for, and he said, “Even better and even better.”

In English, next to emojis of the Israeli and American flags, Mr. Smotrich added, “Together, we will make the world great again.”

Liam Stack contributed reporting.

Mr. Trump also withdrew the United States from the U.N.’s Human Rights Council and stopped funding the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA, which provides critical humanitarian assistance to millions of people in war-torn Gaza. Those moves were expected because Mr. Trump had withdrawn U.S. involvement from both organizations during his first term as president.

In addition, Mr. Trump’s order called for a review of U.S. involvement in UNESCO, which protects world heritage sites, on allegations that it had exhibited what the White House staff secretary, Will Scharf, called “anti-American bias.” In handing the order to Mr. Trump to sign, Mr. Scharf said it derived from “wild disparity and levels of funding among different countries” that Mr. Trump viewed as “deeply unfair to the U.S.”

In response to the executive order, Stéphane Dujarric, a U.N. spokesman, said U.S. support for the U.N. had advanced global security and that Secretary General António Guterres “looks forward to continuing his productive relationship with President Trump and the U.S. Government to strengthen that relationship in today’s turbulent world.”

The U.N. has been bracing for Mr. Trump’s second term, having already experienced a turbulent period during his first four years in office. Mr. Guterres managed the U.N.’s then-tense relations with Washington by mostly refraining from engaging in public spats with Mr. Trump.

On the first day of his second term, Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement.

“Trump’s attacks on UNRWA and the U.N. Human Rights Council were widely expected,” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. director of the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution agency. “But the knock-on effects of the administration’s aid freeze,” he added, “are making U.N. officials increasingly nervous.”

In addition to hosting the U.N. headquarters in New York City, the United States is also the agency’s top donor, contributing about 22 percent of its overall budget, followed by China (15 percent) and Japan (8 percent). For 2024, the U.S. contribution was estimated at about $3.6 billion, which goes toward the agency’s administrative and peacekeeping budget.

The United States is also a major donor to various U.N. agencies and the world body’s annual global humanitarian appeal for money to help populations during conflicts and natural disasters. In 2022, the United States contributed about $18 billion to the U.N. across the board. Last year, it paid for 47 percent, or about $14 billion, of the agency’s global humanitarian efforts.

But Mr. Trump on Tuesday criticized the U.N. for what he described as its inability to resolve conflicts raging around the world — ones that he said his administration was trying to address. The U.N. has been widely rebuked for not fulfilling its mandate to mediate and uphold peace in parts of the world.

The U.N. Security Council — a 15-member body responsible for mediating and ending conflicts — has been accused of failing to act on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza because of tensions among its five veto-holding permanent members: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. In the case of Ukraine and Gaza, for example, both Russia and the United States have blocked multiple resolutions that attempted to bring an end to the wars.

Mr. Trump, without naming any country, said on Tuesday that the U.N. had not been “fair to countries that deserve fairness.” He most likely meant Israel. Elise Stefanik, Mr. Trump’s pick to be the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said during her Senate confirmation hearing that the agency had an anti-Israel bias and accused it of antisemitism.

Mr. Trump also speculated, without evidence, that many countries would leave the U.N. if the organization did not change course. He added that the United States, as the top financial backer of the U.N., was not looking to take away money, but that it wanted to push the organization to operate more efficiently.

In practical terms, Mr. Trump’s decisions on UNRWA and U.N. Human Rights Council may not have much of an immediate effect.

The Biden administration stopped funding UNRWA after Israel accused the agency of being widely infiltrated by Hamas. Two U.N. investigations found that about nine of 13,000 of its staff members in Gaza were affiliated with the militant group, and they were fired.

As for the U.N. Human Rights Council, a spokesman said the United States was not currently among the Geneva-based council’s 47 voting members, therefore the decision to withdraw had little effect on the agency’s work. The council authorizes investigations, applies pressure to hold authoritarian governments accountable and debates violations in countries like Russia, Myanmar, Iran and North Korea.

The United States gave up its membership in the council at the end of 2024, under the Biden administration. But as an observer state, it was still entitled to participate in council deliberations and could still, if it chose to, play an influential role by speaking in debates and shaping the content of council resolutions.

A critical test of the Trump administration’s intentions will come later this year, when the United States is due to undergo a council review of its human rights record, a process in which every U.N. member state has taken part. A U.S. decision not to partake in the next review, set for November, would deal a severe blow to the council’s credibility and open the way to dictatorial states to similarly avoid scrutiny.

Rights groups said that a complete withdrawal means the United States would be absent in these discussions, a notion that they said sends the wrong message.

“President Trump’s performative decision to pull the U.S. out of the H.R.C. signals to the rest of the world that the U.S. is happy to completely cede important decisions about human rights violations happening across the globe to other countries,” said Amanda Klasing, the national director of Amnesty International USA.

Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting.

A former prosecutor in Florida, Ms. Bondi, 59, has acted as a high-profile surrogate for Mr. Trump. She cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election, criticized prosecutors in other jurisdictions who charged Mr. Trump with crimes and defended him at his first impeachment, over whether he had improperly withheld military aid to Ukraine.

She takes the reins as the president has tossed vague accusations of criminal wrongdoing at his political rivals, and out-of-power Democrats warn that as attorney general, she may enable abuses of power.

Mr. Trump had made plain his intent to install an ally as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, vowing to eliminate what he calls his “deep state” rivals. The pledge has raised the possibility that he would seek to end a longstanding practice of Justice Department criminal investigations operating independent of White House direction.

The department has already begun making sweeping personnel changes in the career ranks — reassigning or dismissing scores of prosecutors, including those involved in the investigations into Mr. Trump.

Hours before the vote, F.B.I. officials turned over a lengthy list of information about agents who had worked on Jan. 6, 2021, riot investigations — a list that has provoked fears that it could be used to punish or fire hundreds of agents. Some agents filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to stop the Justice Department from publicizing the names of the agents.

On the Senate floor beforehand, Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, warned that the “campaign of retribution” Mr. Trump had long promised was already underway.

“Top F.B.I. agents have been fired,” he continued. “Would she have defended these F.B.I. agents at the risk of her own job, as one senior F.B.I. leader has done? Of course not, and let us not pretend otherwise.”

The country “cannot afford,” Mr. Schiff said, an attorney general who believes their role is to defend Mr. Trump rather than the American people.

Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri, called Ms. Bondi “supremely qualified for this job,” and the right person to take over “a Justice Department gone astray.”

In his first term, Mr. Trump had troubled relationships with his two attorneys general — both of whom he forced out of their jobs after they displeased him by not meeting his demands.

Ms. Bondi was the president’s second choice to run the department. Mr. Trump’s first choice, former Representative Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration as lawmakers pressed for more details about a sex scandal involving a 17-year-old girl.

At Ms. Bondi’s confirmation hearing, Republicans urged her to drastically overhaul the department and punish any employees who exhibited what they described as bias against conservatives. Democrats, in turn, questioned whether she would bow to Mr. Trump’s stated desire to seek vengeance.

Ms. Bondi refused to say explicitly how she would handle such pressure from Mr. Trump, but insisted that “politics will not play a part” in her investigative or prosecutorial decisions.

At the hearing, which took place before Mr. Trump was sworn into office, Ms. Bondi also downplayed the suggestion by Democrats that the president would issue sweeping pardons to all of those convicted or charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol.

“I’m not going to speak for the president, but the president does not like people who abuse police officers either,” she said. Days later, Mr. Trump pardoned or granted clemency to everyone charged in that melee — nearly 1,600 people, including those who assaulted the police.

She echoed Republican grievances, criticizing how the department had been run during the Biden administration, saying it “has been weaponized for years and years and years, and it has to stop.”

Pressed about a past vow that “the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Ms. Bondi doubled down, replying, “None of us are above the law.”

In 2010, Ms. Bondi emerged from a crowded Republican primary to win the Florida attorney general’s race. Over her eight years in the job, Ms. Bondi became a national figure in the battle against opioid addiction. Since her nomination, she has focused on that part of her résumé and her prosecutions of violent criminals as her chief credentials for the job.

“Treasury has no higher obligation than managing the government’s finances on behalf of the American people, and its payments system is critical to that process,” wrote Jonathan Blum, a legislative affairs official at the Treasury Department.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has yet to comment on the situation. The letter was the first public comment by the department since the matter came to light last week following the abrupt resignation of David Lebryk, a career official who did not approve of Mr. Musk’s team accessing the data.

The letter was sent as what appeared to be hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Treasury Department building to express their opposition to Mr. Musk’s involvement in the federal payments system.

Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrats on the banking and finance committees, called on the Government Accountability Office on Tuesday to begin an investigation into Mr. Musk’s access to the payment system.

“The process by which Mr. Musk’s team obtained access to these systems is troubling — as are the implications,” they wrote.

Critics are concerned that Mr. Musk and the Trump administration want to stop payments that were authorized by Congress. There are also concerns about data privacy, Mr. Musk’s potential conflicts of interest and the possibility of federal funds being mishandled during a standoff over the debt limit that could lead to a U.S. default.

The Treasury Department said in the letter that an official by the name of Tom Krause was working on an “operational efficiency” assessment of the coded data of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems.

The letter said that Mr. Krause, who is associated with Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, was working on the initiative with Treasury career staff and that he had the necessary security clearances to perform the role.

“Treasury will continue its efforts to promote efficiency and effectiveness in its operations, and to prevent waste, fraud and abuse,” Mr. Blum wrote.

He also noted that the Federal Acquisition Service, which aids other government agencies in dealing with office supplies, technology and travel needs, would consider utilizing artificial intelligence to reduce costs.

Mr. Gruenbaum’s warning came as roughly 2 million federal workers around the country face a looming deadline Thursday to decide whether to accept an offer to resign but be paid through the end of September. Already, tens of thousands of federal workers have submitted their plans to leave, Trump administration officials said Tuesday.

In another email sent to G.S.A. employees on Tuesday, workers were told that Thursday’s deferred resignation deadline was only the beginning of work force reductions. The deadline was merely a “first step” and the agency would continue “right-sizing” its work force, said the email, which was obtained by The New York Times. The agency also planned to close or consolidate many of its roughly 700 field offices, the message added.

Union leaders have urged employees not to accept the offer, questioning its legality and legitimacy.

Three government unions on Tuesday sued the Office of Personnel Management, the agency overseeing the deferred resignation program, seeking to block it.

Across the government, federal workers have been bracing for news of how the Trump administration’s planned reductions will affect them as agency officials stressed their plans to cut costs.

“We’ll be looking at operations in every portfolio to strengthen our business and comply with the directive from the president to reduce the federal work force,” Mr. Gruenbaum wrote in the email, which was seen by The New York Times. “We can and must make tough decisions to create a leaner and more agile organization.”

The General Services Administration, which manages the federal government’s property portfolio, has about 12,000 workers across the country. On Monday, The Times reported that G.S.A. leaders have discussed eliminating as much as 50 percent of the agency’s budget.

Mr. Gruenbaum, whose LinkedIn profile identifies him as a former director at private equity firm KKR, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The G.S.A. did not respond to a request for comment.

In recent days, the Office of Personnel Management has tried to reassure workers about the legitimacy of the offer. On Tuesday, the agency issued a new memo that said that separation agreements would be legally binding, and that concerns about the legality of the program were “misplaced.” The agency has also circulated template contracts to federal agencies “to assuage any concerns about enforceability.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Gruenbaum encouraged recipients of the email to “seriously consider the current offer” for deferred resignations from the Office of Personnel Management.

“You probably know that DOGE — the DOGE team — is, like the other federal departments, is here working on President Trump’s promise to the American people to reform the federal bureaucracy, so we’re going to increase efficiencies in O.C.R. and Ed generally,” Mr. Trainor said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times, referring to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

The Musk team’s presence at the Education Department is the latest sign of the billionaire’s expanding government influence, which already stretches into more than half a dozen agencies. His allies have gained access to closely held financial and data systems and helped rapidly dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development in the last week.

Tuesday’s meeting at the Education Department came after other efforts by Trump appointees to realign the agency with the president’s goals, through which at least 60 employees affiliated with diversity and equity efforts were placed on paid leave indefinitely, according to their union. Among those placed on leave were several dozen people who took part in a routine diversity workshop that had been offered regularly for a decade.

The Musk team’s engagement came as the White House has been discussing the possibility of issuing an executive order to effectively shut down the Education Department, according to people familiar with the conversations.

In a post Tuesday on X, Mr. Musk boasted that President Trump would “succeed” in effectively dismantling the department.

Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the department, said on Tuesday that Mr. Trainor “apprised the staff that President Trump has made reforming the federal bureaucracy a top priority.” In a statement on Monday, Ms. Biedermann said the department was “evaluating staffing” in line with “putting student outcomes above special interests.”

Within the civil rights office, staff were bereft, according to two people who attended the meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Even though the group had anticipated the changes, one person said, hearing them laid out in such stark detail was upsetting.

Mr. Trainor also cautioned staff members to “not to believe everything you read and everything you hear about how the process will shake out,” and encouraged them to seek answers from their supervisors.

In the past week, staff members who had recently been hired were told to expect to lose their jobs, according to several people across the department.

The civil rights office has the mandate of investigating violations of a variety of civil rights laws in schools that receive federal funding. But Trainor told employees that they would now be expected to prioritize antisemitism cases, following a directive from Mr. Trump in an executive order he signed last week.

“We’re also going to use our scarce resources to maximum effect in the service of the president’s priorities,” he said, according to the recording.

Mr. Trainor also told the office’s staff, which helped pursue more than 140 investigations involving accusations of antisemitism or other discrimination based on shared ancestry last year, that the office had failed under his predecessors’ leadership, resolving too few cases.

“To say the last administration was both negligent and feckless on this front would be charitable to the point of dishonesty,” he said.

In 2024, the office received more than 22,500 complaints of civil rights violations, a single-year record, and resolved a number of the fraught cases opened after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, which set off protests on campuses across the country. But at the end of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s tenure, dozens of cases involving charges of antisemitism, anti-Arab or anti-Muslim discrimination remained open.

It was not clear how the civil rights office would handle its caseload in other areas, especially while facing the possibility of reductions to its staff.

The office is also legally obligated to investigate a variety of other civil rights violations, including harassment or discrimination based on race, sex and age. And at the same time employees were being told to refocus on Tuesday, the department sent out a “Dear colleague” letter restating its new interpretation of Title IX — the set of regulations covering sexual misconduct and harassment that the office enforces — which the Trump administration narrowed significantly in January.

“We’re going to trust you to use your judgment to dismiss cases expeditiously, consistent with the law and the administration’s priorities,” Mr. Trainor said.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to withhold disaster aid if California does not change how it manages its water, a perennially charged issue in an arid state where officials have to balance the needs of agriculture, ecosystems and thirsty cities. The president has also said that he wanted California to enact a voter identification law in order to obtain federal funding that would help Los Angeles recover from the wildfires.

Last month, wind-swept wildfires in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles and Altadena, Calif., killed 29 people and left thousands of homes in ashes. Mr. Trump almost immediately blamed Mr. Newsom and other Democratic leaders in California for the destruction and referred to the governor as “Newscum.” It is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars to rebuild the damaged communities.

Mr. Newsom is an ambitious Democrat who spent much of 2024 blasting Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, as he helped campaign for the Democratic ticket, but he has toned down his wrath since the fires devastated the Los Angeles region. He greeted Mr. Trump on the tarmac in Los Angeles on Jan. 24, and the two promised to work together to advance the region’s recovery.

The day before the president’s visit, Mr. Newsom signed legislation that approved $2.5 billion for the recovery work, which he said he hoped would be reimbursed by the federal government.

On Monday, Democratic lawmakers in California passed a pair of bills to spend $25 million on litigation against the federal government and $25 million to offer legal aid to undocumented immigrants.

Mr. Newsom in November called for swift legislative action to buttress the state from Mr. Trump’s conservative agenda, but the governor has said little about the proposals this year, taking a more cooperative approach to dealing with the president. He left the state on Tuesday without signing the bills, and he cannot take action on them until he returns to California later this week.

Some of the lawyers in the crypto unit are being assigned to other departments in the S.E.C., the people said. One of the unit’s top lawyers was moved out of the enforcement division. Some of the people briefed on the shake-up described that move as an unfair demotion.

A spokesperson for the S.E.C. declined to comment.

Mr. Trump, once a cryptocurrency critic, embraced digital assets during the 2024 presidential campaign and welcomed the support of the crypto community, which had come to see the S.E.C.’s previous chair, Gary Gensler, as its No. 1 nemesis.

The acting chair of the commission, Mark T. Uyeda, is a Republican who has tended to be supportive of the crypto industry. He has made a slew of appointments while shaking up other top jobs at the S.E.C., which employs more than 1,000 lawyers.

One of the first things Mr. Uyeda did was set up a team to review the S.E.C.’s approach to dealing with digital assets. The task force is led by Hester Peirce, an S.E.C. commissioner and an outspoken crypto supporter.

In a position paper published Tuesday on the S.E.C. website, Ms. Peirce took issue with the commission’s past approach to regulating crypto and likened it to a car careening down the road.

“The commission’s handling of crypto has been marked by legal imprecision and commercial impracticality,” Ms. Peirce wrote. She said the goal of the task force would be to come up with a regulatory framework that permits people “to experiment and build interesting things” without allowing crypto to become “a haven for fraudsters.”

It is unclear what effect the downsizing of the crypto unit will have on pending enforcement actions. One of the more prominent cases was filed in 2023 against Coinbase, charging the crypto platform with violating federal securities laws by operating as an unregistered exchange.

The Coinbase case is a test of Mr. Gensler’s position that most digital assets are securities contracts and subject to S.E.C. oversight, a position that Coinbase and the crypto industry adamantly reject.

Corey Frayer, who was senior adviser to Mr. Gensler on crypto issues and recently left the agency, said on Tuesday, “What the new S.E.C. leadership proposes to do for crypto is remove the speed limits and guardrails that have made our capital markets the strongest in the world.”

The S.E.C.’s crypto enforcement unit was created in 2017 during the first Trump administration, but it greatly expanded during Mr. Gensler’s tenure. In May 2022, the agency announced that it was nearly doubling the team’s size to 50 dedicated positions. The unit had brought more than 80 enforcement actions “related to fraudulent and unregistered crypto asset offerings and platforms,” the S.E.C. said at the time. A recent tally shows it brought more than 100 crypto-related actions during the Biden administration.

Mr. Trump has nominated Paul Atkins, a lawyer with close ties to the crypto industry, to succeed Mr. Gensler. Mr. Atkins, who was an S.E.C. commissioner under President George W. Bush, long has favored a lighter approach to regulation and enforcement. The Senate Banking Committee has yet to schedule a date for his confirmation hearing.

Since Mr. Trump’s victory, crypto companies have mobilized to try to punish S.E.C. officials who brought legal cases against them. Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase, said on social media that his company would not work with law firms that hired senior S.E.C. officials who had been involved in the crypto crackdown.

Mr. Gensler, who left the S.E.C. the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated, joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he had taught before President Joseph R. Biden Jr. tapped him.

After the announcement, Tyler Winklevoss, one of the founders of the Gemini crypto exchange, said his company would not hire any M.I.T. graduates, even as interns.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.