Here’s what happened on Tuesday. (2025)

The U.S. calls for sweeping reforms to the I.M.F. and World Bank.

The United States has upended the global trading system in recent months and the views of the Trump administration on climate change, international development and economic equity are often at odds with those of the other nations that are shareholders in the global institutions.The speech came a day after the I.M.F. downgraded its outlook for growth globally and in the United States as a result of President Trump’s punishing tariffs. Trade tension between the United States and China, the world’s largest economies, threaten to weigh on output this year and next.

In his remarks, Mr. Bessent defended the Trump administration’s trade actions and called for China to curb economic practices that he said were destabilizing international commerce. He noted that the United States was actively engaged in trade talks with dozens of countries and expressed optimism that these negotiations would help rebalance the world economy and make the global trading system more fair.

It remains unclear when, or if, the United States and China will begin to engage in talks. Mr. Trump has said he expects to speak with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, but no formal conversations have been scheduled.

Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said overnight that “if the U.S. truly wants to resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation, it should stop threatening and coercing, and engage in dialogue with China on the basis of equality, respect and mutual benefit.”

Mr. Bessent made clear that despite the concerns of the United States, the Trump administration does not plan to walk away from the I.M.F. and the World Bank.

“‘America First’ does not mean America alone,” Mr. Bessent said. “To the contrary, it is a call for deeper collaboration and mutual respect among trade partners.”

“Far from stepping back, ‘America First’ seeks to expand U.S. leadership in international institutions like the I.M.F. and World Bank,” he added.

But the Treasury secretary did not hold back in his criticism of the institutions that were created in 1944 to stabilize the world economy after World War II.

“The I.M.F. has suffered from mission creep,” Mr. Bessent said in remarks to the Institute of International Finance. “The I.M.F. was once unwavering in its mission of promoting global monetary cooperation and financial stability. Now it devotes disproportionate time and resources to work on climate change, gender, and social issues.”

Arguing that its focus has overshadowed its economic mission, Mr. Bessent added: “These issues are not the I.M.F.’s mission.”

The Treasury secretary also had tough criticism for the World Bank, which under the Biden administration increased its focus on combating climate change.

“The bank should no longer expect blank checks for vapid, buzzword-centric marketing accompanied by halfhearted commitments to reform,” Mr. Bessent said. “As the bank returns to its core mission, it must use its resources as efficiently and effectively as possible. And it must do so in ways that demonstrate tangible value for all member countries.”

Mr. Bessent did applaud the bank’s plan, under the leadership of Ajay Banga, to consider ending its restrictions on lending for nuclear energy projects. He said that the bank should be “tech neutral” and prioritize affordability in energy investment.

“In most cases, this means investing in gas and other fossil fuel-based energy production,” Mr. Bessent said. “In other cases, this may mean investing in renewable energy coupled with systems to help manage the intermittency of wind and solar.”

Mr. Banga has sought to emphasize the bank’s focus on job creation as key to economic development and to prioritize private sector involvement in projects around the world.

Last week, Mr. Banga said that he continued to have talks with the Trump administration about the direction of the bank.

“We’re having a constructive dialogue with the U.S. administration,” Mr. Banga said. “I don’t know where it’ll end, but I’ve got no problem with the dialogue I’m having.”

“They’re asking the right questions, and we’re trying to give them the right answers,” he added.

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Vance threatens that the U.S. will ‘walk away’ unless Trump’s Ukraine deal is accepted.

“We’ve issued a very explicit proposal to both the Russians and the Ukrainians, and it’s time for them to either say yes or for the United States to walk away from this process,” Mr. Vance told reporters. “The only way to really stop the killing is for the armies to both put down their weapons, to freeze this thing and to get on with the business of actually building a better Russia and a better Ukraine.”

The vice president’s comments came just hours after President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said his country will not accept Russia’s 2014 occupation of Crimea as legal, adding that doing so would violate his country’s constitution. He also said that Ukraine could not accept any prohibition against becoming part of NATO.

European-led peace talks set for Wednesday in London were downgraded when Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced he would no longer attend. His decision to pull out prompted Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, to decide that he, too, would not attend — though Mr. Lammy met separately with Ukraine’s foreign minister in London.

Lower-level diplomats from Britain, France, Germany, Ukraine, and the United States still gathered for technical talks, according to the officials from Britain and France. But the sudden downgrading of what was meant to be a significant diplomatic gathering raised questions about efforts to negotiate a cease-fire.

Those still meeting are expected to discuss details of the Trump administration’s proposed peace plan, which calls on Ukraine to recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea — a move that much of the international community deemed illegal — and accept that its NATO aspirations will go unmet.

Mr. Vance told reporters in India that under the American proposal, “we’re going to freeze the territorial lines at some level close to where they are today.”

“The current lines, or somewhere close to them, is where you’re ultimately, I think, going to draw the new lines in the conflict,” he added. “Now, of course, that means the Ukrainians and the Russians are both going to have to give up some of the territory they currently own.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris and Steven Erlanger contributed from Brussels.

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Trump says he won’t fire Powell. His Fed battle may not be over yet.

Now back in office, Mr. Trump has again begun berating Mr. Powell and the Fed, urging them to lower borrowing costs. But the economic circumstances today are drastically different than those of 2019, setting the stage for a more intense showdown between the central bank and Mr. Trump.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he had “no intention” of firing Mr. Powell despite having lambasted him over several days, calling the Fed chair a “major loser” and saying his “termination cannot come fast enough!”

But the clash between Mr. Trump and the Fed is likely to linger. On one side is a Fed now much more hesitant to reduce borrowing costs because of fears that the broad-based tariffs Mr. Trump has announced on virtually all U.S. trading partners will reignite inflation and slow economic growth. On the other side is a White House wanting immediate relief and taking steps to infringe on the central bank’s longstanding political independence.

“This is an existentially threatening moment for the institution,” said David Wilcox, who is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the director of U.S. economic research at Bloomberg Economics and an ex-leader of the Fed’s research and statistics division. “We may be on the cusp of throwing away an asset that has taken decades to accumulate.”

Financial markets have taken notice, whipsawing in what is likely a partial preview of the fallout should Mr. Trump follow through on his earlier threats.

The Fed’s independence from the White House is seen as sacrosanct across Wall Street. It gives the central bank the ability to take necessary but sometimes politically painful actions, like raising borrowing costs in order to mitigate inflation. Proponents of the Fed’s independence say that it helps to not only foster a more stable economy but also a more robust financial system.

That independence was crucial to the Fed’s ability to rein in inflation after the worst surge in decades in the wake of the pandemic. The central bank initially misread the extent of the inflation threat posed by the shutdown of global supply chains and was forced to adjust course quickly once it was clear it was dealing with a much more persistent issue. Officials rapidly raised interest rates above 5 percent and kept them there until last year.

After lowering interest rates by a percentage point, the Fed is now in a holding pattern as it waits to see what the economic effects of the president’s policies will be.

High Bar For Cuts

Even before Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, inflation was proving to be stubbornly sticky. As of February, the Fed’s preferred gauge was stuck at 2.8 percent.

Mr. Trump’s tariffs risk stoking inflation while crimping growth. That combination — which carries the whiff of stagflation — risks pitting the Fed’s congressionally mandated goals of pursuing 2 percent inflation and a healthy labor market at odds with one another, forcing the central bank to make what Mr. Powell recently described as a “difficult judgment” of what to prioritize.

The Fed’s recent miss on inflation, coupled with the uncertainty surrounding Mr. Trump’s policies, is a “recipe for a Fed that starts late and goes slow,” said Vincent Reinhart, a former Fed economist who is now chief economist at BNY Investments.

So far, a majority of Fed officials have tacitly endorsed that approach, saying they can afford to be patient on taking any action on interest rates because of the relative strength of the U.S. economy that the Trump administration inherited. The central bank is poised to wait for noticeable cracks in the labor market before lowering rates — something that could take time to materialize.

Officials have yet to talk about raising rates in response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs, likely reflecting their thinking that the pullback in economic activity will be so significant as to over time weigh on price pressures. But Dean Croushore, who served as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia for 14 years and is now at the University of Richmond, warned the central bank against dismissing that possibility outright.

“I have a feeling inflation is going to go up so much in the short run that any Fed action to cut rates would not be justified, and they have to prepare the markets for higher rates because of that,” he said.

Can a President Fire a Fed Chair?

The prospect of a stalemate on interest rates is worrying enough, but the Trump administration’s efforts to challenge a legal precedent that underpins the Fed’s political independence has stoked far greater unease.

The Federal Reserve Act says members of the central bank’s seven-strong Board of Governors can be removed only “for cause,” which is interpreted as serious misconduct and other violations. That is backed up by a 1930s Supreme Court ruling commonly referred to as Humphrey’s Executor.

Mr. Trump’s Justice Department is now seeking to overturn that standard as part of a broader legal fight regarding the president’s recent decision to fire the top brass at several independent agencies over policy disagreements. Mr. Powell said he does not expect cases set to be heard by the Supreme Court to apply to the Fed, suggesting there could be some kind of carve out for the central bank.

“The court has a route available to it if it wants to distinguish the Fed, and there are some powerful reasons for it to do so,” said Daniel K. Tarullo, a former Fed governor who focused on regulatory matters. Several conservative judges on the Supreme Court, including Brett M. Kavanaugh, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., have at one point signaled that they may view the Fed as distinct, bolstering the prospects that the Fed would be safeguarded in some way.

Other Pressure Points

Beyond the looming court cases, Mr. Trump has also, via executive order, sought to encroach on the Fed’s ability to set regulation. The central bank is one of the three primary institutions responsible for shaping the rules by which Wall Street must abide. Even though the executive order exempted monetary policy decisions, it presents a tricky challenge for the central bank.

Mr. Tarullo said that if the president can take action against the Fed’s board of governors because of disagreements over regulation, “then the supposed monetary policy independence of those very same seven people becomes, at the very least, extremely murky.”

So long as the administration pursues policies that chip away at the Fed’s independence, Graham Steele, a longtime financial regulation lawyer, warned that the “bedrock of what has made the U.S. such a strong economy and the global safe haven” will remain under strain.

“The Fed chair doesn’t need to be removed in order for some of this damage to be done,” said Mr. Steele, who is also a former Treasury Department official. He added that there just needs to be “more attention and more questions” about whether that could happen or if the Fed would acquiesce in any way.

“What’s going to give here at the end of the day?”

The big law firms fighting Trump’s blacklist seek quick and permanent relief.

The judges presiding over their cases, Beryl A. Howell and Richard J. Leon of the Federal District Court in Washington, are under no obligation to act immediately after the hearings on Wednesday. But the legal community is intensely interested in how these two cases proceed, after the president’s executive orders and threats caused a deep rift of the world of elite corporate firms.

“Simply put, blacklisting and sanctioning law firms for representing the president’s political opponents, devoting resources to causes the president dislikes or hiring attorneys who have investigated the president is anathema to our constitutional order,” attorneys representing WilmerHale wrote in a filing requesting the speedy resolution of the case.

The government has asked that the lawsuits be dismissed, arguing that the orders were all within the president’s authority, and an expression of political speech.

Perkins Coie and WilmerHale were singled out in March by Mr. Trump for punishment with individualized executive orders, owing largely to past legal work on behalf of clients opposing Mr. Trump and policies he had championed. Among other things, the orders directed federal agencies not to contract with the firms or permit their staff into federal buildings, and to suspend security clearances held by their attorneys.

Both firms had been involved in investigations concerning Russian disinformation during the 2016 election, and the question of whether Russian influence had been designed to benefit Mr. Trump’s campaign. And both noted in court filings that the president himself had said repeatedly that he had singled them out specifically because of their previous clients.

“The president openly proclaims that he is targeting WilmerHale for representing his political opponents in election-related litigation, challenging his immigration-enforcement policies, associating with his perceived enemies (including a special counsel appointed by the president’s own Justice Department) and defending a client’s race-conscious college admission policies,” lawyers representing WilmerHale wrote.

As it became clear that the White House was poised to retaliate against firms that had tangled with Mr. Trump in the past, a host of top legal firms raced to cut deals with the president, offering to do hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of free legal work on behalf of charitable causes, in exchange for avoiding persecution. To avoid attracting the president’s ire, none of the 10 largest firms by revenue initially signed onto a legal brief expressing support for Perkins Coie, after it became the first firm subject to an order.

Perkins Coie and WilmerHale, as well as and Susman Godfrey, two other firms targeted by Mr. Trump that chose to fight in court, have already been granted temporary injunctions stopping the orders from taking effect while litigation proceeds.

Following those rulings, Attorney General Pam Bondi began distributing memos to federal agencies noting that the earlier request that agencies comb through their books and disclose any relationship with Perkins Coie or other law firms was no longer in effect.

The memo nonetheless reiterated that the government considered the court’s order “erroneous” and the terms of Mr. Trump’s executive order “permissible.”

“The government reserves the right to take all necessary and legal actions in response to the ‘dishonest and dangerous’ conduct of Perkins Coie,” it said.

Since the courts have appeared at least initially receptive to the law firms that have challenged Mr. Trump’s order, some in the legal world have rallied behind them in their battle against the White House.

After Perkins Coie filed its lawsuit in March, more than 500 firms promptly filed a brief in support. The group has also received supporting briefs from a group of 363 law professors and a coalition of leading legal groups describing themselves as “from across the ideological spectrum,” including the Cato Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union.

This month, a group of bar associations from across the country also threw their support behind the firm, arguing in a brief that the order targeting the firm was an obvious intimidation tactic by the White House and warning of damage to the legal profession.

“The order is not only blatantly illegal; it is a naked attempt to instill fear in the legal profession and intimidate lawyers into submission, thereby co-opting the bar to be subservient to the executive branch, undermining the judiciary’s ability to check executive power and striking at the heart of the rule of law,” the bar associations’ brief said. “The court should grant plaintiff’s requested relief and enjoin this executive order to limit the chilling effects on the legal profession.”

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Here’s what happened on Tuesday.

• Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined plans to reorganize his department, including a 15 percent cut in American staff, with the cuts also affecting the work of embassies and consulates overseas. Closures of diplomatic missions and layoffs abroad are expected later.

• Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, said he would spend less time in Washington working for President Trump after the automaker reported a profit drop of 71 percent in the first three months of the year. Mr. Musk told Wall Street analysts in a conference call that he would continue to spend “a day or two per week” on Washington matters.

• Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that he had “no intention” of firing the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, even as he repeated his calls for the central bank to lower interest rates. The president made the remark during an event at the White House.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, escalated his war against the food industry, declaring that “sugar is poison” as he was asserting that he has “an understanding” with major food manufacturers to remove petroleum-based food colorings from their products by 2026.

• A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from dismantling Voice of America, a government-funded news organization that Mr. Trump has accused of being biased against him, and mandated that its journalists be allowed to resume their work.

• Minnesota became the first state to sue the Justice Department over its threats to cut federal funding to states that allow transgender girls and women to participate on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity.

• The Justice Department has defied a judge’s order to explain what the Trump administration has done, and plans to do, to seek the release of a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador last month, according to court papers filed on Tuesday.

• Mr. Trump’s trade war is expected to slow economic growth across the globe this year, according to economic projections released by the International Monetary Fund.

Kennedy escalates his fight against the food industry.

No one from the food industry attended the event, and none have publicly agreed to Mr. Kennedy’s demands, although the International Dairy Foods Association has pledged to eliminate artificial colors in milk, cheese and yogurt sold to schools as part of the federal lunch and breakfast programs by the start of the 2026 school year.

However, Mr. Kennedy and his advisers said that every major food manufacturer and some fast-food companies have contacted the agency looking for guidance.

“Four years from now, we are going to have most of these products off the market, or you will know about them when you go to the grocery store,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. Kennedy’s push to get food manufacturers to remove dyes from their products is his first effort at sweeping reform of the food industry, which he has long blamed for creating and marketing ultra-processed foods that he says are making Americans obese and contributing to a host of diseases, including diabetes and heart disease.

He ratcheted up his campaign with the remark about sugar, lamenting that government agencies recommend “a huge amount of sugar” for children, “and it’s hurting them, and it’s addicting them, and it’s changing their taste buds.”

The Food and Drug Administration recommends that added sugar — sugar that is not found naturally in foods, including fruit — account for no more than 10 percent of the diet for both children and adults.

“Sugar is poison,” Mr. Kennedy said, “and Americans need to know that it’s poison.”

Critics of Mr. Kennedy say that while his goal of making the food supply healthier is laudable, the cuts he is making to scientific research grants, coupled with significant staff reductions at agencies like the F.D.A. and the National Institutes for Health, will hinder his efforts. The very same people who police the food industry, they pointed out, are now out of jobs.

Some have quit in frustration. The leading nutrition scientist at the N.I.H., Kevin Hall, recently resigned, saying he was being censored. Jim Jones, the chief of the F.D.A.’s food division, quit last month, saying “indiscriminate” layoffs would make it “fruitless” for him to continue.

“I was looking forward to working to pursue the department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food,” Mr. Jones wrote at the time.

Mr. Kennedy delivered his remarks in the grand hall of the Department of Health and Human Services on a stage filled with so-called MAHA Moms — women who power his “Make America Healthy Again” movement — and their children.

He was joined by Dr. Marty Makary, the F.D.A. commissioner; Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Republican leaders of states that have signed onto his MAHA movement, including the governor of West Virginia, who recently signed legislation banning dyes in most foods.

Dr. Makary said he expected cooperation from the food manufacturers.

“You win more bees with honey than fire,” Dr. Makary said, adding “I believe in love, and let’s start in a friendly way and see if we can do this without any statutory or regulatory changes.”

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How Americans feel about DOGE and Elon Musk.

When given a broad set of options for whether DOGE should continue, less than 40 percent of voters said that DOGE should stop its work entirely, according to a March poll by NBC News. But respondents who expressed support for DOGE were split between thinking it should continue at the current pace and thinking it should slow down to assess impact.

When respondents are forced to choose between two options — whether they approve or disapprove of DOGE — as many as 60 percent of respondents express negative sentiment.

Some pollsters explicitly give respondents the option of saying they are uncertain or have a neutral opinion about DOGE. (Other pollsters accept that answer only if the respondent volunteers it.) Polls that include this option show slightly less negative sentiment; in other words, respondents who might otherwise have said they disliked DOGE instead answered that they were neutral toward it.

The image of the broad government cuts has become linked with Mr. Musk, who is leading the effort and regularly floats plans on X, the social media website he owns, to slash government spending. The breadth of Mr. Musk’s influence has touched off some infighting in Mr. Trump’s administration, including during a contentious cabinet meeting, and has caused some Republicans on Capitol Hill to make direct appeals to Mr. Musk to try to limit the effects on their constituents. Mr. Trump himself suggested Mr. Musk should work with a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet.”

In a Quinnipiac University poll taken this month, 57 percent of voters — including 16 percent of Republicans — said that Mr. Musk had too much power in decisions that affect the country.

Views of Mr. Musk have taken a hit, as well. Over the last four years, he has gone from having a mostly positive approval rating among the voters who had heard of him to a deeply negative one.

Mr. Musk’s drop in popularity has come almost entirely from Democrats and independent voters, while his ratings have improved among Republicans.

While many poll findings about DOGE yield findings with relatively predictable partisan divides, there is at least one area that has elicited broad objection: efforts to access and consolidate data from agencies such as the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. Neary two-thirds of Americans express some concern when asked about the access of Mr. Musk’s team to that data.

Harvard plans to use Trump’s haste against him as it fights a funding cut.

The 51-page lawsuit the university filed on Monday, intended to fight the administration’s freeze of billions in federal funding, hinges largely on a statute that provides specific timelines for federal agencies to draft rules and impose penalties.

This wonky workhorse of American law, known as the Administrative Procedure Act, has been cited in a majority of lawsuits filed this year against the Trump administration, including complaints seeking to reverse funding reductions to the United States Agency for International Development, local schools and Voice of America.

While Mr. Trump’s strategy has generated headlines, the outcomes of these cases will determine whether that approach will also produce lasting policy victories.

In Harvard’s case, the university is seeking to fend off accusations of discrimination from the administration’s antisemitism task force, a group that was put together to move faster than typical federal civil rights investigators.

The administration preferred to work with Harvard and encouraged the university to “come to the negotiating table in good faith” instead of grandstanding, said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “Harvard is showboating,” Mr. Fields said. “But they know more than anyone that not playing ball is going to hurt their team. They need to be in compliance with federal law in order to get federal funds.”

Harvard turned to the administrative procedure law after facing a crush of government demands that included, among other conditions, audits of its faculty for plagiarism and political views, along with changes to admissions and hiring. The university argues that Washington is seeking to exert unconstitutional sway — and that its effort is defined by sloppiness that blasted past due process.

In some ways, the administration’s zeal for speed has already proven costly. The list of demands emailed to the university on April 11 was sent by mistake, Trump officials have said. But while there have been differing accounts about why the email was mishandled, the demands were so onerous that Harvard officials decided they had no choice but to take on the White House.

Trump officials tried to reopen negotiations in recent days, but Harvard refused. Instead, the university has accused the administration of breaking the law.

“Defendants,” Harvard wrote in the lawsuit, “failed to comply with their own regulations before freezing Harvard’s federal financial assistance.”

In another section, Harvard notes that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which forbids certain kinds of discrimination, requires a detailed process before it can be a basis for freezing money. The Trump administration, Harvard says, did “the precise opposite.”

Elsewhere in its complaint, the university contends that the government’s moves against it were “arbitrary and capricious” and could not be explained, or explained reasonably.

For universities putting up legal fights against the Trump administration, and familiar with deliberative processes that traditionally govern federal grants, the procedure act may be their most essential tool.

In February, the law was the foundation of a challenge to the administration’s effort to change how universities are reimbursed for overhead costs related to National Institutes of Health research. Last week, universities and their industry associations turned to the law again after the Department of Energy sought to cut research funding. Harvard is now embracing much of the same playbook.

But for an administration that has signaled it would like to make an example of a top university — all the better to cow other universities — the deluge of abrupt pressure is part of the point.

To some of the administration’s allies, the government’s haste to curb what it contends is endemic campus antisemitism is a virtue. The federal government’s civil rights investigations are ordinarily long and steeped in procedures and policies that, the administration’s allies contend, can make bad situations worse.

“My greater worry has been with the slowness of investigations, historically, and with the great amount of time in which students are left without recourse or remedy,” Kenneth L. Marcus, the Education Department’s top civil rights official during Mr. Trump’s first term, said in an interview before the administration’s fight with Harvard fully erupted.

Catherine Lhamon, who was assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department during the Obama and Biden administrations, said that the process was too long for prosecuting civil rights violations, particularly when infractions affected students directly. But she added that those were issues for Congress to consider.

“Congress decided at a crucible moment in our nation’s history that there should be federal civil rights protections and a pretty onerous process for the government to say those laws have been violated and federal funds should not be spent,” Ms. Lhamon said. “What we’re seeing now is what Congress was worried about when those principles were written, which is that somebody might try to weaponize these particular protections.”

Harvard has also reached for concepts of American law — like First Amendment protections — that are less about bureaucratic procedures and easier sells in the still-essential court of public opinion.

But even part of Harvard’s First Amendment argument partially relies on the procedure act, which says that an action by a federal agency that runs “contrary to constitutional right, power, privilege, or immunity” is illegal.

“In terms of what Harvard is specifically doing, it is pushing back against agency action, and we have an entire legal framework,” said Osamudia R. James, a professor at the University of North Carolina whose specialties include administrative law.

Harvard officials are hoping that the government’s speedy tactics will steer the case toward a speedy end. The university’s lawsuit asked the Federal District Court in Massachusetts to expedite the case.

So far, Harvard has not requested an interim step, like a preliminary injunction. Although the university has not ruled out seeking some kind of short-term relief, its early approach is a signal that it believes the court may be able to act definitively and quickly on grounds that may not require much spectacle.

To make its case, Harvard has hired a roster of legal heavyweights, many of them with deep experience in Washington and close ties to the conservative establishment.

William A. Burck, who worked in George W. Bush’s White House and now is an outside ethics adviser to Mr. Trump’s company and sits on the Fox Corporation’s board, was the first lawyer listed in the lawsuit. Robert K. Hur, the U.S. attorney in Maryland during Mr. Trump’s first term and later the special counsel who investigated President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s handling of classified documents, came next.

Other lawyers representing Harvard include Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, who was one of Mr. Bush’s Supreme Court litigators; Steven P. Lehotsky, who worked in Mr. Bush’s Justice Department and clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia; Mary Elizabeth Miller, who worked for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.; and Katherine C. Yarger, a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.

Jonathan F. Cohn was a deputy assistant attorney general during Mr. Bush’s administration. Scott A. Keller is a former solicitor general in Texas who later worked as chief counsel for Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican.

The outcome of the legal case may be beside the point, Professor James said.

“If you lose ultimately at the court but millions of people now believe that all of these institutions are hotbeds of discrimination, that they don’t provide any benefits to the communities in which they operate, that they don’t produce anything of value,” she said, adding, “that might be a win if you are hostile to higher education institutions.”

Seamus Hughes contributed research.