A federal judge in Maryland granted a temporary restraining order on Monday blocking the Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management from disclosing sensitive data to members of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team and anyone assisting them. The order, issued by Judge Deborah L. Boardman in Federal District Court for the District of Maryland, prevents Mr. Musk’s representatives from carrying out what they have described as an audit of the Education Department’s student loan systems for two weeks while the lawsuit continues. Judge Boardman wrote that the government had not argued convincingly that members of Mr. Musk's team had a real need for access to such personal information in the performance of their duties. “DOGE affiliates have been granted access to systems of record that contain some of the plaintiffs’ most sensitive data — Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, income and assets, citizenship status, and disability status — and their access to this trove of personal information is ongoing,” Judge Boardman wrote. “There is no reason to believe their access to this information will end anytime soon because the government believes their access is appropriate.” The American Federation of Teachers, a union representing more than 1.8 million educators, had sued to keep members of the Musk team out of the department’s data systems, which it said contained private information that its members had submitted in connection with student aid for themselves or their families. “We brought this case to uphold people’s privacy, because when people give their financial and other personal information to the federal government — namely to secure financial aid for their kids to go to college, or to get a student loan — they expect that data to be protected and used for the reasons it was intended, not appropriated for other means,” Randi Weingarten, the group’s president, said in a statement. Last week, a judge in a related case refused to issue a restraining order restricting Mr. Musk’s team, finding that the group that brought the lawsuit had not shown that a group of students who had lodged similar complaints had suffered clear harm by having their data analyzed by affiliates of Mr. Musk. But Judge Boardman found that the disclosure of sensitive personal information to Mr. Musk’s team alone was itself a concrete injury, notwithstanding any hypothetical concerns like the possibility of identity theft. Lawyers who brought the suit had asked that the same restraints be placed on the Treasury Department, but Judge Boardman declined, as a judge in a separate case had already blocked Mr. Musk’s team from sensitive data there. She indicated that she believed the teacher’s union would prevail in its lawsuit, and that the restraining order was necessary until the members of Mr. Musk’s team who are detailed to the Education Department could explain why they could not do their analysis with data that left out or redacted sensitive information.

It was 45 seconds too late, but the teacher had a plan. A gunman had just barraged her classroom with an AR-15, killing two students and injuring four others before turning to a classroom across the hall. The bullet-riddled walls were crumbling. Ceiling tiles were falling. If the shooter came back to kill more of her students, the teacher decided, she would stand up and shout, “We love you.” The teacher was Ivy Schamis, whose husband would be waiting at home with a Valentine’s Day dinner; whose son was planning a wedding she couldn’t imagine missing; whose curriculum for this class — History of the Holocaust — had just moments earlier stirred a discussion about hate on campuses. We love you. These would surely be her final words, Ms. Schamis thought. She knew her plan was futile — irrational, even. But with no stop-the-bleed kit, no shield, no help, words were all she had to show the children that an adult had put up a fight. The moment never came. The gunman doubled back to the class across the hall, but not to Room 1214. At the command of a SWAT team, Ms. Schamis climbed over bodies and ran with her surviving students down the blood-smeared hallway, out the doors, and into the blinding light. What waited for her there, in the days and months and years ahead, would be a whole new role in the lives of the 30 students who had survived. For them, she would be what she couldn’t be for the two who died: a lifeline. She felt she owed them that. She had been the only adult in the room. Attending to Her Students The morning after the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Ms. Schamis rose before dawn and began cleaning her bloodstained suede boots. Seventeen people had been killed, including Nick Dworet and Helena Ramsay, who had been in her class. Some of the surviving students had abandoned their blood- and glass-caked shoes on the school pavement, but Ms. Schamis had the strange feeling she ought to take hers home and wipe them down, over and over, until they came clean. She left the boots out by the closet to dry and then phoned the moving company that was set to relocate her family to a new neighborhood in a few weeks. She no longer had time to pack boxes, she explained to the movers. She needed to attend to her students.Within a few hours, Ms. Schamis was corresponding with her students by text. Today, she adamantly denies that she started the Room 1214 text thread, but everyone else seems to remember it that way. She used it to organize car pools to wakes and funerals, to check in on the wounded and to plan a meet-up at Cold Stone Creamery, just so everyone could be together. When the school reopened two weeks later, Ms. Schamis was there, shuffling between campus buildings with a cart of teaching supplies. The school’s psychological support offerings for students included coloring books and Play-Doh. She found them useless. She arranged to instead have a service dog, Luigi, a golden retriever, join her classes for the rest of the year. When Luigi arrived, tail wagging madly, students from throughout the school came to play with him — including some who had otherwise refused to return to campus. The following fall, Ms. Schamis arranged to have everyone from Room 1214 placed in her study hall for support. Ms. Schamis had known some of the students for only six weeks before the shooting, but she seemed to have a preternatural sense of what each of them needed. Rebecca Bogart, who had been a senior, felt so lost after what she had witnessed that Ms. Schamis encouraged her to apply for a scholarship to go abroad to Ecuador. The physical distance finally gave her mental space from the event. Ally Allen, who had watched the killer approach through a glass door panel, kept waking in the night with tears pouring down her face. When Ms. Schamis dropped a picture of a German shepherd puppy in the Room 1214 group chat — a future service dog, in need of a home — Ally felt deep down the dog was meant to be hers. She received Dakota the morning after the one-year anniversary of the shooting: a new beginning. And Kelly Plaur, who had called 911 four times during the shooting, was at a music festival when the crowd began running from what sounded like gunshots. This time, it was Ms. Schamis she called. Keep calm, the teacher coached. Keep me on the phone, and keep running. Students called and texted her with their grief, their panic attacks, their drug use, their suicidal thoughts. What their own parents could not fully understand — the worst moment of their lives — Ms. Schamis could. One day, she took some of the students to meet with a survivor of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado. His experience of being shot and watching a friend die was remarkably similar to theirs, and Ms. Schamis hoped that his journey toward healing would assure them that together, they could persevere. But weeks later, Ms. Schamis’s phone began buzzing incessantly. It was the Room 1214 text thread. The Columbine survivor had died of an overdose. Leaving Parkland Ms. Schamis committed herself to staying at Marjory Stoneman Douglas until every surviving student from Room 1214 graduated in the spring of 2019. It was not easy. On her commute each morning, she had the same troubling premonition: her car plummeting off the expressway overpass. Finally, her husband, Jeff, suggested a daily ritual. When she approached the bridge, she was to call him to discuss something grounding and ordinary, like what they would have for dinner. At the 2019 graduation ceremony, Ms. Schamis wept: Helena should have received a diploma. Ms. Schamis found Helena’s brother and hugged him, but Helena’s mother stood back. Ms. Schamis wondered what the woman felt seeing the teacher who had been with her daughter. That fall, she took the semester off and then moved to Washington, D.C., forgoing her full pension in search of peace. Washington was where Ms. Schamis truly began to mourn. She joined a two-year waiting list for therapy. She reached out to Ally Allen, whom she had referred to a breeder for a service dog, realizing for the first time she needed one of her own. But two Parkland survivor charities she approached for financial aid to train a dog said they could not help her. As a teacher, she wasn’t entirely surprised: She didn’t recall a school administrator ever once checking in on her. She had never heard any school official admit that she had not received active shooter training, or that her classroom had no stop-the-bleed kit. And she had never been able to reclaim mementos of almost 20 years of teaching that remained inside Room 1214. Ms. Schamis, who has a master’s degree in education and specialized in Holocaust studies, had spent almost her entire career at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She had loved teaching social studies in part because it allowed her to watch students see themselves anew: As they made sense of current events in the context of history, she witnessed their opinions changing and their prejudices being renounced. There was nothing more meaningful to her. But she could not return to another classroom. So she took a job as an office manager at a small private school, accepting a major pay cut to avoid being in a classroom where she would again be responsible for students’ safety. When she started, she discovered the office manager station was in the front foyer of the building — in a way, the first line of defense. ‘Always Available’ The students, too, scattered around the country, but the Room 1214 text thread bound them together. Over time, there were updates: Ally Allen, inspired by Ms. Schamis, was preparing to become a teacher. Hannah Carbocci was pursuing a career in criminal justice and writing her thesis on warning signs in school shooters. Catie Krakow was getting a degree in mental health counseling and shared tips on how the others could care for themselves as another anniversary approached. I hope everyone is doing as well as they could be, wrote Elena Blanco, who had been assigned to the seat behind Nick. You guys are forever family, replied Matt Walker, whose desk had been next to Helena’s. As long as I am breathing, Ms. Schamis told them, I will always be available for you.A year later, soon after the Uvalde, Texas, shooting, Ms. Schamis woke up to a message on the thread that had landed during the night: Uvalde was one too many, a student wrote; he couldn’t take his anguish anymore. Ms. Schamis had taken a suicide prevention course the summer after the massacre. She knew the steps. She called the former student, asking if he had a specific plan to end his life. He did. She kept him engaged with questions — what was something he was looking forward to? — while she sought emergency help for him from five states away. She spent the next five hours in a maze of dead ends. She tried the suicide hotline, but they could not help her, since she was not the person in distress. She did a 40-minute intake call with a Florida behavioral health center, only to learn they did not serve his region. She connected with a mental health hospital, but it turned out to be private. By now, she was weeping. Eventually she reached the instructor of her suicide prevention class from all those years ago, who told her to call the West Palm Beach Police Department and explain that the distressed young man was a survivor of Parkland’s school shooting. The boy ultimately received emergency care and survived. But not before the dispatcher who answered Ms. Schamis’s call admitted that with all the school shootings, she could not specifically recall what happened in Parkland. ‘That’s My Girl.’ Four years after the shooting, a process server arrived at Ms. Schamis’s home with a subpoena calling on her to testify at the killer’s sentencing trial. Ms. Schamis hid. The text thread began to buzz with messages from former students who would also be required to appear. Ms. Schamis reverted to her usual role. I’m with you as you testify, she wrote. Daniela Menescal, who had gone on to study psychology in Boston and still had shrapnel embedded in her leg and back, was distressed about going alone. I’ll ask if I can be with you, Ms. Schamis told Daniela. As the sun rose on a Wednesday morning, she texted the group that it was her turn. Dylan Kraemer, who had already taken the stand, replied fast. You got this! If you look straight when u testify, he wrote, you can’t see the shooter. On the witness stand, Ms. Schamis spoke with the tone of a teacher in front of a class, nodding for emphasis and gesturing around the room. Her gold necklace glimmered under the lights as she described the layout of Room 1214, the lesson she had been teaching, the first deafening blasts.Her eyes trailed over to the defense table. There he was, the man who had stolen Nick’s chance to swim at the Olympics; who had robbed Helena of her plans to attend college in England. The killer kept his head down. The prosecutor, Mike Satz, brought over a photograph, Exhibit 3S, and asked Ms. Schamis to name the subject. “That’s my girl,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth, her voice cracking. “Helena. Helena Ramsay.” Then he brought over another, Exhibit 3R. “And that’s Nicholas Dworet,” she said. “Handsome boy.” Parents in the courtroom shifted in their seats. Others shook their heads. Ms. Schamis looked up to the ceiling, blinking the tears from her eyes, patting her cheeks with a tissue and adjusting her glasses back on her nose where they had been. Hannah Carbocci — watching the trial live from home — knew her teacher wouldn’t see the group chat until later, but she sent an encouraging message anyway: Mrs Schamis you’re a rockstar, she wrote. There were no further questions, the lawyer in the courtroom said. Ms. Schamis climbed down from the stand. That afternoon, she typed a response in the thread: Love you so. A Demolition As the sixth anniversary of the shooting approached last year, Lexi Gendron was struggling. She had tried to go to college, but like many of the others, found herself too preoccupied with classroom seating arrangements to focus. She couldn’t have her back to the door, but facing it meant watching for a killer. After one class, she dropped out, instead working at a casino and a winery before moving to Texas. Now, she was about to start nursing school in hopes of a career in pediatrics — which meant returning to a classroom once again. Just spilling my heart out, she wrote on the thread one night. Lexi had thrown away all her #MSDStrong memorabilia in search of a fresh start in Texas — only to realize that those tangible objects had been her puzzle pieces to a day that had never fully sunk in. I’m so upset with myself for letting that stuff go, she wrote. I can’t believe I did that. Ms. Schamis was the first to reply, offering to send T-shirts, bracelets, buttons and pins. Let me know whatever will make you feel better, she wrote. Love you all, she added.She understood the pull of Parkland. When the school’s 1200 building was set to be demolished, Ms. Schamis had reached out to the school board, desperate to return to her classroom one more time. The jury, bereaved parents, journalists, and even Vice President Kamala Harris were granted permission to enter the building, but Ms. Schamis was not. Instead, prosecutors sent a package to her home in Washington: a five-year-old box of stale Valentine’s Day chocolates from her desk in Room 1214. On the morning the demolition was set to begin, Ms. Schamis heard a radio segment as she drove to her new school in Washington. Bereaved families in Parkland were cathartically hammering off bits of the school building before the team came in to clear it away. Ms. Schamis, shaking, called Jeff. They discussed the weather. Her last mental image of her own classroom comes from a press pool report in which strangers described the artifacts left inside her fourth-period Holocaust class: a 2017-18 school year planner; a whiteboard bearing Ms. Schamis’s learning objective, “to be aware of the world and its surroundings”; bullet strike marks across the desks; and the dried blood of Nick and Helena coating a book titled “Tell Them We Remember.”

Tyler Nelson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida, studies the neurobiology of pain, a choice partly motivated by his own frustrations with a neuromuscular disability. Last October, he applied for a grant at the National Institutes of Health that, if awarded, would support his dream of someday running his own lab. But, earlier in February, he learned that his application, which took six months to pull together, was about to be thrown out. The reason: Dr. Nelson had applied for a version of the award that supports researchers who are historically underrepresented in science, including people with disabilities. That funding avenue now violates President Trump’s executive order banning federal agencies from activities related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, or D.E.I.A. Dr. Nelson was tipped off by an N.I.H. affiliate, but he has received no official notice about the situation. “I’ve tried to call probably 150 times,” he said. Unofficially, he learned that the agency was planning to pull his submission altogether rather than move it to the general award pool for consideration. This has happened with at least one other type of award offered by the agency, which did not respond to a request for comment. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Thanks to the tip, Dr. Nelson was able to withdraw his application and resubmit it to the general award pool before its deadline — but he is unsure if others were so lucky. “What this does is discriminate against people who are underrepresented,” said an N.I.H. reviewer who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. The reviewer added that the evaluation criteria for the general and diversity award pools were the same, with no priority given to either pool. “I can’t stress enough,” the reviewer said, that an undeserving grant “is not going to get funded, whether it’s ‘diversity’ or not.”According to Eve Hill, a civil rights lawyer in Washington, D.C., this may violate certain legal protections for people with disabilities, although there is no precedent in court. “They’ve provided this category to overcome past discrimination,” she said. “By not then considering them in the general award, they are exacerbating that discrimination.” The predicament is one of many ways that accessibility across the sciences is taking a hit from the D.E.I.A. shutdown. Federal agencies, once proponents for increasing opportunities for scientists with disabilities, are now ceasing programs geared toward that goal. Left uncertain is how funding for disability research — from designing accessible health services to building better prosthetics — will be affected by the order. People with disabilities make up more than a quarter of the nation’s population and are considered to be the world’s largest minority. But experts say that, until recently, disability has largely been neglected in discussions about marginalized groups. “Accessibility was always seen as an afterthought,” said Kim Knackstedt, a disability policy consultant in Washington, D.C. “Whether intentional or not, disability has been excluded from a lot of D.E.I. efforts.” That extends to the sciences. The National Science Foundation reported that, in 2021, people with disabilities made up only 3 percent of the STEM work force. Only in 2023 did the N.I.H. designate people with disabilities as a community that experienced health disparities. As the first director of disability policy in the Biden administration, Dr. Knackstedt led a push for accessibility to be at the forefront of diversity, equity and inclusion policy. One outcome of this effort was an executive order issued by President Biden that explicitly named accessibility as an area to strengthen in the federal work force. “That was a win for many of us,” said Bonnielin Swenor, an epidemiologist who founded the Disability Health Research Center at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Swenor, who experienced barriers pursuing a research career because of a visual impairment, added that it was disheartening “to have that progress not just stopped, but rolled back.” Federal science agencies scrambled to comply with the reversal, leaving scientists and disability advocates apprehensive about the future of accessibility research. Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation began flagging grants that contained buzzwords commonly associated with D.E.I.A., including “disability” and “barrier.” An N.S.F. program director, who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation, said that there were “quite a few awards flagged for the word ‘disability,’” including projects to make driving and computing more accessible. The program director added that staff members were unsure if these research activities were banned by the executive order. A spokesman for the N.S.F. did not answer questions sent by The New York Times regarding the eligibility of such awards. Robert Gregg, an engineer at the University of Michigan who designs wearable robots for people with mobility impairments, said he had received notification from the N.S.F. to halt D.E.I.A. activities. But he interpreted that to mean supplemental programs aimed at increasing participation of underrepresented groups in science. “Fundamental research in technology, like robotics and A.I. — my understanding is that that is still perfectly valid and can continue,” he said. But Dr. Gregg also runs clinical trials funded by the N.I.H., and he recently learned that the renewal process for this funding had effectively been frozen again. Scientists with disabilities are also worried about what the clampdown on accessibility will mean for both their own careers and those of the next generation. “Disabled people were barely being included,” said Alyssa Paparella, a graduate student at the Baylor College of Medicine who founded an online movement called #DisabledInSTEM. “Now there’s a huge fear of what’s going to be the future of all of us.” A notice on the N.I.H. website encouraging participation of people with disabilities in the research enterprise has been removed, as has an N.S.F. webpage that listed funding opportunities for scientists with disabilities. Last month, the N.S.F. also indefinitely postponed an engineering workshop to better include people with autism and other neurocognitive differences in the work force. In the geosciences, many degree programs require students to complete weekslong outdoor field camps that can be difficult to navigate with certain disabilities. This led Anita Marshall, a lecturer at the University of Florida, to found GeoSPACE, an N.S.F.-funded camp that incorporates modern technology and can be completed virtually. She did not know if GeoSPACE would be able to continue. “This has really knocked me off my feet,” said Dr. Marshall, who described the project as her pride and joy. “I’m not sure what’s next.” Doubts have sprung up for Dr. Nelson, too. Although he managed to salvage his application for N.I.H. funding, the change has pushed back any clarity about his future in research by at least five months. “It’s a really dismal time in science for trainees,” he said. “I look at the last 15 years, like, ‘Why did I work this underpaid, high-stress job?’ Do I want to do this forever?”

A decade after allegations first surfaced that schools operated by New York’s Hasidic Jewish community were denying children a basic education, the state government is for the first time cutting off funding for schools it says have refused to improve. The New York State Education Department will no longer provide crucial funding for two all-boys Hasidic schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and will ensure that all of their students are enrolled in different schools by the fall. The effective closure of the two schools, which are known as yeshivas, is the strongest action taken in New York to crack down on schools over their failure to comply with education law. And it’s a move that many Hasidic leaders and even critics of the yeshiva system doubted the state would ever make. That’s partially because of the long and tangled process that the state created to penalize schools found to be breaking the law, which mandates that all children receive an adequate secular education, even in private schools. Resisting outside oversight into religious education has become perhaps the top political priority for the Hasidic community, which has long maintained a significant influence in local politics and tends to vote as a bloc. The insular community’s yeshivas, which rely heavily on taxpayer dollars, teach religious lessons in Yiddish and Hebrew for most of the school day, and offer little instruction in English or math. The two schools that the state is effectively closing are part of a larger group of yeshivas that have not made sufficient progress, said Rachel Connors, a spokeswoman for the Education Department. Most of those schools have not yet faced any consequences for failing to boost their secular education. But the leaders of the two schools, Yeshiva Talmud Torah of Kasho and Yeshiva Bnei Shimon Yisroel of Sopron, which are housed in three locations in Williamsburg, refused even to meet with education officials to work on an improvement plan. “In December 2024, the department wrote to noncompliant schools, inviting them to meet and urging them to re-engage in the process to avoid the consequences associated with final negative determinations,” Ms. Connors said in a statement. “Schools that did not re-engage have been deemed schools that do not provide compulsory education.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The two yeshivas were part of an investigation into Hasidic schools that began after yeshiva graduates filed a complaint with the state in 2015, claiming that the education they had received had left them unprepared to navigate the world as adults. When education officials in 2019 visited one of the Sopron locations, which is now effectively being shuttered, inspectors “did not observe any instruction, taught in English, in the core academic subjects of English, history, mathematics and science,” according to a report released by the city’s Education Department. Spokespeople for a group that represents yeshivas did not respond to requests for comment. But an article published Friday in Yeshiva World News, a Hasidic news outlet, offered some insight into the community’s reaction. “It is always wiser to make your case to government rather than to refuse to respond,” the editorial read. “That makes it seem like they had something to hide. The yeshivas should have demonstrated pride and confidence in their students.” The editorial also noted that the yeshivas were not being judged on their curriculum or “approach to education.” Instead, their funding was being cut off because they had not engaged with the government. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Indeed, the state’s move, which was earlier reported by The Daily News and The Jerusalem Post and not publicized by the state’s Education Department, underscores how much some yeshivas have defied government efforts to bolster secular education. Scrutiny of the schools ramped up following a 2022 New York Times investigation, which found that scores of all-boys Hasidic schools in Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley did not provide a basic secular education despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding. The report also discovered that teachers in some yeshivas had used corporal punishment. The following year, city and state education officials determined that 18 Hasidic yeshivas were not providing a basic nonreligious education. The state, however, provided those schools with multiple opportunities to demonstrate their commitment to improving their secular studies. A spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams, a longtime political ally of the Hasidic community, said that the city would defer to the state on this issue but otherwise declined to comment. Adina Mermelstein Konikoff, the director of Yaffed, a group of former yeshiva students that supports secular education, said in a statement that she hoped the state’s move “serves as a wake-up call for other schools that continue to disregard essential academic standards.”

A federal judge on Friday agreed to extend an order blocking the National Institutes of Health from reducing grant funding to institutions conducting medical and scientific research until she could come to a more lasting decision. Judge Angel Kelley of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts had temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s cuts from taking effect earlier this month, with that hold set to expire on Monday. That teed up an urgent hearing on Friday in which states and associations representing those institutions urged her to consider halting the cuts more permanently. The stakes of the lawsuit were put in stark relief during one portion of Friday’s hearing that focused on “irreparable harm,” in which Judge Kelley asked both sides to explain whether the suspension of the funds amounted to an irreversible blow to the universities and hospitals across the country that depend on the funding. The N.I.H. has proposed cutting around $4 billion in grants it provides for “indirect costs,” which it has described as tangential expenditures for things like facilities and administrators, and which it said could be better spent on directly funding research. The proposal envisioned reducing funding for those indirect costs to a 15 percent rate to all institutions that receive funds, which a lawyer for the government said was in line with that of private foundations. But the coterie of lawyers representing the states and research institutions argued to the judge that the direct and indirect costs are often intertwined. One lawyer asked Judge Kelley to consider a scenario of a researcher doing experiments directly funded through an N.I.H. grant, and a worker disposing of hazardous medical waste produced by all the experiments being run at that facility. “It is equally important to the research that both of those people are paid to do their work,” the lawyer said. “The research couldn’t happen without that — nevertheless, one is classified as a direct cost, one is an indirect cost.” Lawyers for the plaintiffs ticked through an array of adverse effects that could result from the pause in funding. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT They asked the judge to consider the ramifications of potential layoffs of highly skilled staff members, such as veterinary technicians that oversee animal research and hospital nurses. They warned of clinical trials on new drugs being paused. They argued that many institutions would be unable to bring back employees they had lost once experiments and trials were forced to stop.Brian Lea, a lawyer representing the government, said on Friday that the broad effects mentioned at the hearing were largely speculative, part of a “nonspecific aura of urgency” that research institutions had drummed up without showing concrete damages. With universities in the middle of admissions season, the plaintiff lawyers described a chaotic environment in which both schools and Ph.D. applicants would need to reassess whether the projects they planned to pursue would be feasible. And they expressed fear for smaller universities that were not likely to be able to fill the unanticipated gap left in their budgets. Even at larger schools with hefty endowments, the promise of government funding had already influenced big investments, the plaintiff lawyers said. They pointed to a $200 million neuroscience lab at the California Institute of Technology, finished in 2020, that the university expected to pay for in part through the funding. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “There’s going to be a hole in the research budget at Caltech, and actually a big one,” a lawyer said. The plaintiff lawyers said that other groups not involved in the lawsuit, such as associations of dental and nursing schools, had also become invested in the outcome, fearing disruptions to their own operations. “Are you willing to agree that the plaintiffs will suffer harm?” Judge Kelley asked the government’s lawyer after hearing the long list of examples marshaled by the groups suing. “Not irreparable,” Mr. Lea replied. He said the states and associations suing the government had other means of recovering the lost funding, such as suing under the Tucker Act, which allows groups to sue the government in contract claims. He added that the 15 percent cap was in line with what private foundations such as the Gates Foundation often agree to. Earlier, Mr. Lea repeated the government’s claim that capping “indirect funds,” for costs like buildings, utilities and support staff, at 15 percent was simply designed to free up more money to be allocated directly to researchers. “I want to be clear about one thing at the outset: This is not cutting down on grant funding,” he said. “This is about changing the slices of the pie, which falls squarely in the executive’s discretion.” Lawyers suing to stop the cuts said that capping indirect funds at 15 percent across the board was arbitrary, a standard for challenging agency decisions. They argued that institutions of different sizes naturally have different needs when negotiating with the government, and forcing all to adapt to a 15 percent maximum was unreasonable. “A lot of this is driven by economies of scale, right?” one of the lawyers said. “The larger the institution you have, the bigger the building you have, the more you can house multiple projects within that one building — that’s going to change your ratio of direct costs or indirect costs,” she said.

David L. Boren, a popular reform-minded Democrat who led Oklahoma as its governor and then represented it for three terms in the United States Senate, where he was an influential voice on national intelligence, died on Thursday at his home in Norman, Okla. He was 83. The death was confirmed by Clark Brewster, his lawyer. The son of an Oklahoma congressman, Mr. Boren rose from academic brilliance as a Rhodes scholar into a steppingstone political career as a state legislator (1967-75), the nation’s youngest governor (1975-79) and a member of the Senate (1979-94), where he became the longest serving chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. His Sooner eminence grew further when he served as president of the University of Oklahoma. To dramatize his campaign for the governorship in 1974, a 5,000-strong “Boren Broom Brigade” converged on the Capitol in Oklahoma City as Mr. Boren vowed to “sweep out the old guard” with reforms. In his single term, he cut state income taxes, abolished inheritance taxes for spouses, pushed through anti-crime laws, improved a troubled prison system, funded public education for gifted students, and invoked so-called sunset laws to eliminate some 100 state agencies, commissions and boards. A reliably red state today, Oklahoma was long a Democratic stronghold until recent decades.Rising to national prominence in the Senate, Mr. Boren became a centrist, allying himself on many issues with President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, both Republicans. He championed tax cuts and campaign finance reforms to limit the influence of wealthy donors. As chairman of the Intelligence Committee, from 1987 to 1993, he helped shape foreign policy and was a mentor to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence. Mr. Boren was also instrumental in building bipartisan support for sanctions against South Africa over its apartheid racial laws, and in 1990 he helped secure the release of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader, after 27 years in prison. Mr. Mandela went on to serve as the president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999, and he and Mr. Boren became friends. Mr. Boren resigned midway through his third Senate term to accept the presidency of the University of Oklahoma. In his long tenure there, from 1994 to 2018, he increased enrollments and the number of scholarships, introduced new academic and research programs, raised more funds for endowed professorships, expanded student housing and added classrooms.For most of his university presidency, Mr. Boren was never far from the national political spotlight. There was talk in 2007 of a third-party presidential campaign by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, with Mr. Boren as a possible running mate. But in 2008, Mr. Boren endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president. Mr. Obama later named Mr. Boren co-chairman of the nonpartisan President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Mr. Boren also made national headlines in 2015 by closing the campus chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the nation’s largest college fraternities, after a video showed white fraternity members singing a racist chant that included anti-Black slurs, a reference to lynching and vows that African Americans would never be allowed to join the campus chapter. Mr. Boren retired as the university’s president in 2018. Months later, in February 2019, Oklahoma news outlets reported that a former student and teaching assistant at the university, Jess Eddy, had reported to the Norman Police Department that Mr. Boren had made unwanted sexual advances toward him in a Houston hotel room in November 2010. Both were drinking alcohol, he said. They and other university personnel were in Houston for a weekend of conferences on alumni affairs, fund-raising and student recruitment. The accuser, a University of Oklahoma graduate, was quoted as saying in multiple interviews with nondoc.com, an Oklahoma-based independent journalism website, that Mr. Boren had sexually harassed him with “touching” and “kisses” about “once or twice a semester” from 2010 to 2012. The university hired the law firm Jones Day to investigate the allegations. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation also got involved. Nondoc.com said Mr. Eddy had acknowledged that he had called Mr. Boren and “asked him for compensation for my pain and suffering” and that he had said he regretted that call. Bob Burke, a lawyer for Mr. Boren, rejected the allegations. “Even though we have received no complaint, President Boren emphatically denies any inappropriate behavior or unlawful activity,” he said. “He has been a dedicated public servant for more than 50 years, and his life is an open book in Oklahoma.” The results of the Jones Day investigation were never released, and the allegations did not lead to criminal charges or civil litigation. The episode nevertheless prompted Mr. Boren to sever his ties with the university.David Lyle Boren was born on April 21, 1941, in Washington to Representative Lyle H. Boren and Christine (McKown) Boren. He had a younger sister, Susan. His father, who served in the House from 1937 to 1947, was a conservative Oklahoma Democrat who opposed the growth of government and what he regarded as excessive federal spending. David grew up and attended schools in Seminole, Okla., before graduating in 1959 from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda, Md. He went on to Yale University, where he majored in American history, joined the Yale Conservative Party and was president of the Yale Political Union. He graduated in 1963 near the top of his class. As a Rhodes scholar, he earned a master’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics from the University of Oxford in 1965. Plunging into Oklahoma politics, Mr. Boren won a seat in the state’s House of Representatives in 1966 and served four two-year terms. He earned a law degree at the University of Oklahoma in 1968; was in the Oklahoma National Guard for a decade, rising to captain in command of a supply company; and was chairman of the social sciences department at Oklahoma Baptist University, in Shawnee. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The Watergate scandal, which forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign in 1974, had permeated politics when Mr. Boren ran for governor that year, and he cast himself as a state-government reformer. He defeated the incumbent Democratic governor, David Hall, in a primary, and a Republican, James Inhofe, in the general election. (Mr. Inhofe was later elected to the House and the Senate. He died in July.) At 33, Mr. Boren was the nation’s youngest governor when he took office in January 1975. As governor, he reformed the state’s workers’ compensation law and fostered many improvements to Oklahoma’s correctional system, which was still reeling from a 1973 riot at the overcrowded state penitentiary at McAlester that left three dead and $20 million in damage. He also drew wide attention during the energy crisis of the mid-1970s by calling for the nationwide deregulation of natural gas prices. President Carter named him chairman of a task force to study the problem. His actions positioned him well for his next move, up to the Senate.Shortly after graduating from law school in 1968, Mr. Boren had married Janna Lou Little, whose father, Reuel Little, ran for governor on the American Party ticket in 1970. The couple were divorced in 1976. In 1977, Mr. Boren married Molly W. Shi, an Oklahoma county judge. They exchanged vows at the Governor’s Mansion. He is survived by his wife; two children from his first marriage, David Daniel Boren and Carrie Headington; and a number of grandchildren. His sister, Susan Boren-Dorman, died in 2020. Mr. Boren’s son, who goes by the name Daniel, was elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat in 2004 and served four terms before returning to private life. David Boren was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1988. As his 26-year political career drew to a close in 1994, Mr. Boren wrote an opinion article for The New York Times titled “Why I Am Leaving the Senate.” He told of his exhaustion after years of 14-hour days with little time for reflection, family relationships, personal friendships or even time to exchange ideas with fellow senators. “I have come to believe that the revitalization of our nation will not come from Washington but from the grass roots — from those who become active in their own communities,” he wrote. “If America gets everything else right but fails to provide for the education of the next generation, we will lose our strength as a society. A reporter asked me, ‘Why would you give up power and influence to become a university president?’ My answer: At this point, I feel I can do more good at the university.” In 2011, he published “A Letter to America,” a short book warning that the nation was in trouble because, he said, unrestrained partisanship, the corrosive influence of big money and the growing divide between the very wealthy and everyone else had virtually paralyzed the political processes. “In truth,” he wrote, “we are in grave danger of declining as a nation.”

The New York University chapter president of the College Republicans resigned this week, yielding to pressure from the national organization after she was prominently quoted in a Vanity Fair profile saying that Barron Trump, President Trump’s youngest son, was “sort of like an oddity on campus.” In the profile, published on Feb. 12, Kaya Walker, the chapter’s president, suggested that the president’s son, an 18-year-old freshman at N.Y.U., did not appear to be assimilating into campus life and was reclusive. “He goes to class, he goes home,” she told the magazine. In the interview, Ms. Walker questioned whether the university, a liberal bastion in Greenwich Village with many famous Hollywood graduates, was the right fit for Mr. Trump’s son. And, according to the magazine, she recalled how a professor had joked about his presence at N.Y.U. — “he doesn’t really belong here.” Will Donahue, the president of the College Republicans of America, said in a statement on Tuesday that Ms. Walker had not obtained prior authorization from the national organization before speaking to Vanity Fair. Chapter presidents, he said, must get clearance before “engaging with media outlets known for editorial biases against conservative voices.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “During the conversation, she was presented with a narrative about Barron Trump that was clearly framed in a partisan manner,” the statement said. “Rather than redirecting the inquiry to our communications team or refuting the premise, she used language that did not align with C.R.A.’s standards of professionalism and responsibility, inadvertently contributing to a misleading and negative portrayal.” The College Republicans recommended on Sunday that Ms. Walker step down, and she did, according to the group, which also said that it was inviting Barron Trump to become a member. Ms. Walker, 21, did not immediately respond on Tuesday to requests for comment. A student profile for her on the university’s website lists her as a senior who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in international relations and French. It said that she had recently completed an internship in the Bronx District Attorney’s Office. Condé Nast, the parent company of Vanity Fair, did not immediately respond on Tuesday to a request for comment. Since his enrollment in 2024 at N.Y.U., where he is a first-year student at the Stern School of Business, Barron Trump has been a focus of intense fascination. In contrast with some of his half siblings, he is not active on social media and rarely makes public statements. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The White House and a spokesman for Melania Trump, the first lady, who has been fiercely protective of her son’s privacy, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday. During an appearance on “Fox & Friends” in December, her first interview since the election, Mrs. Trump described her son as playing a pivotal role in her husband’s victory. She credited him with advising his father to appear with media personalities popular with younger voters. Mr. Donahue, the leader of the College Republicans of America, said on Tuesday that the group would welcome Barron Trump into its leadership ranks. He said that the group had long served as a launchpad for conservative leaders who had gone on to become members of Congress and key figures in the political landscape. “While we have not yet had direct communication with him, we would be honored to provide him with a platform to begin his political career should he choose to do so,” he said. “However, we fully respect Barron’s privacy and personal decisions regarding his future involvement in politics.”

The Education Department warned schools in a letter on Friday that they risked losing federal funding if they continued to take race into account when making scholarship or hiring decisions, or so much as nodded to race in “all other aspects of student, academic and campus life.” The announcement gave institutions 14 days to comply. It built on a major Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that found that the use of race-conscious admissions practices at colleges and universities was unlawful. But it went far beyond the scope of that decision by informing schools that considering race at all when making staffing decisions or offering services to subsets of students would be grounds for punishment. The letter was the latest step in the Trump administration’s push to recast programs intended to level the playing field for historically underserved populations as a form of racial discrimination. It also appeared to be an extension of the broadsides President Trump has delivered to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from the federal government, which critics have assailed as veiled racism. Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said related programs and scholarships, many of which have historically sought to help Black and Latino students attain college degrees or find community, had come at the expense of “white and Asian students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds.” “At its core, the test is simple: If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law,” Mr. Trainor wrote. Sign up for the Race/Related Newsletter Join a deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with New York Times journalists. Get it sent to your inbox. “Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” he said. On Monday, the department said it had also canceled $600 million in grants focused on training teachers in “inappropriate and unnecessary topics” such as critical race theory, social justice activism, antiracism and “instruction on white privilege.” The warning in the letter applies to any institution that receives federal funding, including K-12 schools. But it could fall harder on higher-education institutions. The sweeping guidance caused alarm in academic circles and raised pressing questions about how much it would disrupt campuses. Many colleges offer scholarships and grants specifically for students of certain ethnic backgrounds or maintain program houses, professional societies and fraternities and sororities on campus tailored to students of specific ethnic heritages or races. In some cases, the decision to fund those programs is not necessarily made by the university, but by student governments or outside organizations. But the guidance appeared to touch all of those areas and more, barring schools from “using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies and all other aspects of student, academic and campus life.” Some colleges have already preemptively taken steps to bar any clubs or student organizations that could run afoul of the department’s interpretation of civil rights law. This month, West Point moved to immediately disband 12 affinity groups, including the National Society of Black Engineers Club, the Asian-Pacific Forum Club and the Vietnamese-American Cadet Association. Other colleges suspended a ceremony marking the Lunar New Year, canceled a forum on race and ended degree requirements for students to take classes touching on D.E.I. to graduate. The letter on Friday specified that even graduation ceremonies that honored Black students separately from larger commencement ceremonies, for example, could be considered discriminatory. “In a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history,” Mr. Trainor wrote, “many American schools and universities even encourage segregation by race at graduation ceremonies and in dormitories and other facilities.” Adding to confusion for schools, legal experts have pointed out that despite the sweeping nature of the Education Department’s threat, it did not touch on a number of areas like college recruitment or retention programs that target certain demographics that may transfer or drop out at higher rates than others. Other aspects of the letter appeared certain to run into legal challenges, particularly the guidance on changing hiring practices, which were not at issue in the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action. Jeff Weimer, a partner in the higher education practice at the law firm Reed Smith, said the letter raised more questions for schools than it was immediately possible to untangle under the current understanding of civil rights laws. “Well, what if it’s an affinity group, for example, for Asian students, that promotes Asian culture and has events that are centered around holidays that are important for various Asian cultures and so forth — but the organization is open to all students, regardless of your race or ethnicity?” Mr. Weimer asked. “Is that prohibited or permitted under this administration’s interpretation of the Supreme Court decision and Title VI and otherwise?” “There’s no clear answer to that question, or to any number of different variations on the same question,” he said. A correction was made on Feb. 18, 2025: An earlier version of this article and an accompanying picture caption incorrectly described an alternative graduation ceremony featuring speeches by pro-Palestinian activists and writers. The event was organized by Columbia University faculty and staff members, not the university itself.

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance laid out his version of the relationship between the presidency and the courts. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he wrote, in a post on X. Mr. Vance’s post was “as wrong as it is reckless,” responded 17 attorneys general from 17 states in a joint statement. “No one is above the law.” Was Mr. Vance demanding that presidents be allowed to make their own rules, regardless of what the courts say? Everything depends on what he meant by the word “legitimate.” Who gets to decide the limit of the executive’s power? The Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted for more than 200 years, offers a clear answer: judges. “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases arising under this Constitution,” says the Constitution itself, in Article III, which establishes the federal court system and its powers. And that is exactly what the federal judiciary is trying to do now. Federal judges have issued preliminary orders that block some of the administration’s most aggressive assertions of power: a freeze on as much as $3 trillion in federal spending, the termination of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee to birthright citizenship, the firing of civil servants before the end of their statutorily defined terms, the forced transfer of trans women in prison to men’s facilities and the turnover of sensitive data and systems to a newly minted quasi-agency headed by Elon Musk. More than 60 lawsuits have been filed against the second Trump administration — more than two for each day that the president has been in office. Many of the plaintiffs allege that the Trump administration’s actions are ultra vires, literally “beyond the powers,” meaning that Mr. Trump has wielded power in ways that go beyond his lawful authority. In one case, a dispute over the funding freeze before Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, the court has found the government to be defying its ruling and granted a “motion to enforce,” essentially a nudge. On Tuesday afternoon, as his administration sought out new, more justifiable reasons for keeping the same money frozen, Mr. Trump insisted that “I always abide by the courts, and then I’ll have to appeal it.” That is the closest the administration has come to clarifying Mr. Vance’s provocatively ambiguous post. None of these cases have been decided. At least some are very likely to be taken up by the Supreme Court. Some legal commentators believe that the Trump administration’s strategy is to flood the zone with extreme executive actions in hopes that the Supreme Court will find some of them to be legal, and in so doing, expand the White House’s legitimate constitutional power. Mr. Vance’s post raises another possibility: that the administration could decide that it, and not the courts, is the constitutionally designated arbiter of the limits on its own authorities, and choose to ignore judicial rulings. That would represent an extreme rupture to the constitutional order. Yet the ideological foundation for such a moment has been emerging for decades. Mr. Vance is among an increasing number of elected Republicans who are influenced by new strains of conservative legal thought that entail a radical reinterpretation of the Constitution, particularly the powers it bestows on the president. Many can be traced back to originalism, a set of doctrines that American conservatives have relied on since the 1980s. Originalism comes in many stripes, but its essence is that the plain words of the Constitution — what they see as its “original public meaning” at the time of the country’s founding — can be deployed to roll back what they perceive to be the progressive excesses of the judiciary during the mid-to-late 20th century. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT But as originalism has become more dominant — “we are all originalists,” Justice Elena Kagan said at her confirmation hearing — some conservatives have grown dissatisfied. A group of right-wing thinkers is putting forward a new set of doctrines: Call it “post-originalism.” The Godfather of Post-Originalism Until recently, Adrian Vermeule’s public profile has been modest. Mr. Vermeule, a 56-year-old professor at Harvard Law School, is the author of scores of academic books and law review articles. He would most likely take issue with the label “post-originalist.” He has called himself a “classical legal theorist,” and his work is buttressed by quotes and footnotes that demonstrate his mastery of the classical legal canon — Justinian’s Digest, Aquinas’s Summa, the Institutes of Gaius. He argues that a robust understanding of the Constitution requires being steeped in ancient sources and theories about natural law, divine law and Roman law, all of which, he claims, influenced the founders and are baked into the Constitution. But among conservatives who believe that originalism isn’t enough to get them the policy results they want, he is an ideological lodestar. The day before Mr. Vance posted that “judges aren’t allowed to control the limits of the executive’s legitimate power,” he shared a post from Mr. Vermeule: “Judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers.” On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion essay in which Mr. Vermeule defended Mr. Vance’s post, explaining that the vice president was simply “referring to legal doctrines of justiciability, reviewability, standing and the so-called political-question doctrine.” Worries that Mr. Vance was calling for the defiance of judicial orders were “unbalanced reactions,” Mr. Vermeule wrote in a longer version of the essay. At least one prominent left-leaning legal commentator appeared to agree. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Vermeule’s acknowledgment of the judiciary as a “coequal” branch of government puts him at the milder end of post-originalist thinking. In his book “Regime Change,” Patrick Deneen, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and a prominent thinker on the new right, calls for “the raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism.” To achieve “the creation of a new elite that is aligned with the values and needs of ordinary working people,” Mr. Deneen proposes setting aside the goal of “a form of ‘democratic pluralism’ that imagines a successful regime comprised of checks and balances.” Jesse Merriam, a professor at Patrick Henry College, has criticized originalists for embracing Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that found racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. The “canonization” and “weaponization” of Brown, Mr. Merriam argues, paved the way for “the ​​antiracist constitutional order.” Just as Mr. Vance’s post appeared to tiptoe to the line of constitutional crisis, Mr. Merriam’s demand that “we must be free to debate Brown and the broader civil rights revolution,” by “opening up space to dissent on racial matters” risks sounding like an affirmative case for segregation. As a website of legal writing to which Mr. Vermeule has contributed puts it: Originalism and textualism had to be discarded as they “have proven impotent in opposing the liberal concept of the good.” It’s hard to get a handle on post-originalism without first understanding its beginnings in the conservative movement’s growing impatience with originalism. That doctrine holds that judges who want to interpret the Constitution should look backward, taking into account various blends of text, meaning and the founders’ intent, sometimes supplemented by “history and tradition” as well. Originalism’s offshoots can be grouped into two camps: One group, the scholars, sees originalist interpretation as an end in itself, and will follow it anywhere. A second camp, the soldiers, see originalism as a useful tool for pushing jurisprudence rightward on issues like environmental regulation, reproductive rights and gun control. While the scholars want to understand the founding period from the inside out, the soldiers want results. They can often be heard calling for conservative judges to be “bold” and “fearless,” while decrying their purist cousins as spineless “libertarians.” The soldiers felt betrayed by Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 2020 opinion for the majority in the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which prohibited employers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. “If we’ve been fighting for originalism and textualism, and this is the result of that,” Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, said in a speech on Bostock, “then I have to say it turns out that we haven’t been fighting for very much.” Bostock “represents the end of the conservative legal movement,” Mr. Hawley said. He called for “a new beginning.” The Bostock ruling arrived against a backdrop of anguished soul-searching on the right. For many, the combination of the Black Lives Matter protests and the Covid lockdowns appeared to validate what voices on the fringe of the conservative movement had been saying for years — the fights happening at the polls and in the courts against progressive values were, in fact, the front lines of an existential struggle for the future of Western civilization. This was familiar terrain for many of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters. They had been equating Democrats with America’s foreign enemies for years while half-jokingly referring to Mr. Trump as their “God-Emperor,” or, perhaps with more seriousness, extolling the virtues of monarchism. But it took the post-2020 reaction against “wokeness” to bring those ideas into the conservative mainstream. All that was missing was a grand unifying theory — a vocabulary to give voice to these intense cultural frustrations and draw a legitimizing connection between them and the Constitution. Enter Mr. Vermeule’s “Beyond Originalism,” an essay published in The Atlantic at the height of the pandemic, between the time Bostock was argued and when it was decided. Mr. Vermeule was already well-known among some Catholic scholars for being, as one political science professor put it, “the foremost defender in the United States” of integralism, which seeks to bring state power in line with church teachings. (Mr. Vermeule would most likely contest that label, too.) After converting to Catholicism in 2016, he praised the church as a defense against “the universal deluge of economic-technical dominance.” His Atlantic essay proposed what he called “common-good constitutionalism,” a vision of the public good that both incorporates and somehow transcends the written law, a vision that elected governments are obliged to realize. “Strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate,” he wrote. The essay provoked angry responses from both originalists and Reagan-era conservatives. Mr. Vermeule’s theories were “un-American,” wrote the Washington Post columnist George F. Will, who accused him of succumbing to the “allure of tyranny.” Mr. Vermeule “seems to enjoy provoking members of the liberal intelligentsia by coyly advancing almost-forbidden ideas,” wrote another Catholic scholar. “Beyond Originalism” also drew strong reactions from more liberal commentators. Garrett Epps, a retired law professor, called it “an argument for authoritarian extremism,” an “anti-constitutional philosophy” and an augur of “post-legal times.” Traditional conservatives have long pushed for a more expansive view of presidential power, often with something called the unitary executive theory, the idea that the president personally embodies an entire branch of government. Mr. Vermeule goes further. “The American president is more like a Roman emperor than many would like to admit and that fact is legitimized by the state of American law,” he wrote in a 2023 paper titled “The Many and the Few.” Even critics of this approach have to acknowledge how much power Congress and the courts have handed over to the presidency. Congress has effectively relinquished its constitutional power to declare war through the combination of the 1973 War Powers Act and the 2001 law that authorized the use of military force against terrorists and the countries that harbor them after the Sept. 11 attacks. With the 2024 Trump v. U.S. decision, the Supreme Court held that the courts could not find any president criminally liable for performing his constitutional duties. While the project of essentially legitimizing the imperial presidency can appear threatening to America’s system of divided government, it also raises a difficult question: If America really wanted a separation of powers, why have two of the three branches chosen to give so much of their power away? The law, Mr. Vermeule wrote in 2022, “is to a large degree what the President and the agencies say it is,” and presidential power is “roughly comparable to the aggregate of powers held by Augustus and his successors.” Those powers were given to them by the Roman people to supplant “the corrupt government of the senatorial class,” which served only “the self-interest of a predatory elite.” Into the Courts? Mr. Vermeule’s “common-good constitutionalism” is gaining traction in some corners of the U.S. judiciary, particularly among judges — roughly one quarter of the bench — who were appointed during Mr. Trump’s first term. A 2022 conference at Harvard on common-good constitutionalism was attended by two Trump-nominated appellate court judges: James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who is sometimes mentioned as a possible Supreme Court pick, and Paul Matey of the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Mr. Vermeule has posted some of Judge Matey’s essays on his Substack. References to “Common Good Constitutionalism,” the book that developed from Mr. Vermeule’s Atlantic essay, have begun turning up in the footnotes of appellate court decisions. As the Trump administration fights the onslaught of lawsuits against its executive orders and other actions, the Justice Department’s lawyers are arguing that the administration’s actions are legal, rather than that the president is above the law. But at the same time, many of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters — especially those who are most plugged into new conservative intellectual currents — are following Mr. Vance’s lead and trying to undermine the authority of any judge who rules against the president. Senator Mike Lee of Utah has called on Congress to “impeach corrupt judges” and “investigate lawfare.” Elon Musk suggested that “the worst 1%” of the judiciary “be fired every year.” “Outrageous,” posted Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas when a judge barred Mr. Musk’s team from having access to sensitive Treasury Department data. It is hard to find much precedent for this moment. President Nixon’s behavior caused grave tensions between the three branches of government, but the buildup was protracted and gradual. Presidents Jackson and Lincoln both ignored important court rulings, according to the Federal Judicial Center. But those prior instances of presidential recalcitrance — just two, spread out over 248 years — were narrow. Mr. Vance hints at something very different: wholesale ultra vires executive-branch impunity. That idea is increasingly part of the Republican mainstream. A correction was made on Feb. 15, 2025: An earlier version of this article misquoted Vice President JD Vance’s social media post. He wrote, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” not “Judges aren’t allowed to control the limits of the executive’s legitimate power.”

Linda McMahon, the sports entertainment mogul whom President Trump has nominated to run the Education Department, told lawmakers on Thursday that she envisioned a vastly diminished role for the agency in the future, and would seek to realize that vision if confirmed. A former executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, Ms. McMahon was tapped to run a department that is in the middle of intense upheaval and whose very reasons for being have been challenged by the president. Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he would like to shrink, if not fully eliminate, the department, setting up a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday with few parallels in American history. Ms. McMahon stopped short of embracing calls to shutter the department, which would have amounted to calling for the elimination of the job she has been nominated to take. Instead, she laid out a more roundabout plan to return to the period before the department was established in 1979, during which she said state officials and other federal agencies handled the department’s current responsibilities more effectively. “I’m really all for the president’s mission, which is to return education to the states,” she said. “I believe, as he does, that the best education is closest to the child.” Ms. McMahon walked lawmakers through her qualifications to oversee the health of the country’s schools in the midst of open discussions in the White House about whether to close the department. On Wednesday, less than a day before Ms. McMahon was scheduled to appear for the hearing, Mr. Trump said he wanted to see the department shuttered “immediately,” calling it “a big con job.” She headed off some of the most pressing questions about that rhetoric at the outset by acknowledging that slashing federal funding for schools, which is allocated by Congress, was neither practical legally nor a goal she would pursue. But she repeatedly suggested that many of the duties the department currently handles, including disbursing funds for special education or collecting data and research on students and teaching methods, could be better handled by other agencies. “It is my goal, if I am confirmed, to get in and assess these kinds of programs, because I’m not sure yet what the impact of all of those programs are,” she said. Ms. McMahon spoke about the dismal results documented last month on a national exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed pervasive learning loss across the country’s public schools since the Covid-19 pandemic. Conservative think tanks and lawmakers have pointed to the results as evidence that the nation’s education system requires deep changes, and as justification for policies aimed at expanding access to private and religious schools. She was introduced at the hearing by Senators Tim Scott of South Carolina and Katie Britt of Alabama, Republicans who each lamented what they described as a long slide in educational standards. They called for a move away from public schools and traditional college programs. In her opening statement, Ms. McMahon picked up that theme, promoting novel ways to train the country’s future work force. She also ticked through the priorities Mr. Trump had already set for the agency through executive orders in recent days. One of the orders focused on school choice, a topic she will most likely highlight. The administration’s other priorities revolve around cultural issues, such as gender, race and sexuality, and combating antisemitism. Recent appointees of Mr. Trump have already taken steps to turn the department into a vehicle to clamp down on schools and organizations perceived as hostile to the president’s agenda. On Wednesday, the department started new investigations into two interscholastic sports associations in Minnesota and California that had signaled they would allow transgender athletes to continue competing on teams corresponding to their gender identity. The president has tasked Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, with downsizing the federal government, and his associates have combed through the Education Department’s data, flagging programs and grants for cancellation. The specter of coming staff reductions and a fundamental reorientation of the agency’s functions have left hundreds of the department’s more than 4,200 workers demoralized and sounding the alarm about the effect on educators. Since last week, more than 70 employees in the department have been put on administrative leave because of their connection to longstanding diversity, equity and inclusion programs. And between Monday and Tuesday, the department canceled dozens of grants underpinning most of its research operations. At least 50 more employees who were on probationary status have been fired this week, according to a union representing federal workers. “It’s always difficult to downsize; it’s always difficult to restructure and reorganize in any department,” Ms. McMahon said about culling the department’s ranks. “I have faced that, you know, in the business world, because you know that you do impact people’s lives.” On Tuesday, Mr. Trump signed an order demanding wide-ranging reductions in the federal work force through “attrition” and issuing severe directives, including that agencies hire “no more than one employee for every four employees that depart.” Like most of Mr. Trump’s nominees, Ms. McMahon is seen as a loyal lieutenant, but one with an unusually long record of supporting the president’s political ambitions and preserving a position within his orbit. During his first term, she served as the head of the Small Business Administration until stepping down in 2019 to run a political action committee supporting Mr. Trump. She then became the chairwoman of the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank heavily staffed by former Trump officials, where she conceived policy ideas in preparation for a second Trump term. Mr. Trump’s relationship with Ms. McMahon and her husband, Vince McMahon, dates to the 1980s, a period during which Mr. Trump cultivated an interest in their wrestling ventures and success in television. He served as a sponsor for the W.W.E. broadcast WrestleMania when it appeared in Atlantic City, N.J., and even performed several times, including in a scripted feud against Mr. McMahon billed as the “Battle of the Billionaires.” Their relationship has only grown more intertwined, as Ms. McMahon has emerged as a committed megadonor in Mr. Trump’s last three bids for the presidency. Ms. McMahon and her husband, from whom she is separated, were the sixth-largest donors to Mr. Trump during his 2024 bid, funneling more than $20 million into Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign and to associated PACs, according to data compiled by Open Secrets, a government transparency group. She personally gave over $360,000 to help support Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign in 2020. Ms. McMahon has also gained standing and influence through her association with the president, taking on senior advisory roles in multiple conservative policy organizations and The Daily Caller, a conservative news site. She also receives an $18,400 quarterly retainer from the Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Mr. Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, and received thousands of shares in the company in compensation for her work with the group. Many who have worked with Ms. McMahon have noted her political acumen and staying power within the president’s inner circle. Mr. Trump praised her as a “superstar” when she stepped down from his cabinet in 2019. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT She has vowed to resign from those positions and divest from Mr. Trump’s business if confirmed. Like Betsy DeVos, the education secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term, Ms. McMahon is exceptionally wealthy, reporting millions in annual income from her holdings in the professional wrestling empire she built, according to a financial disclosure filed ahead of the hearing. But the business empire she created that produced that wealth has also prompted serious questions about Ms. McMahon’s management and oversight of ethical breaches. Under her leadership, various iterations of World Wrestling Entertainment have produced a stream of complaints describing rampant substance abuse and sexual misconduct throughout the business. Ms. McMahon was named as a defendant in a pending lawsuit in Maryland that claims she failed to take action against employees accused of sexually abusing minors working for the organization. Critics have said her relative lack of experience in education amid a tide of conservative resentment directed toward the department leaves her little prepared to navigate the effects that Mr. Trump’s agenda may have on the nation’s schools. She earned a certificate to teach French and served a brief stint on the Connecticut State Board of Education. She has also been a university trustee at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., for many years.