Over the course of 20 days in March 2020, 55 million American children stopped going to school as Covid-19 swept the United States. What was impossible to anticipate then was that millions of those students would not return to classrooms full-time until September 2021, a year and a half later. Those children and teenagers, often in public schools in Democratic areas, remained online at home while private schools, child-care centers, public schools in conservative regions, office buildings, bars, restaurants, sports arenas and theaters sputtered back toward normalcy. Five years on, the devastating impact of the pandemic on children and adolescents is widely acknowledged across the political spectrum. School closures were not the only reason the pandemic was hard on children, but research shows that the longer schools stayed closed, the farther behind students fell. What would happen if another health crisis came along — a pressing concern, as cases of measles and bird flu emerge? In the face of a new unknown pathogen, how would school leaders and lawmakers make decisions?“It’s so important for Democrats to do a retrospective on this episode,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts, who represents a district in the Boston suburbs where some schools were fully or partially closed for a year. He has argued that during the pandemic, his party “over-indexed” toward the views of teachers’ unions and epidemiologists, who often pushed for a slow, cautious approach to reopening schools. The extended closures “crystallized how the party has been failing in governance,” Mr. Auchincloss said. In some ways, moving to online learning would be easier next time, now that nearly all schools give students their own laptops or tablets. And in places where schools remained closed longer, some people in positions of power, including health officials and leaders of local teachers’ unions, say they stand by the decisions they made at the time. Still, in interviews with more than a dozen leaders in health, education and politics, including some who were key figures at the time, others said they would take a different approach in the future, and try to do more to avoid extended shutdowns for entire school districts. “Yes, I’ve learned a lot from this,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a powerful force in Democratic politics who at times worked behind-the-scenes to negotiate reopenings. She also stood by locals in places like Philadelphia and Chicago, where union members fought for vaccines, tests, ventilation and other safety measures — even after classrooms in other parts of the country had reopened.Ms. Weingarten defended her members’ right to work safely and emphasized the importance of ventilation, but said she would strive to be clearer in the future that “kids have to be the priority.” That includes in-person instruction, she said. “I thought I was pretty loud,” she added. “I would be even louder.” Conflicting advice in 2020 Few education or health leaders doubt that it was right for schools to close in March 2020, when much about Covid-19 was unknown. But by early that summer, there was a spate of evidence that pointed toward a careful reopening. Classrooms had reopened abroad, with research showing that there was limited spread of the virus inside schools. It was becoming clear that children tended to be less severely affected by the virus than many adults were, and that young children were less likely to spread the disease. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report in June 2020 recommending that schools reopen. Republican-run states like Texas and Florida forged ahead with plans to offer in-person instruction to families who wanted it. Yet thousands of schools in Democratic-majority states like California, Oregon, Washington and Maryland stayed closed or partially closed for another full year. Policymakers who had a role in those decisions argue that applying evidence from abroad was difficult because of several factors, including higher U.S. infection rates, less consensus around masking and limited availability of virus tests. The politicization of the pandemic also played a role. President Trump repeatedly called on schools to reopen, while many Democratic officials and advocacy groups fought for stricter safety measures and more federal aid to schools. In addition, conflicting advice from health experts caused confusion.The Centers for Disease Control had, at times, recommended greater precautions than the pediatrics academy did, including maintaining six feet of distance between desks. In the summer of 2020, health agencies in states like California advised schools to remain closed in areas where case levels were high — which was almost everywhere. The California Department of Public Health declined to respond to questions about their approach to school closures for this article. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union, said that following cautious public health guidance was the right approach, and is the one she would follow again. “What we needed to do was to listen to infectious disease experts,” Ms. Pringle said. She pointed out that rates of infection and death were higher in low-income communities of color, and that many parents preferred to keep their children at home. “You try to make the best decisions with the information you have,” she added. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado and the lead author of the academy’s report, recalled that some teachers pushed back against the report’s recommendations by pointing to crowded classrooms, dated H.V.A.C. systems and sealed-shut windows in their schools, many of them in low-income urban neighborhoods. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The teachers argued that reopening schools would be dangerous, and they organized marches — outdoors and masked — to demand that classrooms remain empty until virus transmission rates fell essentially to zero. Dr. O’Leary said it was clear even at the time that those demands failed to consider what he called “the bigger picture.” “What are the downstream consequences of closing schools?” he asked. “Is this the right decision as a society?” Local officials who wanted to reopen schools sometimes found that their plans were superseded by governors and state health officials. Heidi Sipe, the superintendent in Umatilla, Ore., a rural district that serves mostly Hispanic and low-income students, remembered releasing a video detailing a complex reopening plan for her district in the fall of 2020, only for the governor to announce shortly afterward that all Oregon schools would be remote that fall based on infection rates. “It was devastating for us,” she said. “The challenge of that was the organizational trust that was lost — because so many of our families lost faith.” Oregon’s school strategy mirrored a cautious approach to the virus more broadly in many Democratic states. “I’m proud overall of our response,” said Dr. Dean Sidelinger, Oregon’s state health officer, who noted that Oregon had one of the lower Covid mortality rates in the country. But research now suggests that keeping schools closed was not a significant factor in slowing the virus, particularly after other parts of society were up and running. More people died in some Republican regions, Dr. O’Leary said, “not because the schools were open, but because they didn’t wear masks and didn’t get vaccinated.” Would leaders make different decisions today? Almost everyone in education acknowledges that extended school closures were damaging. Academic achievement plummeted and has not recovered. Student absence rates are double their prepandemic levels. And remote learning pushed children further into screens and away from learning and play in the physical world. But even today there is not broad consensus about whether the lengthy closures were necessary. Brent Jones, superintendent of Seattle Public Schools, said he was “not apologetic” about his system’s 18-month period of virtual and hybrid learning, one of the longest in the country. “I saw it as a forced opportunity to step back,” he said. “We were called upon, frankly, to expand our mission to include many other things: nutritional, social, emotional, mental health. There was a cry for support. Schools stepped into that gap.” Seattle also made investments in ventilation that he said could help keep classrooms open during another pandemic. In some other cities, ventilation remains a sticking point, particularly in old school buildings. “We would insist that the buildings be safe before they are occupied,” said Arthur G. Steinberg, president of the teachers’ union in Philadelphia, where dozens of school buildings do not have updated H.V.A.C. systems. Still, he and others said that they would be more apt to consider school closures on a building-by-building basis, rather than pushing for systemwide shutdowns.Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, acknowledged that some city schools “could have probably been fine” reopening sooner, but noted that they tended to be the ones in more affluent neighborhoods. “How do you continue to create a policy that marginalizes people who have been marginalized for years?” she asked in an interview late last year. Ms. Weingarten, the national union leader, said that in a future crisis, she would urge local unions to come up with their own safety plans, and to be creative in order to educate children in person — an approach many parents were desperate for during the Covid shutdowns. If school buildings do not have proper ventilation, she said, “then you find other buildings within the city.” Still, politics, not logistics, may be the biggest obstacle in a future health emergency. Public trust in science and schools fractured during the pandemic and remains low, especially among Republicans. Governors and state leaders could once again split along partisan lines. If anything, over the last five years, Americans’ views about vaccines, public health and education have only become more divided and politicized. Some of the mistrust seeded by the pandemic has spilled over into other arenas of education. Debates about schools now often focus on how race, gender and American history are taught. Republicans are pushing new state laws to provide public money for families to send their children to private schools. The number of children nationwide who are using some form of private-school voucher has doubled since 2019, to more than 1 million. Partisans on both the right and left say those trends might not have taken off without the widespread anger and frustration arising from how the education establishment handled Covid-19. Public health experts caution that their guidance in a future health crisis would depend on the particular disease. A future pathogen could be far more dangerous for children or teachers than Covid-19 was. “We don’t know what could be coming,” said Sean Bulson, the superintendent of schools in Harford County, Md., outside Baltimore. But based on what was learned over the past five years, he said, “our threshold for closing probably got higher.”

Texas Tech University has shut down its campus and sent students home early for spring break after a series of explosions and manhole fires, the university said in an emergency alert. An explosion at a substation near the school Wednesday evening caused power outages across campus, the university said. Conditions quickly devolved, with the university reporting a “gas odor” on campus. Videos on social media later showed green-colored flames leaping from manhole covers. University officials evacuated parts of the campus and forbade staff members from returning to their offices. Access to the university’s Engineering Key — the central area of campus where the gas odor was detected — was restricted.Videos posted on social media showed smoke billowing up from the street on campus and flames leaping out of manhole covers. The college, in Lubbock, Texas, was scheduled to begin its weeklong spring break hiatus on Monday, but it opted to send students home early. By late Wednesday, students were permitted to re-enter residence halls, but the university urged staff members not to return to their offices. Power remained out across campus, the university said.

Johns Hopkins University, one of the country’s leading centers of scientific research, said on Thursday that it would eliminate more than 2,000 workers in the United States and abroad because of the Trump administration’s steep cuts, primarily to international aid programs. The layoffs, the most in the university’s history, will involve 247 domestic workers for the university, which is based in Baltimore, and an affiliated center. Another 1,975 positions will be cut in 44 countries. They affect the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, its medical school and an affiliated nonprofit, Jhpiego. Nearly half the school’s total revenue last year came from federally funded research, including $365 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development. In all, the university will lose $800 million in funding over several years from U.S.A.I.D., which the Trump administration is in the process of dismantling. Johns Hopkins is one of the top university recipients of the funding that the administration is aiming to slash. And it appears to be among the most deeply affected of the major research institutions that are reeling from cuts — or the threat of cuts — to federal money that they depend on for research studies and running labs. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In a statement on Thursday calling it a “difficult day,” Johns Hopkins said it was “immensely proud” of its work on the projects, which included efforts to “care for mothers and infants, fight disease, provide clean drinking water and advance countless other critical, lifesaving efforts around the world.” In a statement last week describing Johns Hopkins’s reliance on federal funding, Ron Daniels, the university’s president said, “We are, more than any other American university, deeply tethered to the compact between our sector and the federal government.” Of the school’s total operating revenue in 2023, $3.8 billion, or nearly half, came federally funded research. The Trump administration has said that it wants to make the government leaner and more efficient by, among other measures, dramatically cutting financial support for the program, which promotes public health and food security in low-income countries. In ordering cutbacks in the agency, which amount to a 90 percent reduction in its operations, President Trump said that it was run by “radical left lunatics” and that is was riddled with “tremendous fraud.” Critics of the decision, however, have said the cuts are ushering in a new era of isolationism that could prove to be dangerous. Sunil Solomon, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, said the cuts would lead to a resurgence in the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. “What true great nations do is help other nations, but now, it seems, we’re America first,” Dr. Solomon said. The administration has also sought to reduce the amount of money that the National Institutes of Health sends to university for research, cuts that have been blocked for now in the courts. If they go into effect, those cuts would reduce federal payments to Johns Hopkins by more than $100 million a year, according to an analysis of university figures. The university, which receives about $1 billion a year in N.I.H. funding and is currently running 600 clinical trials, is one of the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit challenging those cuts. Separately, the Trump administration also has targeted specific schools for cuts. It slashed $400 million from Columbia’s budget last week based on accusations that it had failed to protect students and faculty from antisemitism. Johns Hopkins and Columbia are on a list of 10 schools that the administration says are being scrutinized by an executive branch antisemitism task force. The administration has threatened to reduce federal funding for schools on the list, and others, that it views as being noncompliant with federal civil rights laws. In addition to the more than 2,000 employees whose jobs have been eliminated, the university said that an additional 78 domestic employees and 29 international would be furloughed at reduced schedules. The cuts at Johns Hopkins involve programs funded by U.S.A.I.D. through which American universities have worked with global partners, largely to advance public health and agricultural research. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that 5,200 of the agency’s 6,200 contracts had been canceled and that the remaining programs would be operated directly by the State Department, eliminating the need for U.S.A.I.D., which is under the State Department. Research projects that are being eliminated include international work on tuberculosis, AIDS and cervical cancer, as well as programs that directly benefit residents of Baltimore. Dr. Solomon, the epidemiologist, runs a $50 million, six-year program to improve H.I.V. outcomes in India. He said the budget cuts in his program alone would result in layoffs of about 600 people in the United States and India. The program had led to, among other things, the diagnosis of almost 20,000 people with H.I.V. through contact tracing. “It’s heartbreaking,” Dr. Solomon said. “Stopping funding isn’t going to kill you today, but in six months you’re going to see an impact around the world.” Dr. Judd Walson runs the department of international health at Johns Hopkins, which oversaw a five-year, $200 million program to diagnose and control tuberculosis in 20 countries funded by U.S.A.I.D. In Kampala, Uganda, he said, the program was the only way children were diagnosed. “That’s just one example of how the sudden withdrawal of support is having real impacts on survival,” he said. In addition to the loss of jobs at Johns Hopkins, he said, the loss of the programs will lead to a spike in communicable diseases worldwide. What is essentially a shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. has had significant effects at universities around the country. An organization called USAID StopWork, which is tracking the layoffs, said that overall, 14,000 domestic workers had lost their jobs so far, with thousands more anticipated. Research by the Federal Reserve shows that universities serve as major economic engines in many agricultural regions, from Iowa to Florida, meaning that the impact of the administration’s cuts to science research will be felt in both red states and left-leaning communities like Baltimore. The elimination of a $500 million agriculture project called Feed the Future, which funded agriculture labs at 19 universities in 17 states, means many of those labs must shutter. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 30 people have lost their jobs at a Feed the Future lab that worked on improving soybean cultivation in Africa, according to Peter D. Goldsmith, a professor of agriculture who ran that laboratory. At Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss., a fisheries laboratory was shut down, according to Sidney L. Salter, a university spokesman, who did not disclose the number of jobs lost. Economic ripple effects of the funding cuts are expected to spread through the Baltimore area. Johns Hopkins, which enrolls about 30,000 students, is also one of Maryland’s largest private employers.

A federal appeals court ruled this week against a Florida couple who had sued officials in their child’s school district for disregarding their wishes and excluding them from discussions about the child’s gender identity. The ruling adds to a complicated legal landscape concerning minors and gender identity. While Republican lawmakers across the country have sought to restrict gender-transition care and the expression of gender identity, federal courts have remained divided over whether such laws violate equal protection. Some parents, like the ones in the Florida case, have argued that their rights should take precedence over a child’s professed wish to transition. Others, facing bans on transition care for teenagers, have argued that their children have a right to health care that they feel is necessary for their well-being. At the center of the Florida case is January Littlejohn, who with her husband sued the Leon County School District in Tallahassee and has become a prominent promoter of parental rights. Now affiliated with an organization opposed to gender-transition care, she was a guest of the first lady, Melania Trump, at President Trump’s speech to Congress last week. Ms. Littlejohn “is now a courageous advocate against this form of child abuse,” Mr. Trump said in his speech, nodding to her as he detailed the steps his administration had taken to “protect our children from toxic ideologies in our schools.” But two of the three judges who heard the case for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit rejected the argument made by Ms. Littlejohn and her husband, and upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss the case. “Even if the Littlejohns felt that defendants’ efforts to help their child were misguided or wrong, the mere fact that the school officials acted contrary to the Littlejohns’ wishes does not mean that their conduct ‘shocks the conscience’ in a constitutional sense,” Judge Robin S. Rosenbaum wrote in the majority opinion. A lawyer for the couple did not say whether the Littlejohns would appeal, but said “we cannot allow this assault on parental rights to remain unchallenged.” “This decision wrongly emboldens school districts to act in secret, eroding the fundamental parental rights that have been upheld by the Supreme Court for more than 100 years,” said Vernadette Broyles, the president and general counsel for the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, a nonprofit law firm. The child, who is not identified by name in the lawsuit, first asked to use they/them pronouns and a more masculine name ahead of the 2020-21 school year at Deerlake Middle School in Tallahassee. While the Littlejohns agreed to use a different name as a nickname, they did not explicitly agree to the use of different pronouns — something they told the school staff.At the time, the school district was using a 2018 guide that warned that “outing a student, especially to parents can be very dangerous” for a student’s well-being. And it allowed for a support plan that documented, in part, whether parents were “supportive” of a student’s identity or whether they were to be identified as L.G.B.T.Q. to their parents. (The guide was updated in 2022 after Florida passed a law prohibiting any classroom instruction about sexual or gender identity.) When the Littlejohns learned of their child’s identity change, they asked the school why they had not been included in meetings setting up a support plan. Administrators said that because the child had not asked for their involvement, and because there was no law requiring parents to be informed, the school did not have to involve them in the decision. “It’s our fundamental right to direct the upbringing of our children,” Ms. Littlejohn said in a video posted by the White House this month. “And that includes mental and physical health care.” The Littlejohns sued the school district, the superintendent, the assistant superintendent equity officer and a school counselor, arguing that their parental due process and privacy rights had been violated. But Mark E. Walker, the chief judge for U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, dismissed the case in December 2022. That decision upheld by the appeals court on Wednesday. The school officials named in the case “did not force the Littlejohns’ child to do anything at all,” Judge Rosenbaum of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote. “And perhaps most importantly, defendants did not act with intent to injure. To the contrary, they sought to help the child.” A lawyer representing the school district and staff did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After Mr. Trump singled out Ms. Littlejohn in his speech last week, Rocky Hanna, the Leon County Schools superintendent, told The Tallahassee Democrat: “To blatantly lie and disparage our teachers and our public schools to simply gain notoriety or political power is reprehensible. I only hope that truth and honesty matter more to our federal courts than it does to Ms. Littlejohn, our current governor and our current president.” Wednesday’s ruling — 169 pages in total — reflected divisions on the court, including between the two judges who agreed to dismiss the case. In his concurring opinion, Judge Kevin C. Newsom said he considered the actions taken by the school district officials “shameful.” But the question at hand, he wrote, was “whether it was unconstitutional.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “If I were a legislator, I’d vote to change the policy that enabled the defendants’ efforts to keep the Littlejohns in the dark,” he wrote. “But — and it’s a big but — judges aren’t just politicians in robes, and they don’t (or certainly shouldn’t) just vote their personal preferences.” Senior Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat, who dissented, warned that the decision “ignores bedrock separation of powers principles, waters down fundamental rights and flies in the face of our prior panel precedent rule.”

For more than a quarter of a century, the death toll in the Columbine High School mass shooting, a statistic intertwined with the gun violence epidemic in the United States, stood at 13 victims. But another name has now been added to the list: Anne Marie Hochhalter, who was a student at the time and was paralyzed from the waist down as a result of the shooting. Her death on Feb. 16 has been officially classified by a coroner in Colorado as a homicide, bringing the number of victims to 14. In a 13-page autopsy report, Dr. Dawn B. Holmes, a forensic pathologist with the Jefferson County coroner’s office, linked Ms. Hochhalter’s death to the injuries that she suffered as a 17-year-old high school junior. “Complications of paraplegia due to two (2) gunshot wounds are a significant contributing factor,” Dr. Holmes wrote. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The report, which was obtained on Thursday by The New York Times, said that Ms. Hochhalter, who was 43, had died from sepsis, an extreme immune response to an infection. Twelve students and a teacher were killed when two heavily armed students opened fire at the school in Littleton, Colo., on April 20, 1999, before taking their own lives. At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. It also left 21 other people wounded. Ms. Hochhalter was eating lunch with friends when the gunfire erupted. She was hit twice, in the chest and the back. Despite experiencing a lifetime of medical challenges as a result of her injuries and having to use a wheelchair, Ms. Hochhalter maintained her independence and spoke often about gun violence. Her brother, Nathan, who was a freshman at Columbine at the time of the shooting but was not injured, said on Thursday that it made sense to include his sister among the other people who were killed that day. “She got an extra 26 years,” Mr. Hochhalter said. “She was very independent, but it was not an easy 26 years.” Mr. Hochhalter, 40, said that his sister had considered herself a survivor instead of a victim: She was able to drive, go to the store and attend school and lived by herself for a number of years. Police officers discovered Ms. Hochhalter’s body at her home in Westminster, Colo., on Feb. 16 while conducting a welfare check. Sue Townsend, who became close to Ms. Hochhalter after her stepdaughter, Lauren Townsend, was killed in the shooting, told The Times last month that Ms. Hochhalter had been dealing with lingering effects from her injuries, including a pressure sore and an infection. Over the years, the trauma manifested itself on a multitude of levels for Ms. Hochhalter and her brother. Six months after the shooting, their mother, Carla June Hochhalter, walked into a pawnshop, asked to see a gun, loaded it and killed herself. The elder Ms. Hochhalter, 48, had been struggling with depression and other mental health issues before the Columbine shooting, her daughter later said. In 2016, when Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters, released a memoir, “A Mother’s Reckoning,” Ms. Hochhalter wrote a note addressed to Ms. Klebold on Facebook saying that she harbored no ill will. “Just as I wouldn’t want to be judged by the sins of my family members, I hold you in that same regard,” Ms. Hochhalter wrote. “It’s been a rough road for me, with many medical issues because of my spinal cord injury and intense nerve pain, but I choose not to be bitter towards you. A good friend once told me, ‘Bitterness is like swallowing a poison pill and expecting the other person to die.’ It only harms yourself. I have forgiven you and only wish you the best.”

Helyeh Doutaghi, a scholar in international law, began a new job in 2023 as the deputy director of a project at Yale Law School. As an activist who had championed pro-Palestinian causes in both published papers and public appearances, Dr. Doutaghi seemed to fit into the left-leaning mission of the Law and Political Economy Project, which promoted itself as working for “economic, racial and gender equality.” Last week, though, she was abruptly barred from Yale’s campus in New Haven, Conn., and placed on administrative leave. She was told not to advertise her affiliation with the university, where she had also served as an associate research scholar. Yale officials cited the reason as allegations that she was tied to entities subject to U.S. sanctions. It was an apparent reference to Samidoun, a pro-Palestinian group placed on the U.S. sanctions list last year, after the Treasury Department designated it a “sham charity” raising money for a terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The decision came three days after a news site, powered at least in part by artificial intelligence, published a story about Dr. Doutaghi’s connections to the group. The news site called her a member of a terrorist group, citing postings referring to appearances she made on panels at Samidoun-sponsored events, but a lawyer for Dr. Doutaghi said she is not a member of Samidoun, a global organization that sponsors meetings and protests supporting Palestinian causes. In an interview, Dr. Doutaghi, 30, called herself a “loud and proud” supporter of Palestinian rights. “I am a scholar,” she said, adding, “I am not a member of any organization that would constitute a violation of U.S. law.” The swift action against Dr. Doutaghi illustrates the tightrope American universities are walking as the Trump administration takes aim at higher education. Yale’s peer institution, Columbia, lost $400 million in federal funding last week after being named on a list of schools accused of tolerating antisemitism. On Monday, the Trump administration announced that Yale was among 60 schools that could face funding cuts if federal investigations show evidence that they have permitted antisemitic behavior.In a statement Tuesday, Yale Law School described the allegations against Dr. Doutaghi as reflecting “potential unlawful conduct.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We take these allegations extremely seriously and immediately opened an investigation into the matter to ascertain the facts,” said the statement, issued by Alden Ferro, a spokesman for Yale Law. “Such an action is never initiated based on a person’s protected speech.” Dr. Doutaghi said the actions against her are part of an attempt to silence scholars. “This is the type of thing that happens under fascist dictatorships, which Donald Trump is trying to establish,” she said in the interview. The article about Dr. Doutaghi was published on March 2 on Jewish Onliner. On its website and on Substack, Jewish Onliner says it is “empowered by A.I. capabilities.” It does not identify any reporters on its site. An effort to reach Jewish Onliner for comment elicited a response from “JO,” which identified itself as an A.I. assistant developed by Jewish Onliner. Later, emails from the site said that, while it uses A.I. to enhance research, fact-checking and rapid content creation, the final edits are done by humans. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The identities of the news site’s staff were kept private out of concern for “professional repercussions, doxxing, etc.,” the site said. In January, the Israeli publication Haaretz questioned the reliability of such A.I.-powered platforms that it said worked to promote Israel’s cause online. Eric Lee, the lawyer representing Dr. Doutaghi, also questioned the reliability of Jewish Onliner’s reporting in correspondence with Yale. In his letter last week letter placing Dr. Doutaghi on administrative leave, Joseph M. Crosby, Yale’s senior associate dean, raised concerns about her activities. “As you are aware, the university is reviewing serious allegations regarding your activities with various entities that are subject to U.S. sanctions,” said the letter, dated March 5, which was reviewed by The New York Times. Samidoun, based in Vancouver and London, says that its primary mission is to support Palestinian prisoners and to amplify the voices of Palestinian advocates of justice and human rights. The impact of U.S. and European Union sanctions on Iran was the topic of Dr. Doutaghi’s dissertation for the Ph.D. she obtained from Carleton University in Ottawa, which was officially awarded after she joined the Yale project. Amy Kapczynski, a Yale Law professor who co-founded the project, which is funded by outside grants, envisioned the project as an effort to understand the structures that led to the election of Mr. Trump and a counter to neoliberal thought in America, according to posts on its website. Ms. Kapczynski did not respond to a message seeking comment. Dr. Doutaghi joined in October 2023, about a week before the Hamas attack on Israel. An Iranian and a Muslim, she said Yale knew about her views when they hired her. “In fact, at the time I believed that this quality would be an asset for the project I was hired to help lead,” she said. The Law and Political Economy Project appeared to embrace Dr. Doutaghi’s views, featuring her last year in a virtual event titled, “A Political Economy of Genocide and Imperialism.” The page describing the discussion has been scrubbed from the project website, but it referred to the “genocide in Palestine,” a characterization that some pro-Israel groups have called antisemitic. Within 24 hours of the Jewish Onliner article’s publication, Dr. Doutaghi said, she began to receive harassing and threatening messages online. She was also asked to meet with Yale officials to explain her position. She decided to retain a lawyer, Mr. Lee, who is based in Southfield, Mich., and asked for additional time to prepare for the meeting with Yale because she was fasting for Ramadan and dealing with harassment. But three days after the Jewish Onliner published its article, Dr. Doutaghi was barred from campus and placed on administrative leave by Mr. Crosby, who told her the move was necessary because “we have not received any responses or factual explanations from you.” Mr. Lee said he hoped Dr. Doutaghi’s job and access to emails and campus would be restored, and he is asking the school to take “public action to restore her reputation.”

Deep cuts to staff and funding in the Department of Education will deal a major blow to the public’s understanding of how American students are performing and what schools can do to improve. On Tuesday evening, at least 100 federal workers who focus on education research, student testing and basic data collection were laid off from the Department of Education, part of a bloodletting of 1,300 staffers. Outside of government, at least 700 people in the field of social science research were laid off or furloughed over the past week, largely as a result of federal cuts to education research. The layoffs came just weeks after the latest federal test scores showed American children’s reading and math skills at record lows. Trump administration officials have pointed to those low scores as evidence that the Department of Education had failed and needed to be cut. But now the extent of those cuts raises questions about how the federal test itself will continue. Other basic information about schools, along with research about what works to improve them, seems most likely to be degraded or to disappear entirely. Many of those who were laid off worked on projects evaluating math and reading instruction, disability supports and other subjects critical to student learning. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT And some of the data they collected and analyzed played a crucial role in directing federal dollars to schools. “This is bedrock, base-line information for how our society is functioning,” said Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. The education department’s data informs knowledge far beyond the school system, he pointed out, and addresses issues related to the economy, the labor market, race, class, gender and inequality. “It’s a common language — a shared reality we all have.” In a written statement, Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said, “We are aggressively auditing our spending to ensure maximum impact for students and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.” Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly ridiculed federally funded research that touches on race and gender. But many of the canceled projects were uncontroversial explorations into core questions of student achievement and well-being. The Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, had already seen budget and contract cuts that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Last night, the vast majority of its staff was laid off, according to three former employees and an email sent to I.E.S. staff that was reviewed by The New York Times. That included widespread layoffs to the team that administers several important tests, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment, which measures how competitive U.S. students are globally, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is considered a gold standard in the industry and is the only national test that compares student performance across all 50 states. Education researchers and even those involved with overseeing NAEP were scrambling to understand what the cuts would mean for the test, which is mandated by Congress and overseen by a separate, independent board. Federal employees who lost their jobs helped administer the test and were “essential” to ensuring it was accurate, said Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard who previously sat on the board that oversees the exam. “If Congress and the department don’t act quickly to bolster national assessment expertise, who could trust that this once ‘gold standard’ test is still fair and comparable?” he said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The national test was thought to be a priority for the Trump administration, even as it was possible it could be moved to a different department. Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government, had suggested moving the division that oversees NAEP to the Census Bureau. I.E.S. workers also maintain the Common Core of Data, a rich trove of demographic information about students and educators, which is used in determining how many federal dollars K-12 school districts should receive. Betsy Wolf, an agency research analyst who was laid off yesterday, said that the staff and funding reductions had been so drastic that she believed: “For the most part, federal education research is over.”She has three young children and said she expected to have to make a swift career change, since so many education experts are now out of work, and federal funding has dried up. Referencing a Trump official who said he wanted federal workers to be “traumatically affected” by layoffs, she said, “He had success in that.”The outside workers who lost their jobs were employed by a cluster of independent organizations, including the American Institutes for Research, Mathematica and WestEd, that frequently partner with government and are known for conducting high-quality studies. Those staffing cuts were confirmed in interviews with current and former employees, and in recordings of internal meetings reviewed by The Times. Some of the research cuts immediately affect students and teachers who had been participating in the educational equivalents of medical drug trials. One canceled contract was weighing how effectively Oregon schools spent taxpayer dollars that were set aside to improve reading instruction, by emphasizing phonics, vocabulary and other building blocks of early literacy. The findings from the study were supposed to guide school spending decisions in the future. Another aborted project provided mentoring and a life-skills curriculum for high school students with disabilities, as they prepared to transition into the work force or college. The purpose of the research had been to find out what types of supports were most helpful. Disabled students “don’t get a lot of research” done on their needs that is directly relevant to schools, said Nathan Edvalson, director of special education for the Canyons School District, outside of Salt Lake City. About 90 students in his suburban district were participating in the canceled evaluation, called Charting My Path for Future Success, which was working with 1,600 students nationwide. Funding from the project had allowed Canyons to hire three teachers and one counselor, who spent most of the fall semester in training and had only begun meeting with students in December. Since the grant was canceled, those staffers have been reassigned to other jobs. Parents received a letter explaining that their teenagers would no longer receive support from the program, but would be eligible for other types of counseling. Mr. Edvalson said he understood the need for fiscal responsibility. But he argued that quality education research served that cause by pointing to best practices that would help students with disabilities become independent, working adults. A spokesman for the American Institutes for Research, which was administering the program, declined an interview request. According to audio recordings of internal meetings shared with The Times, the nonprofit laid off about 300 staffers on Monday. In one of the recorded meetings, A.I.R.’s president, Jessica Heppen, said that because of federal cuts to education and foreign aid, the group had lost $80 million of its expected 2025 funding of $400 million for research projects. Another $80 million was at risk, she said, from federal stop-work orders. “We cannot maintain our current staffing levels given the situation and the headwinds we know are coming,” she said in the recording. “We’ve had to make agonizing decisions that affect our staff.” A.I.R. had about $236 million in federal funding in 2024 for work over multiple years, including $115 million from the education department. At Mathematica, based in Princeton, 340 workers were laid off or furloughed last week, according to current and former staffers. The organization had $360 million from the federal government last year, including $28 million from the Education Department. The Trump administration ended Mathematica’s work managing regional educational laboratories across 11 states, according to a statement from the group. Those labs were researching math instruction, writing instruction and teacher shortages, among other topics. Grazia Mieren, a digital project manager who was laid off, said Mathematica staff had heard for months about preparations for cuts during a second Trump term. She said the group had been planning to beef up its existing funding from state governments and philanthropies. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Even so, the extent of the reductions had been shocking. “Nobody expected this,” Ms. Mieren said. “Your life is upside down, inside out and backwards.” Another 50 positions were eliminated at WestEd, a research nonprofit based in San Francisco. Several canceled WestEd projects directly addressed the biggest challenges in education since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. WestEd had managed the canceled evaluation of Oregon’s reading reforms, and had been planning similar efforts in Alaska, Montana and Washington. The group was also working to combat chronic absenteeism in a Nevada school district; researching how to prevent teacher attrition in Utah; and developing tools to aid student mental health in Alaska. In a written statement, WestEd chief executive Jannelle Kubinec said, “These cancellations are a great loss for our nation’s students, families and communities.” Nat Malkus, an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute who has been tracking contract cancellations and layoffs, acknowledged inefficiencies in federally funded research. But the Trump cuts had been made so broadly and hastily, he argued, that they had grouped the wheat with the chaff, while threatening the agency’s core functions. “We will lose some valuable studies,” he said, “and we’ll probably lose some bloated studies.”

For months now, President Trump has been threatening to deport foreign students who took part in last year’s campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. Behind the scenes, his administration got to work. Investigators from a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that typically focuses on human traffickers and drug smugglers scoured the internet for social media posts and videos that the administration could argue showed sympathy toward Hamas, administration officials said. The investigators handed over reports on multiple protesters to the State Department, which used an obscure legal statute to authorize the arrest over the weekend of a 30-year-old lawful permanent resident: Mahmoud Khalil. Mr. Trump said this week that Mr. Khalil’s case was the first of “many to come.” Civil rights groups say the arrest of Mr. Khalil, who is a legal permanent resident and is married to an American citizen, is a clear violation of the First Amendment. But it also illustrates how Mr. Trump is using the tools of the federal government to launch a crackdown not only on those who break the law — but also on dissent more broadly. “Freedom of speech has limitations,” Thomas D. Homan, who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s deportation operation, said on Wednesday during a meeting of New York lawmakers in Albany. “We consider him a national security threat.” Mr. Khalil has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the government is using a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act to argue that his actions during protests at Columbia University harmed U.S. foreign policy interests by fomenting antisemitism. The statute says that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” Mr. Khalil was a negotiator and a spokesman for the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia, from which he graduated in December with a master’s degree. His lawyers said Wednesday that they had not been able to hold a private conversation with him since his arrest. Stephen Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said there was only one other case he was aware of where similar powers were cited in deportation proceedings. The case involved Mario Ruiz Massieu, the former deputy attorney general of Mexico who entered the United States in 1995 on a visa. That year, the U.S. government tried to send him back to Mexico, where he was wanted on money laundering and other charges. The secretary of state at the time, Warren Christopher, said deportation was necessary for foreign policy reasons. Allowing Mr. Ruiz Massieu to stay would undermine the U.S. push for judicial reforms in Mexico, Mr. Christopher argued. The case against Mr. Ruiz Massieu was held up on appeal.The cases differ in important ways, Mr. Vladeck said. Mr. Ruiz Massieu was a foreign government official accused of corruption who was in the country on a temporary visa. Mr. Khalil has a green card — which allows a person a path to stay in the United States permanently — and was engaged in what appears to be constitutionally protected speech. “The government certainly appears to be retaliating for constitutionally protected, even if offensive, speech,” Mr. Vladeck said. The Trump administration has argued that Mr. Khalil’s role in protests at Columbia showed he was “aligned with Hamas,” but officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it. Mr. Trump has talked openly over the years about using the power of the presidency for retribution and reprisals. He has fired or launched investigations of government officials deemed to be disloyal and revoked security details for people with whom he has fallen out. He has put federal employees embracing diversity programs that he disagrees with on leave. But critics of the president say Mr. Khalil’s case seems designed to intimidate. “We cannot allow this nation to slide into a system of presidential authoritarianism, where people are seized at their homes, arrested and detained simply for expressing disfavored political viewpoints,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and ranking member of the judicial committee. Mr. Raskin said the detention of Mr. Khalil “sets an extremely dangerous and chilling precedent from an administration that is hellbent on wielding fear and intimidation as weapons to crush political dissent.”Legal experts say Mr. Trump’s attempts to stifle dissent can have a chilling effect. “Even if Khalil is eventually able to prevail, the government may get the short-term win of sending the message to immigrants of every status that they risk arrest, detention and perhaps even removal for having the temerity to speak out in favor of unpopular causes, even if they might win their lawsuit in the end,” Mr. Vladeck said. Mr. Trump has used his powers in the past to muzzle forms of protest. In 2020, as demonstrations against police brutality and racism swept the nation, Mr. Trump deployed various federal agencies, including the Bureau of Prisons and Customs and Border Protection officials, to crack down on protests in Washington. His administration even deployed military helicopters to fly low in the nation’s capital to try and disperse protesters. The Trump administration also considered making use of the Hobbs Act, which was put into place in the 1940s to punish racketeering in labor groups, to charge the protesters. At the same time, Mr. Trump has shown leniency when it comes to protests he agrees with. One of his first acts when he came into office in January was granting clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people who committed both violent and nonviolent crimes on Jan. 6, 2021, including assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. The rioters ransacked the Capitol in Mr. Trump’s name after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the election.

Just a few years ago, university statements on the day’s social and political issues abounded. When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, Harvard’s president at the time called it “senseless” and “deplorable,” and flew the invaded country’s flag in Harvard Yard. After George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer, Cornell’s president said she was “sickened.” The University of Michigan’s president described the Oct. 7, 2023, violence against Israel as a “horrific attack by Hamas terrorists.” But over the last year, each of those universities has adopted policies that limit official statements on current issues. According to a new report released on Tuesday from the Heterodox Academy, a group that has been critical of progressive orthodoxy on college campuses, 148 colleges had adopted “institutional neutrality” policies by the end of 2024, a trend that underscores the scorching political scrutiny they are under. All but eight of those policies were adopted after the Hamas attack. “We must open the way for our individual faculty’s expertise, intelligence, scholarship and wisdom to inform our state and society in their own voice, free from institutional interference,” said Mark Bernstein, a regent at Michigan, after adopting the policy in October. He said the university had historically refrained from issuing statements on momentous events, like the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy or during the two world wars. “So institutional statements are a modern phenomenon and a misguided venture that betrays our public mission,” he said. The universities are adopting such policies at a time when the Trump administration has moved aggressively to punish them for not doing enough to crack down on antisemitism and for embracing diversity, equity and inclusion policies. On Friday, the administration announced that it was pulling $400 million from Columbia, a move that sent shock waves across higher education. The administration has already said it is looking to target other universities. Universities ramped up issuing statements on hot-button issues about a decade ago, after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police shootings of Black people in places like Ferguson, Mo., said Alex Arnold, director of research at the Heterodox Academy. Some conservatives had long lamented such statements and believed they veered too leftward. Speech groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression worried that they discouraged dissent. For a while, the statements were hardly the subject of widespread controversy. The Hamas attack and the war that followed changed the equation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always split the left, but the attack on Oct. 7 and the war that followed sharpened those divisions. The statements that universities issued on the attack and Israel’s bombing of Gaza came under scrutiny, and were often criticized for being too late, too weak, too biased — or all three. University leaders, under pressure from donors, lawmakers and the public, began to ask: Why put out statements at all? About four out of five colleges that adopted neutrality policies are public and face scrutiny from state lawmakers. Several states, including Texas and Utah and North Carolina, forced their public universities to adopt such policies. Others, like Tennessee, are considering it. Most of the new policies apply to senior administrators, like college presidents and provosts. Others also encompass units like academic departments. And many apply to faculty members when they are speaking in an official capacity, but often make clear that faculty are free to express personal views, according to the Heterodox Academy. “The whole experience of coping with the campus controversy triggered by the Hamas attack has really gotten institutional leaders to think carefully and to reflect on what the function of our institutions of higher education is,” Mr. Arnold said. “I do think this is probably going to be a pretty durable change.” Critics of the neutrality trend have argued that administrators are merely sidestepping difficult debates on the Middle East conflict, and scared of angering donors and lawmakers. After Clark University, in Massachusetts, said it would shy away from taking positions, the school newspaper’s opinion editor called the move a “fake policy” designed to curb discussion of the conflict. But even universities that adopted such a policy have not gone totally silent on contested political issues. At an Anti-Defamation League event in New York City last week, Michigan’s president, Santa Ono, called the effort to boycott, divest and sanction Israel antisemitic, and said his response had been to invest even more in those partnerships. In an email, the university said the new neutrality policy adopted a “heavy presumption” against issuing statements “not directly connected to internal university functions.” “Combating antisemitism and making sure we have an environment where all students can thrive and succeed is part of our moral and legal obligation, and absolutely connected to our internal functions as an institution of higher education,” said Colleen Mastony, a Michigan spokeswoman. Presidents are often stumbling over their new policies. During an October interview with the school newspaper, Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, called a statement by pro-Palestinian students “offensive,” prompting the editorial board to tell him to “follow your own policy.” Last month, the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group, issued a statement on neutrality that was, more or less, neutral. It stated that the idea “is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.” The re-election of Donald Trump is now testing those policies. As the new administration, which has described universities as “the enemy,” ratchets up its attack on higher education, colleges are under greater pressure to be voices of resistance. But many college presidents have been spooked into silence, said Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, a small Catholic institution three miles from the White House. “They look at what happened to Claudine Gay, and some of the other presidents,” she said, referring to the former Harvard president who resigned last year after a congressional hearing on antisemitism. “And they’re like: ‘I don’t want that to happen to me. So I’ll just shut up and hunker down, and hope this cloud passes.’” No university is more associated with neutrality than the University of Chicago, where incoming students are furnished with the Kalven Report, the 1967 document that made the case for neutrality. The report, penned as violence upended college campuses during the Vietnam War, said the university “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” Tom Ginsburg, director of the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression at Chicago, says adopting neutrality signals to lawmakers that colleges are committed to welcoming diverse viewpoints. “Because the statements tended to reflect the majority views on campuses, which are overwhelmingly left-leaning,” he said, “you can see how adopting it would be a way of saying to lawmakers: ‘This isn’t who we really are. We’re not indoctrinating people with contested positions.’” But even the Kalven Report included a caveat that doesn’t settle precisely when universities should issue statements. Neutrality, the report says, still allows colleges to speak out when “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry” are threatened. That moment is now, said Ms. McGuire of Trinity Washington University. “The erosion of knowledge and expertise that this administration has embraced is very, very scary,” she said, “and higher ed should be calling it out at every turn.”

The Education Department announced on Tuesday that it was firing more than 1,300 workers, effectively gutting the agency that manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools. The layoffs mean that the department, which started the year with 4,133 employees, will now have a work force of about half that size after less than two months with President Trump in office. In addition to the 1,315 workers who were fired on Tuesday, 572 employees accepted separation packages offered in recent weeks and 63 probationary workers were terminated last month. The cuts could portend an additional move by Mr. Trump to essentially dismantle the department, as he has said he wants to do, even though it cannot be closed without the approval of Congress. Linda McMahon, the education secretary, described the layoffs as part of an effort to deliver services more efficiently and said the changes would not affect student loans, Pell Grants, funding for special needs students or competitive grant making. “Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents and teachers,” Ms. McMahon said in a statement. Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, wrote on social media that he had spoken with Ms. McMahon and received assurance that cuts would not affect the department’s “ability to carry out its statutory obligations.” Sheria Smith, the president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents more than 2,800 workers at the Education Department, said the Trump administration had “no respect for the thousands of workers who have dedicated their careers to serve their fellow Americans” and vowed to fight the cuts. The department’s Office of Civil Rights had particularly steep cuts, with regional centers shuttered or reduced to a skeleton crew, including those in New York, San Francisco and Boston. The office, already understaffed, regularly struggled to work through lengthy civil rights investigations. It had accumulated a heavy backlog of cases under the Biden administration after protests roiled campuses across the country last year. “We will not stand idly by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” Ms. Smith said. Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, said the changes would drain job training programs and increase costs of higher education. “The real victims will be our most vulnerable students,” Ms. Pringle said.Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he wants to close the Education Department and instead rely on states and local school districts to fully oversee America’s education system. The president adopted the stringent position during the 2024 campaign to align himself with the parents’ rights movement that grew out of the backlash to school shutdowns and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic. That movement gained steam by organizing around opposition to left-leaning ideas in the curriculum, especially on L.G.B.T.Q. issues and race. Activists contended that those priorities undermined parental rights and values. In an interview last week on Fox News, Ms. McMahon said Mr. Trump intended to sign an executive order aimed at closing her department, but she declined to give details on the timing. An executive order to dismantle the department would challenge the authority of Congress, which created the department by statute and legally must sign off on any move to close it. In a closely divided Senate, it is unlikely the administration could find enough support to do so, particularly as public opinion polls during the past two months have consistently shown roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose closing the department. But Mr. Trump may be forging ahead anyway. He has talked about moving some of the agency’s work with student loans to the Treasury Department. Education Department officials visited the Treasury Department on Monday to prepare for the shift, said one person familiar with the planning. In her confirmation hearing last month, Ms. McMahon discussed moving civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department and services for disabled students to the Health and Human Services Department. Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the second Trump term, also laid out a detailed plan for eliminating the department. The proposal envisioned moving much of agency’s work to other arms of the federal government. Student aid, for example, would be handled by the Treasury Department; vocational education by the Labor Department; and disability education by the Department of Health and Human Services. Rumors about potential layoffs began circulating around the Education Department after workers received an email around 2 p.m. announcing that the agency’s offices in the Washington area would be closed on Wednesday and reopen on Thursday. The email did not provide a reason for the closure, but the administration gave similarly cryptic notices about temporarily closing offices before severe cuts last month at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Department officials later told reporters that the building closure was related to the layoffs, and was done out of an abundance of caution to protect the safety of workers keeping their jobs. Workers who lost their jobs were informed in emails sent after 6 p.m. on Tuesday, after they had left for the day. They will remain on the payroll for 90 days, receiving full pay and benefits, and be given one week of pay for each of their first 10 years of service and two weeks’ pay for every year of service beyond 10 years. They will also be given time in the coming weeks to return to the department and collect their belongings, agency officials said. About 75 former agency workers had gathered outside the department’s headquarters in Washington on Tuesday morning to rally opposition to the cuts pushed by the administration. At the end of the rally, Dorie Turner Nolt, one of the organizers, urged the crowd members to face the building and cheer their former colleagues inside who, she said, were doing their best to uphold democracy. Several workers inside the building pressed up against the windows, waving their hands and flashing a thumbs-up amid the ovation. Later that evening, a woman left the building carrying a stack of government laptops to a group of colleagues waiting at the curb so they could check their emails to see if they were let go. The woman, who declined to give her name out of fear of retribution, said she had worked for years at the agency overseeing payments from the department. Mr. Trump has radically upended federal agencies at the start of his second term by relying on a team overseen by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to shrink and disrupt the federal government. Mr. Musk’s team has taken aim at more than 20 agencies while gaining access to sensitive government data systems. Ms. McMahon told Fox last week that she had held regular meetings with Mr. Musk’s team. “I’ve been very appreciative of the things they’ve shown us, some of the waste, and we’re reacting to that,” she said.