Trump Administration Highlights: Cuts of 10,000 Jobs at Health Agency Reflect Kennedy’s and Trump’s Priorities (2025)

Musk to campaign in Wisconsin on Sunday ahead of a critical election.

Mr. Musk, the Republican megadonor, said early Friday that he would be going to Wisconsin, apparently to campaign for the conservative candidate in a high-profile judicial contest. The visit, two days before the vote on Tuesday, appears to be his most direct engagement in the State Supreme Court election, which is being watched closely as a test of Mr. Musk’s influence.

Mr. Musk will deliver remarks in the state on Sunday evening, he said on X, without releasing other details. Nor did he mention the candidate, Brad Schimel, by name, saying simply that he would “give a talk in Wisconsin.”

Mr. Musk is reprising a few of the tactics he used in the final weeks of the presidential election, when he traveled across Pennsylvania to assist Donald J. Trump’s campaign with a series of town halls. He is once again issuing personal checks to those who sign a petition that his super PAC is circulating to registered voters and awarding $1 million randomly in sweepstakes-like gifts to signers. (Mr. Musk’s latest petition in Wisconsin is opposed to what he calls “the actions of activist judges.”)

Mr. Musk is also offering a new twist on at least some of these petition payouts: making them conditional not only on signing the petition and being a registered voter, but also on having already voted, a legally contentious escalation of his program. Mr. Musk said in his Friday post that he would “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” Mr. Musk’s super PAC has awarded a $1 million check to one Wisconsin voter who signed the petition.

Mr. Musk’s super PAC has been encouraging early voting in the contest, and the post on Friday offered another example of how.

Unlike the Pennsylvania town halls, Sunday’s event would be open only to those who had already voted in the Supreme Court election, Mr. Musk said, without specifying how this requirement would be enforced.

Mr. Musk has been stepping up his words and his spending in aid of Judge Schimel, who if elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court could weigh in on abortion policy, redistricting and even Tesla’s business in the state.

Though Mr. Musk and allied groups have spent more than $20 million on the campaign, he expressed doubt about the chances of victory, saying on Thursday that Judge Schimel’s odds were “difficult, but not impossible.”

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Trump moves to end union protections across a broad swath of government.

The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workers union, estimated that the order would strip labor protections from hundreds of thousands of civil servants, and said it was preparing legal action.

“This administration’s bullying tactics represent a clear threat not just to federal employees and their unions, but to every American who values democracy and the freedoms of speech and association,” Everett Kelley, the union’s president, said in a statement. “Trump’s threat to unions and working people across America is clear: fall in line or else.”

Unions have been a major obstacle in Mr. Trump’s effort to slash the size of the federal work force and reshape the government to put it more directly under his control. They have repeatedly sued over his blizzard of executive actions, winning at least temporary reprieves for some fired federal workers and blocking efforts to dismantle portions of the government.

To claim authority to cancel the union contracts under the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, Mr. Trump expanded the list of agencies exempt from provisions of laws governing federal labor relations for national security reasons. In doing so, he adopted an expansive view of national security, one that encompasses agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. International Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.

The American Federation of Government Employees said Mr. Trump’s order was illegal.

After Mr. Trump signed the order, the affected agencies filed a lawsuit on Thursday in Texas against the unions representing federal employees, seeking to rescind their collective bargaining agreements.

The government argued that the agreements “significantly constrain” the executive branch and hinder the president’s “efforts to protect the United States from foreign and domestic threats.” In the filing, the government contended that the Biden administration extended the labor agreements for five years shortly after Mr. Trump won the election in November. The government also raised concerns about the contracts’ return-to-work policies.

The executive order is the latest step in Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging effort to drastically overhaul the federal bureaucracy, which he has assigned Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to oversee. Mr. Musk said in an interview that aired Thursday on Fox News that he was trying to reduce the federal deficit by $1 trillion, and to cut $4 billion every day.

Federal workers are already bracing for major new cuts. Mr. Trump signed an executive order aimed at dismantling the Education Department last week, and on Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, announced that he was laying off 10,000 employees as part of a broad reorganization.

The order cuts a wide swath across the government. Among other agencies, it seeks to end collective bargaining at the Defense, Veterans Affairs, State, Treasury and Energy Departments, most of the Justice Department, and parts of the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments, according to a White House fact sheet.

Stefanik dodged a question about what her role might be in the Republican leadership now that she is no longer leaving the House, and whether she thought Trump might tap her for an administration position at a later date. Stefanik’s former leadership position has been filled by Representative Lisa McClain.

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Trump targets the law firm where Robert S. Mueller worked.

He directed the cancellation of all government contracts with WilmerHale, and the suspension of any security clearances of its employees. The order also barred WilmerHale employees from federal buildings, banned them from communicating with government employees and prevented them from being hired at government agencies.

Other elite law firms have been hit with similar sanctions, leaving them to choose whether to fight the orders or cut a deal with Mr. Trump to remove the restrictions, even as a judge has already blocked one of the orders because it is likely to be unlawful.

The order said Mr. Trump was in part punishing WilmerHale for the firm’s connections to Mr. Mueller, who led an inquiry that the order described as “one of the most partisan investigations in American history.”

In fact, Mr. Mueller was appointed as special counsel by Mr. Trump’s own deputy attorney general amid concerns about Mr. Trump’s desire to shut down the F.B.I. investigation of his campaign after he took office. Mr. Mueller, then working at WilmerHale, resigned from the firm to lead the investigation, and returned to WilmerHale after the investigation was closed. Mr. Mueller retired from WilmerHale in 2021.

“WilmerHale rewarded Robert Mueller and his colleagues,” the order said, adding that “Mueller’s investigation epitomizes the weaponization of government, yet WilmerHale claimed he ‘embodies the highest value of our firm and profession.’”

The order also attacked diversity efforts at WilmerHale, as well as its representation of clients who Mr. Trump disagreed with, asserting that the firm “backs the obstruction of efforts” against illegal immigrants and drug trafficking.

In a statement, WilmerHale defended Mr. Mueller’s character and said the firm had “a longstanding tradition of representing a wide range of clients, including in matters against administrations of both parties.”

The firm added, “We look forward to pursuing all appropriate remedies to this unlawful order.”

Matthew Goldstein contributed reporting.

Musk and his aides try a charm offensive in a Fox News interview.

“At the end of the day, America is going to be in much better shape,” Mr. Musk said. “America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work, and it’s going to be a fantastic future.”

Democrats have repeatedly criticized Mr. Musk’s effort to shrink the federal government, warning that critical government services will be cut, and federal judges have struck down some of his team’s steps to fire thousands of federal workers. The interview seemed part of a public-relations campaign by Mr. Musk and his team to present their work on more friendly terms.

“I’m blessed with four beautiful children, my wife and I,” said Tom Krause, the chief executive of Cloud Software Group who is leading the department’s efforts to review the Treasury Department’s payment systems. “But we have a real fiscal crisis, and this is not sustainable. And what’s worse, back to my children and everyone else’s children, we are burdening them with that debt. And it’s only going to grow.”

Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, said his team was trying to reduce the deficit by $1 trillion, and to cut $4 billion every day. He said he expected to accomplish “most of the work” within the first 130 days, which aligns with the amount of time a “special government employee” is permitted to serve.

Mr. Musk was joined by seven men on his team, a group that includes Steve Davis, a longtime loyalist of Mr. Musk’s who largely handles the daily operations of the department, and Joe Gebbia, a fellow billionaire and co-founder of Airbnb. Mr. Musk has been very visible, often appearing at President Trump’s side, but most of his aides have kept low profiles. Mr. Davis, who worked for Mr. Musk at SpaceX and his social media platform X, had not participated in any interviews since he started working in the government.

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Trump restored funding for Radio Free Europe and reinstated 33 employees for Cuban radio station.

Also Thursday, the administration reinstated 33 employees at the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, a federal news outlet critical of the island’s communist government, allowing the radio station’s programming to resume.

On March 15, the administration terminated all grants for RFE/RL in a one-page letter, citing Mr. Trump’s executive order a day earlier aimed at eliminating RFE/RL’s parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

On Thursday, the administration claimed that the lawsuit was moot — since the funding was restored — rather than continuing to argue for the legitimacy of its March 15 decision to cut funding while complying with the judge’s order.

The Trump administration still reserved the right to terminate the RFE/RL’s financing “at a later date” if it “were to determine that such termination was appropriate,” according to the administration’s letter to RFE/RL that was submitted to the court.

It is unclear whether the lawsuit will end, as the administration claims. The news outlet had asked the court to declare the March 15 letter unlawful, to bar Trump officials from rescinding funding that Congress appropriated and to order the government to cover RFE/RL’s legal fees.

On Thursday, the Trump administration also restored funding for Open Technology Fund, an independent nonprofit group that Congress has financed to ensure unfettered access to uncensored internet in countries with restrictions, according to court filings.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty was founded in the 1950s as an American intelligence operation covertly financed through the Central Intelligence Agency. The broadcaster sought to foment anti-communist dissent in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Since the early 1970s, it has been funded by Congress and has had editorial independence. Today RFE/RL reports in nearly 30 languages, reaching 47 million people every week in 23 countries, including Afghanistan, Russia and Hungary. The news organization is an independent nonprofit that receives most of its financing from the federal government.

Another federally funded news agency, Radio Free Asia or RFA, sued the Trump administration on Thursday, seeking nearly identical relief that RFE/RL has sought in its lawsuit. RFA had also received a letter on March 15 that terminated all federal grants.

Established in 1996 after the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, RFA publishes in 10 languages and reaches an audience of nearly 60 million people each week in six countries, including China, North Korea, Vietnam and Myanmar. Earlier this month, the Chinese state media, Global Times, hailed the freeze of funds to Radio Free Asia and a sister news outlet, the Voice of America, calling them “a lie factory” and “a thoroughly biased propaganda poison.”

RFA was one of the first organizations to report on China’s network of detention centers targeting its minority Uyghur population in Xinjiang and has won awards for chronicling human rights abuses and government malpractice across Asia.

RFA and RFE/RL still provide limited coverage, as they are separate entities from the federal government. That is unlike Voice of America, which is a federal agency whose journalists are government employees. The journalists at Voice of America, including its director, were put on indefinite leave by Mr. Trump’s executive order and are challenging that move in court.

The letters to RFA and RFE/RL were signed by Kari Lake, a special adviser at the federal media agency who appears to be leading the push to gut it. Ms. Lake, who was hired in February, is a former United States Senate candidate in Arizona and local news anchor who peddled false claims that the 2020 presidential election won by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was rigged.

Ms. Lake was initially named in December to be the next director of Voice of America by Mr. Trump. She was hired as the media agency’s special adviser instead, as legal experts questioned whether Mr. Trump could fire the Voice of America’s director.

Her appointment stoked fears that the Trump administration would meddle in the editorial decisions of federally funded news organizations. The global media agency has also opened investigations into its journalists for reporting on criticisms of Mr. Trump or making comments that were perceived as critical of him.

During his first term, Mr. Trump attacked the media outlets under the global media agency over their editorial decisions, and his appointees were accused of trying to weaken journalistic safeguards.

The Justice Dept. says it will investigate California universities over race in admissions.

“President Trump and I are dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity across the country,” Ms. Bondi said in a statement.

It was not clear whether similar compliance reviews would be conducted at other colleges or universities across the nation.

The lawsuits that were the basis for the Supreme Court decision, in the case known as Students for Fair Admissions, were filed against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Plaintiffs in that case used statistical evidence, including standardized test scores, to support the contention that some racial groups, including Black and Hispanic students, had been given preferences in admissions. The plaintiffs argued the practice violated the 14th Amendment.

Unlike schools in most states, however, California public colleges and universities have been prohibited from using affirmative action in college admissions since Proposition 209 was adopted in 1996.

Enrollment of Black and Hispanic students and other minority groups dropped precipitously in the more selective public schools in California after the proposition was enacted. Since then it has rebounded at least somewhat. For example, Black enrollment at U.C.L.A. fell to 3.43 percent in 1998 from 7 percent before Proposition 209 was adopted. By 2019, it had increased to 5.98 percent. (California’s population is 6.5 percent Black.)

As a private school, Stanford did not fall under the Proposition 209 requirements.

Stanford said in a statement that it had taken steps to comply with the Supreme Court decision and that it was “committed to fulfilling our obligations under the law.” The statement added that the school had not received any details about the investigation from the Justice Department.

The University of California system was not immediately available to comment on the Justice Department announcement.

The review follows a lawsuit filed in February accusing the University of California system of violating protections against racial discrimination in admissions. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Students Against Racial Discrimination, which was organized by a persistent critic of affirmative action, asked for a court order requiring that the system select students “in a colorblind manner,” to “eliminate the corrupt and unlawful race and sex preferences that subordinate academic merit to so-called diversity considerations.”

Separately on Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services said it was launching an investigation into accusations that a “major medical school” in California had used discriminatory admissions practices. It did not specify which school.

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A top Senate Republican protests Trump’s attempt to withhold appropriated funds.

They pointed to a memo Mr. Trump had sent to Congress on Monday that declared that only a portion of the $12.4 billion designated as emergency funding in the legislation would actually be spent, “because I do not concur that the added spending is truly for emergency needs.”

The appropriators vigorously contested that assertion, arguing that the law requires the administration to spend all emergency money or none of it, and does not allow the president to decide for himself what money to spend and what not to.

“Just as the president does not have a line-item veto, he does not have the ability to pick and choose which emergency spending to designate,” the letter said.

They noted that the Trump administration’s interpretation of federal budget law was at odds with how presidents of both parties had viewed it for two decades.

“It is incumbent on all of us to follow the law as written — not as we would like it to be,” Ms. Collins and Ms. Murray wrote.

Documents compiled by the appropriations panel showed that the White House action would deny funding in 11 areas that it has already targeted for elimination or steep reductions, including $750 million in international disaster assistance, $750 million in migration and refugee assistance, $234 million for the National Science Foundation and $100 million for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among others.

It also withheld $115 million for international narcotics control and enforcement, a decision singled out by Ms. Collins as particularly confounding.

“Why would you want to do that, given the huge drug problem that we have had?” she said in an interview. “We need the help of other nations to stop that.”

In notifying Congress of his decision on Monday, Mr. Trump questioned the necessity of some of the funding and asserted the authority to allow some money to be distributed while blocking the rest.

He said the spending had been “improperly designated by Congress as emergency,” noting that it had been included as a “side deal” negotiated between Republicans and Democrats in 2023 to allow funding in excess of spending caps.

His decision was accompanied by a memorandum from Russell T. Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, who asserted that the president’s action was justified.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Vought, who also headed the Office of Management and Budget in Mr. Trump’s first administration, argue that the budget law that gives Congress the power to set spending to be executed by the executive branch is unconstitutional. They contend that the president has the power to withhold money even if it was approved by Congress, a proposition likely to be ultimately tested in the courts.

Ms. Murray, in a speech on the Senate floor on Thursday, said the White House and its allies were ignoring a clear constitutional provision that gives Congress the power to set spending.

“Right now we have a couple of billionaires running our country straight into the ground who seem to have skipped American history because President Trump and Elon Musk don’t seem to care much about our Constitution,” she said. She pointed to the provision that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”

“Their lack of interest in that section of the Constitution doesn’t make it any less real at all,” she said.

The decision by Ms. Collins to challenge the administration was notable since many Republicans on Capitol Hill have been silent on the administration’s attempts to assert extraordinary power over federal spending.

The fight over who has final authority over funding will hang over the coming debate for 2026 spending as the House and Senate assemble allocations for federal agencies.

In the House, Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, also lashed out at the spending edict. But her letter to Mr. Vought was not signed by Representative Tom Cole, the Oklahoma Republican who chairs the panel.

Ms. DeLauro accused Mr. Vought of providing “ineffective and misleading” advice to the president and putting the entire $12.4 billion — including $8 billion for rental assistance backed by both parties and $900 million for NASA — at risk since the law specifically said it was all or nothing.

“If you direct agencies to spend this money you would be requiring them to draw money from the Treasury, absent an appropriation made by law,” she wrote, saying that violation of the budget law carried the risk of fines and other punishment.

Ms. Collins said she and Ms. Murray were relying on legal opinions and findings by the Congressional Research Service that they were in the right and said they hoped to persuade Mr. Vought to reconsider his view.

“The best outcome would be if O.M.B. took a second look at this,” she said.

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Musk said his team was working to reduce the deficit by $1 trillion, and that their daily goal was to cut $4 billion every day. He said he expected to accomplish “most of the work” within the first 130 days, which aligns with the maximum amount of time he is permitted to serve as a “special government employee.” In the interview, Musk was joined by all men, including a fellow billionaire, Joe Gebbia, a co-founder of AirBnB.

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Signal’s disappearing-messages feature poses a problem for government records preservation requirements.

“It’s a huge problem,” said Anne Weismann, a George Washington Law professor who frequently acts as outside counsel for nonprofits who push for more openness in government.

The White House did not respond to a question about what guidance the Trump administration had given top aides about preserving messages they send or receive on Signal. But experts say the chat in question should be preserved.

“If the secretary of defense is participating in a conversation about planning an attack, I think it’s hard to argue there’s any circumstance in which that would not be appropriate for preservation,” Ms. Weismann said.

Two federal laws — the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act — require officials to preserve communications related to government business. Agencies can comply with the law by instructing those using messaging apps to preserve chats through screen shots or other means.

Presidential records, which would include the communications of Vice President JD Vance, who participated in the Signal chat, must be permanently preserved. Many other federal records are considered temporary, but they must be preserved until the National Archives and Records Administration approves their destruction.

All of this affects what records the public can eventually see through Freedom of Information Act requests. If there is no record preserved, there is nothing to release.

On Thursday, a federal judge heard arguments from the watchdog group American Oversight, which has accused Mr. Trump’s national security team of violating federal records laws.

Judge James E. Boasberg ordered the government to preserve all records in the chat, which took place from March 11 to 15. He made clear that he was issuing his order to be sure that no Signal messages were lost, not because he had determined whether administration officials had done anything wrong.

Amber Richer, a Justice Department lawyer representing the Trump administration, assured Judge Boasberg that the government was taking steps to preserve messages from the Signal chat in question.

“These agencies are certainly working to fulfill their obligations under the Federal Records Act,” Ms. Richer said.

In past administrations, national archivists have written letters to try to enforce the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act. During the Biden administration, the National Archives referred an investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of documents to the Justice Department.

Mr. Trump fired the nation’s archivist in February and appointed Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, as the acting archivist. Mr. Rubio was among those who participated in the Signal chat with disappearing messages.

“They have, in my view, completely co-opted NARA and the role of the archivist,” Ms. Weismann said.

Concerns over the rising use of Signal and other disappearing messaging apps are not new. They existed during the first Trump administration, when the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a lawsuit that claimed White House officials were using apps like Signal and Confide to delete messages in violation of the Presidential Records Act.

During the Biden administration, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommended the use of Signal, writing that it was a “best practice” to “adopt a free messaging application for secure communications that guarantees end-to-end encryption, such as Signal or similar apps.”

But this week’s news thrust the messaging app to the attention of the public.

Top Trump officials had convened a Signal group chat to discuss airstrikes in Yemen, but Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to the group. In the chat, Mr. Hegseth disclosed specific operational details two hours before U.S. troops launched attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen.

Some messages were set to delete automatically in one week or four weeks, Mr. Goldberg reported.

“There were legal obligations on the part of all of the members of that chat to fulfill their record-keeping responsibilities,” said Jason R. Baron, a professor in the College of Information at the University of Maryland.

He said systems to automatically preserve messages are simply not in place for apps like Signal the way they are for emails. When Congress updated the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act in 2014 to include electronic messaging, ephemeral apps were not used pervasively in government. The records laws leave it to individuals to take steps to ensure that messages are preserved.

“Automated email archiving is taken care of at most agencies because they’re under a mandate to preserve government records electronically,” Mr. Baron said. “Electronic messaging is under the same mandate, but it’s still the Wild Wild West in terms of compliance, since agencies have not generally taken steps to automate ways to preserve those records.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Signal was an “approved app” for government use, and “the most safe and efficient way of communicating,” especially when people could not be in the same room.

“This is a first step in the right direction,” Chioma Chukwu, the interim executive director of American Oversight, said of the Trump administration’s pledge to preserve records. “But we’re going to have to keep going, because you can’t believe what the administration says. You have to watch what it does.”

Alan Feuer contributed reporting.

The Signal leak has little precedent.

But after a leak on a commercial messaging app, the Trump administration has played down the episode and signaled there is little chance of an investigation.

President Trump has insisted that administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, had committed only a minor transgression in discussing secret military plans in a group chat on Signal.

Discussing imminent combat operations on a platform not approved for classified information is, by itself, highly irregular. Even more extraordinary was the fact that a senior official had inadvertently invited a journalist to the chat.

Circling the wagons, the Trump administration has adopted the line that advance word of the timing and weapons platforms to be used in an attack were not classified, and Attorney General Pam Bondi signaled on Thursday that there was unlikely to be a criminal investigation.

But usually, any government employee — whether a civilian or a uniformed member of the military — would be subject to severe consequences for failing to protect operational security.

A government employee accused of such an act could be prosecuted in court under various statutes if they knowingly transmit national security secrets to a person who is not authorized to receive them, or if they disclose those secrets through gross negligence.

The Espionage Act, which criminalizes the unauthorized retention or disclosure of defense information that could harm the United States or aid its enemies, has been used to prosecute both spies and leakers alike.

Last November, for example, Jack Teixeira, a Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for posting photos of top-secret documents in online chats using the Discord app. The documents included details about some of the military hardware being supplied to Ukraine and how it would be transported.

The military takes extraordinary measures to keep its plans for imminent operations under wraps. In the naval service, for example, orders to plan and execute combat operations are classified secret and received only through secure and encrypted channels. Typically, commanders then restrict outgoing communications with a simple verbal order: “River City.”

That is most likely nod to a line from the song “Ya Got Trouble” in the Broadway hit and film “The Music Man,” but its meaning is clear when broadcast to the crew at once over the ship’s loudspeaker.

All outgoing phone lines and emails are immediately shut off to all but the highest-ranking officers. Only then will the rest of the crew be briefed on the impending plans.

“When it comes to the mission, there are certain details that you just do not disclose on an unclassified channel,” Sabrina Singh, a deputy Pentagon press secretary during the Biden administration, said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday. “You keep those operational details safe to keep your fighter pilots safe, to keep your military men and women safe.”

In 2002, when details from planning for a potential invasion of Iraq were published by The New York Times, Mr. Rumsfeld said that unauthorized disclosure of classified information could help terrorists and put American lives in jeopardy.

“It is against the law,” Mr. Rumsfeld wrote. “It costs the lives of Americans. It diminishes our country’s chance for success.”

And in a television interview, he said that anyone who leaks should be prosecuted.

“Every once in a while, there are people in the United States government who decide that they want to break federal criminal law and release classified information, and they ought to be imprisoned,” the defense secretary said. “And if we find out who they are, they will be imprisoned.”

Mr. Gates angrily spoke out after a series of leaks in 2009 about an investigation into President Barack Obama’s plans for the war in Afghanistan, as well as a shooting at Fort Hood that left 13 dead and 30 wounded.

“Frankly if I found out with high confidence anybody who was leaking in the Department of Defense, who that was, that would probably be a career-ender,” Mr. Gates said.

For most of American history, the government generally did not deal with unauthorized disclosures of national security secrets by criminal prosecution. Rather, people suspected of mishandling classified information were generally dealt with through other means, like losing their security clearances or being fired.

But in the 21st century, the Justice Department has been bringing criminal charges in leak cases much more routinely.

The shift began midway through the George W. Bush administration, amid leaks of secrets about matters like disputed surveillance and torture programs in the years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and as technology began to make it easier to identify likely culprits.

The new practice continued into the Obama administration. By the end of its eight years, prosecutors had charged more leak cases than were brought under all previous presidents combined.

The Justice Department in the first Trump administration then went further by bringing unprecedented charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, for publishing U.S. secrets even though he was only a recipient of the information and not himself a leaker. Under the Biden administration, the department secured a guilty plea in that case.

While a growing number of cases have involved officials with access to classified information from across the government, a subset involved people who worked for the military, either in civilian or uniformed roles. Notable cases include:

• In 2011, Thomas A. Drake, a former civilian official with the National Security Agency, a component of the Defense Department, struck a misdemeanor plea deal to end a leak-related case against him. Mr. Drake had been accused in connection with a long-running investigation involving leaks to The Baltimore Sun, a case that began in the Bush years and was charged in the Obama era, but largely collapsed.

• In 2013, Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, was sentenced to 35 years in prison — the longest sentence ever in a leak case — after being convicted in a court-martial trial of providing archives of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. In January 2017, Mr. Obama commuted most of the remainder of her sentence, but she spent about seven years in prison following her 2010 arrest.

• Also in 2013, the Justice Department charged a civilian contractor for the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, over his leak of large numbers of documents about government surveillance and hacking activities to journalists. Mr. Snowden is living in Russia and is a fugitive from those charges.

• In 2015, David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director, struck a plea deal with prosecutors for a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information in connection with keeping notebooks with classified information from his time as a top general in the Afghanistan War — some of which he had shared with his biographer.

• In 2016, James E. Cartwright, a retired Marine Corps general who had been vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with reporters in connection with a leak investigation. Mr. Obama pardoned him before he could be sentenced.

• In 2018, Reality Winner, a former Air Force linguist and intelligence contractor, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than five years in prison for leaking a top-secret government report on Russian hacking. She was released early for good behavior in 2021.

• In 2020, Henry Kyle Frese, a civilian former Pentagon counterterrorism analyst, was sentenced by a federal judge to more than two years in prison for sharing national security secrets with a pair of reporters and a consultant.

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Trump has asked Elise Stefanik to withdraw from consideration to be his U.N. ambassador.

Mr. Trump hinted that he might make it up to Ms. Stefanik in the future with another position in his administration. But for now, he said, Speaker Mike Johnson was “thrilled” with the development.

It was a stunning turnaround for Ms. Stefanik, who was Mr. Trump’s first cabinet nominee and who had been expecting to be confirmed by the Senate in the coming days.

And it underscored the precarious position that House Republicans are in with such a narrow majority that they can afford few defections. Mr. Johnson had previously said he could not afford to lose Ms. Stefanik while he was maneuvering critical measures, including his party’s budget plan, through the House.

It also highlighted concerns among Mr. Trump and leading members of his party about their ability to win what should be safe Republican seats in districts like Ms. Stefanik’s solidly red region of upstate New York.

Ms. Stefanik had apparently expected that her wait to be confirmed would soon be over. She has spent the past week on Instagram posting a nostalgic retrospective of her time in Congress as she prepared for her tenure there to end. And she participated in a farewell tour across her district.

Her nomination had been expected to move ahead after April 1, when two Trump-endorsed Republicans were expected to fill a pair of House seats in Florida that were left vacant after the departures of former Representatives Michael Waltz and Matt Gaetz of Florida. Both had resigned after Mr. Trump selected them to serve in his administration, though Mr. Gaetz later withdrew from consideration as attorney general amid resistance on Capitol Hill.

But there has been growing concern among Republicans in recent days about the special election to replace Mr. Waltz, the embattled national security adviser who has drawn criticism for his involvement in a leaked Signal chat about a military strike on Yemen in which he included a journalist. What was supposed to be a safe seat has become a competitive race.

Mr. Trump, according to two people familiar with his thinking who described it on the condition of anonymity, has been livid at Mr. Waltz for his role in inadvertently including the editor of The Atlantic in the high-level chat and at the apparent difficulty at holding his seat in Florida.

He did not want the same thing to happen with Ms. Stefanik’s departure.

“With a very tight Majority, I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat,” Mr. Trump said in his post.

In a Thursday night interview on “Hannity” on Fox News, Ms. Stefanik said that while she was “honored” to have been nominated as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the U.N., she understood the importance of shoring up the Republican majority in the House.

“This is about stepping up as a team, and I am doing that as a leader,” she said.

Ms. Stefanik had been eager to join the cabinet, though, and had not expected to stay for so long in the House, where she gave up a leadership position and had already let many longtime staff members go. She also has not been seated on any subcommittees.

Her focus had been on the next job, and she had been privately expressing frustration on the delay with her Senate confirmation hearing.

Ms. Stefanik attended the first Trump cabinet meeting. And when Mr. Trump addressed a joint session of Congress, she sat with the cabinet rather than her House colleagues.

On social media on Thursday, Mr. Johnson said he planned to invite Ms. Stefanik “to return to the leadership table immediately.” But it was not clear what position she would occupy. The person who holds her old job as conference chair, Representative Lisa McClain, Republican of Michigan, is not resigning, according to a person familiar with her thinking.

In the Fox News interview, Ms. Stefanik skirted a question about what her position might be in Republican leadership, saying only that she would be making more media appearances now that she was no longer concerned with the nomination process. And she sidestepped a question about whether she might serve in Mr. Trump’s administration at a later date.

“I’ve been in the House quite a long time,” Ms. Stefanik said, adding: “I have a long ways to go.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting.