Trump Administration Highlights: Judge Seeks to Rein In Musk as Chief Justice Rebukes Impeachment Threats

Five more vehicles at a Tesla facility in Las Vegas were damaged on Tuesday in what the local authorities said was a targeted attack.

“The swarm of violent attacks on Tesla property is nothing short of domestic terrorism,” Ms. Bondi wrote in a statement. “We will continue investigations that impose severe consequences on those involved in these attacks, including those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”

There is no stand-alone federal domestic terrorism law that includes penalties, although it is defined under federal statute, so those charged in the attacks would be charged under other federal laws. Ms. Bondi did not specify what charges could be brought, but she said that if convicted, some of those accused could face sentences of at least five years in prison.

Ms. Bondi’s remarks echoed President Trump’s labeling of the vandalism as terrorism. On Tuesday, he baselessly suggested in a Fox interview that the vandalism was paid for “by people very highly political on the left.”

Congressional Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, have pressured Ms. Bondi to call such attacks domestic terrorism — after successfully resisting efforts by Democrats in 2022 to pass legislation to counter the rise in activity by white supremacists and other far-right groups.

Ms. Bondi supported Mr. Trump’s mass clemency for hundreds of his supporters who violently ransacked the U.S. Capitol, including some who assaulted police officers. The F.B.I. described those involved in the planning and perpetration of that attack as “domestic violent extremists,” whom they had previously identified in threat assessments.

Several Tesla facilities have been targeted in the past several days.

On Monday, police arrested a 26-year-old woman with spraypainting anti-Musk messages on the front windows of a Tesla facility in Buffalo Grove, Ill., on Friday. That same day vandals broke windows and defaced a dealership in the San Diego area with swastikas and slogans.

The F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, working with the local police, are investigating vandalism of Cybertrucks at a Tesla dealership in Kansas City, Mo., the F.B.I.’s Kansas City field office said in a statement posted to Facebook. An unknown attacker fired more than a dozen shots at a Tesla dealership in Tigard, Ore., last week, damaging some of the vehicles and store windows.

Judge Chuang — appointed to the U.S. District Court for Maryland by President Barack Obama — was one of two judges who blocked the ban for a second time after the Trump administration rescinded and resubmitted the order to remove some of its more contentious elements — an attempt to demonstrate to the courts that the ban did not intend to target Muslims specifically.

Judge Chuang was not persuaded by that argument, ruling that the likely purpose of Mr. Trump’s order was to enact “the proposed Muslim ban” that the president had campaigned on. The judge ordered that the ban not take effect, citing Mr. Trump’s public comments to conclude that the president may have intended to violate the constitutional prohibition on religious preferences.

“In this highly unique case,” Judge Chuang wrote, “the record provides strong indications that the national security purpose is not the primary purpose for the travel ban.”

Months later, Mr. Trump issued the travel ban for a third time, once again tailoring the order and language so that they would hold up under scrutiny from the courts. Judge Chuang again blocked the order, citing Mr. Trump’s repeated promises to bar Muslims from entering the country, as well as other statements he had made since taking office that were seen as hostile to Muslims.

Three years later, in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Judge Chuang again intervened to block a Trump administration measure, ruling that a federal requirement that women pick up abortion pills in person imposed needless risk and delay, particularly given that the health emergency had forced many clinics to reduce their hours.

The case then made its way through the appeals process, and the Trump administration was denied a stay in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit before bringing it to the Supreme Court. But in an unusual order, the Supreme Court returned the case to Judge Chuang, requesting “a more comprehensive record” and a new ruling while the disputed requirement remained suspended.

Judge Chuang issued a second opinion on Dec. 9, again blocking the requirement. The “health risk has only gotten worse,” he wrote.

“The Covid-19 pandemic is substantially worse” Judge Chuang wrote, noting that millions of Americans had fallen ill and hundreds of thousands had died. The severity of the pandemic, he added, was likely to increase.

The Supreme Court ultimately overturned Judge Chuang’s rulings in both the travel ban and abortion drug cases.

The court allowed the third version of Mr. Trump’s Muslim travel ban to stay in effect while the appeals courts considered the issue. Months later, the Supreme Court upheld the ban, saying that Mr. Trump’s power to secure the country’s borders was not undermined by his incendiary statements toward Muslims.

Then, in 2021, the Supreme Court reinstated the requirement that women pick up abortion pills in person at a hospital or clinic.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

“This change will substantially delay their access to their earned benefits,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “All families with children who qualify for benefits will have to visit S.S.A. in person because children cannot have ‘my Social Security’ accounts.”

She noted that the average callback time on phones to make an in-person appointment was more than two hours and that the wait to make an in-person appointment was over a month. “These delays will only worsen as S.S.A. cuts thousands of staff and millions more people need to make appointments,” she added.

The agency said it would allow people who did not or could not use the agency’s online “my Social Security” services — which requires online identity proofing — to start their retirement or disability claims for benefits by phone. But the process wouldn’t be completed until the applicant’s identity was verified in person.

That’s why the agency has said it now suggests people call the agency (1-800-772-1213) to both request an in-person appointment and begin their claim at the same time.

By using a service imported from the Treasury Department, the agency said, it will be able to process all direct deposit change requests — in person and online — in one business day. Before, these changes were held for 30 days.

Still, district managers at the agency voiced concerns in internal discussions on Tuesday that carrying out these changes with fewer staff members would be unrealistic, said one employee familiar with the conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak with the press.

The Trump administration said the changes would further safeguard Social Security records and benefits against fraudulent activity. “Americans deserve to have their Social Security records protected with the utmost integrity and vigilance,” Lee Dudek, the acting commissioner of Social Security, said in a statement. “For far too long the agency has used antiquated methods for proving identity.”

The agency has announced plans to cut up to 12 percent of its work force, at a time its staffing is at a 50-year low. It has also offered early retirement and other incentives to the entire staff, and will close six of its 10 regional offices, which coordinate and provide support to employees.

Of its 1,200 field offices that directly serve the public, more than 40 are to be closed, according to Social Security Works, an advocacy group. The group is trying to track the changes but said its data was based on an unreliable list released by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Alexandra Berzon contributed reporting.

The threat comes amid a continuing battle between the Trump administration and the state-run transit agency over the congestion-pricing toll program that began operating in Manhattan in January. Mr. Trump has moved to kill the program and has given the authority until Friday to abandon it. Gov. Kathy Hochul and M.T.A. leaders have sued to keep it intact.

Mr. Duffy’s letter did not mention congestion pricing, but transit experts and legal observers have said that the federal government might threaten to withdraw funding from other projects to gain leverage in its opposition to the toll.

The M.T.A. relies on billions of dollars a year from the federal government to improve service and is seeking $14 billion from Washington in its next five-year capital budget.

But it was unclear what the federal agency was aiming to accomplish. Crime in the subway has been trending down in New York City, and much of the data related to its prevention is publicly available.

The letter, addressed to Janno Lieber, the head of the M.T.A., demands that the transit authority share the number of assaults on transit workers in the last two years; statistics on fare evasion; attacks on passengers, including the number who were pushed onto train tracks; and evidence of its efforts to prevent these crimes, among other requests. The federal agency set a deadline of March 31.

“People traveling on the N.Y.C.T. system to reach their jobs, education, health care and other critical services need to feel secure and travel in a safe environment free of crime,” Mr. Duffy wrote, referring to the division of the M.T.A. that operates the subway and buses.

He added, “I appreciate your prompt attention to this matter to avoid further consequences, up to and including redirecting or withholding funding.”

In a statement, John J. McCarthy, the chief of policy and external relations at the M.T.A., said the agency was “happy to discuss” its continuing efforts to reduce crime in the transit system. He noted that the authority was already making progress, with subway crime down 40 percent so far this year, compared with the same period in 2020, shortly before the pandemic. Fare evasion had declined by 25 percent in the second half of 2024, he said.

Just 4 percent of violent crime in the city occurs in the subway, but a few recent traumatic events have shaken riders.

In December, Debrina Kawam, a 57-year-old woman, died after she was set on fire as she slept on a train. Later that month, Joseph Lynskey was shoved in front of an oncoming train at the 18th Street station in Manhattan and survived. There were 10 murders in the subway in 2024, up from three in 2019.

And in 2023, for the first time in nearly two decades, felony assaults outnumbered robberies in the subway, raising concerns that the nature of violence underground was becoming more unpredictable.

The letter sent to the M.T.A. resembles one that the Trump administration sent on March 6 to the head of the transit authority in Washington, D.C., which called for a similar crackdown on crime and fare evasion.

In both cases, Mr. Duffy reminded the authorities that their federal resources could and should be used for crime prevention. Neither letter referred to the use of federal funding to pay for infrastructure projects.

The Trump administration has also wielded the threat of withdrawing federal funds against Columbia University. Earlier this month, it canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia, saying it was the “first round of action” in response to what it called the university’s failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism.

Ms. Hochul has said she is making subway safety a priority. Last year, she ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard into the subway. About 1,250 Guard members, M.T.A. officers and state police officers now patrol the system, according to the governor’s office.

That doesn’t include several hundred New York City police officers who have been added to subway patrol assignments, allowing the department to place two officers on every overnight train, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a recent City Council hearing.

In a statement, the governor’s office cited its recent deployment of uniformed officers on the subway and said it was open to “partnering with the federal government on ways to fund New York’s priorities.”

But critics of the city’s and state’s approaches have pointed to the limits of flooding the system with officers, when there is also a need for more social service outreach. Nearly two-thirds of people with repeated arrests in the subway had a history of homelessness or mental illness between 2022 and 2023, according to John Hall, a retired police official and an adviser to Vital City, an urban policy think tank.

Ed Shanahan contributed reporting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Military leaders have repeatedly opposed the transgender ban.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the Trump administration has disregarded their traditional protections.

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

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

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

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

“President Trump has the lawful authority to manage personnel within the executive branch,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson. “President Trump will continue to rid the federal government of bad actors unaligned with his common sense agenda the American people decisively voted for.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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