The State Department has fired about 60 contractors who work for its democracy, human rights and labor bureau, a division whose programs have often been criticized by authoritarian leaders, according to two U.S. officials and two former officials.

The dismissals deal a severe blow to the bureau, because the contractors were mostly technical or area experts whom senior officials relied on to do the day-to-day work of enacting the programs overseas.

The bureau has received about $150 million to $200 million of annual budget funding from Congress in recent years. But the bureau also handles and passes on money that Congress appropriates for other groups, including the National Endowment for Democracy.

Besides the contractors, the bureau has about 200 full-time staff employees. They mainly work out of Washington, where the programs are run from the State Department’s headquarters.

The bureau’s programs have often been focused on building up civil society and democratic practices in countries where the United States does not have missions and formal diplomatic ties, or where relations with an authoritarian government are especially tense. This includes Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba.

President Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 that has suspended any money or programs that can be deemed to be foreign aid or assistance.

Some of the bureau’s contractors have specific technical expertise. For example, at least one is an expert on virtual private networks, software that allows users to get around government internet blocks. China has the most effective internet censorship program in the world, called the Great Firewall.

The bureau has also worked on enacting policies aimed at pressuring China to relent on its forced labor of Uyghur Muslims, including the imposing of sanctions on U.S. companies that buy products that can be traced back to some form of forced labor.

Some Republican politicians have criticized the bureau in recent years, saying its democracy-promotion programs often end up supporting political parties or groups abroad that are opposed to conservative or far-right political figures in those countries.

However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has long been a champion of policies that advance human rights and promote democratic practices. In the Senate, where he represented Florida, Mr. Rubio was a lead sponsor of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which had broad support from both parties in Congress. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. signed it into law in December 2021.

The State Department had no immediate comment when asked about the firings.

Foreign leaders who have criticized the bureau include Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, who has tried to suppress democratic practices in his country over many years. Mr. Orban is a favorite politician of conservative and far-right groups and politicians in the United States. Last December, he met with Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire technology businessman who advises the president, at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home in Florida.

The firing of the contractors is similar to the drastic steps taken in recent days by the Trump administration, and by Mr. Musk in particular, to sharply reduce the work force of the United States Agency for International Development. Last week, the administration placed 60 senior officials from the agency on paid leave and issued orders that led to the firing of hundreds of contractors. Since then, administration officials have fired dozens more employees or put them on paid leave.

Karoun Demirjian contributed reporting.

The Senate confirmed Chris Wright to lead the U.S. Department of Energy on Monday, putting the former oil executive in a key position to help shape President Trump’s energy policies.

Mr. Wright, the founder and chief executive of Liberty Energy, a fracking firm, was confirmed by a vote of 59 to 38, with support from all Republicans present and a smaller number of Democrats. He would be the 17th secretary of energy, a position that was created in 1977.

At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Wright said his top priority was to “unleash” domestic energy production, including liquefied natural gas and nuclear power. He also told Democrats that he believed climate change was a “global challenge that we need to solve” and that he would support the development of renewable energy like wind and solar power.

At the same time, Mr. Wright said he would “work tirelessly” to support Mr. Trump’s “bold” energy agenda. The president has frequently dismissed climate change as a hoax, disparaged wind and solar power and said he wants to expand the use of oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is driving climate change.

The Energy Department plays a central role in developing new energy technologies. The agency oversees a network of 17 national laboratories that conduct cutting-edge research as well as a powerful loan office that has backed dozens of low-carbon energy projects, including battery factories in Ohio and Tennessee and two giant nuclear reactors in Georgia.

Mr. Wright would also oversee approvals of liquefied gas export terminals, which the Biden administration tried to slow, angering industry groups. Mr. Trump has already ordered the Energy Department to restart reviews of proposed export facilities.

The Energy Department is a sprawling agency. About 80 percent of the department’s $52 billion annual budget goes toward maintaining the nation’s nuclear arsenal, cleaning up environmental messes from the Cold War and conducting research in areas like high-energy physics.

Under the Biden administration, the department aggressively supported new clean energy technologies such as advanced nuclear power, enhanced geothermal energy, green hydrogen fuels, next-generation batteries and more. Backed by new funding from Congress, it issued tens of billions in loans and grants to everything from firms making low-carbon cement to power companies building new transmission lines.

At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Wright mostly declined to go into details about how he would run the department.

Some conservative groups have urged Mr. Wright to reorient or even shutter the agency’s Loan Programs Office, which was given roughly $400 billion in loan authority by Congress to bring promising energy technologies to market. Under the Biden administration, the office finalized more than $60.6 billion in loans and loan guarantees to companies that were mining lithium, restarting a shuttered nuclear plant, converting wind and solar power into hydrogen fuels and more. It also issued $47 billion in conditional loans that have not been finalized.

As of Jan. 17, there were still 160 companies seeking more than $200 billion in loans and loan guarantees. But the loan office’s work has largely been paused since Mr. Trump took office, and it is unclear what will happen to those applications.

Most major environmental groups and many Democrats opposed Mr. Wright’s confirmation, saying that he downplayed the risks of a warming planet. In a social media post in 2023, Mr. Wright wrote, “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either.” On a podcast last year, he said that climate change would have “a slow-moving, modest impact two or three generations from now.”

On podcasts and in speeches, Mr. Wright has frequently made a moral case for fossil fuels, arguing that the world’s poorest people need access to oil, gas and coal to enjoy the benefits of modern life that rich nations take for granted.

Still, some Senate Democrats joined Republicans in voting to approve Mr. Wright’s nomination. They included Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Ben Ray Luján and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, as well as Angus King, an independent from Maine who normally caucuses with Democrats.

“While I do not agree with Mr. Wright on a number of issues, he has committed to working with us in good faith” on issues like investing in national labs and building out high-voltage power lines, Mr. Heinrich said last month.

Mr. Wright graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did graduate work on solar energy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he founded Pinnacle Technologies, which created software to measure the motion of fluid beneath the Earth’s surface. The software helped bring about a commercial shale-gas revolution.

Mr. Wright started Liberty Energy in 2011, and the company has worked with others on geothermal energy and small, modular nuclear reactors.

Mr. Wright holds 2.6 million shares in the company, which were worth roughly $47 million based on Monday’s closing stock price. In a written statement to the Senate he promised to step down from Liberty Energy and divest his holdings within 90 days after being confirmed. According to his ethics agreement, he is scheduled to get paid his last bonus from the company in March.

Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.

To broad relief across her country, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico announced on Monday that she had forestalled a plan by the Trump administration to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexican goods. Initially set to go into effect at the stroke of midnight, the tariffs have been delayed by a month, she said.

“We have this month to work, to convince each other that this is the best way forward,” Ms. Sheinbaum said at her regular morning news conference after speaking to President Trump. Suggesting that she might be able hold off the penalties altogether, she said she had told her American counterpart: “We are going to deliver results. Good results for your people, good results for the Mexican people.”

The announcement was seen as a victory for the Mexican government in dealing with Mr. Trump, who has set a new tone of aggression in the first weeks of his presidency. He has demanded that even some of the United States’ closest allies acquiesce to his demands or face consequences in the form of tariffs or perhaps even military force.

The deal, however, will force Mexico into a critical 30-day test during which it must not only continue its recent progress but also make still more headway on two of the country’s most enduring challenges: drug trafficking and migration.

Under the terms of the agreement, Mexico will post an additional 10,000 Mexican National Guardsmen on the border. In return, Ms. Sheinbaum said, the U.S. government will work to stop the flow of arms into Mexico.

In his own statement, Mr. Trump made no mention of a promise to help curb firearms trafficking, but he celebrated the deployment of Mexican troops.

While Mexico has spent the past year stepping up its immigration enforcement, which has already contributed to a drastic reduction in U.S. border crossings, the issue of drug trafficking is much more complicated. It will require Mexico to have “a very clear, very well-defined plan,” said Ildefonso Guajardo, a former economy minister who negotiated with the first Trump administration.

Mr. Trump and Thomas Homan, the administration’s border czar, have repeatedly laid blame for the fentanyl overdose crisis in the United States on Mexican cartels as well as on migrants they say move the drug across the border. Mr. Homan falsely told Fox News that Mexican cartels had “killed a quarter of a million Americans with fentanyl.”

Since 2019, Mexico has displaced China as the biggest supplier of fentanyl to the United States. Besides being extraordinarily potent, the drug is very easy to make — and even easier to smuggle across the border, hidden under clothes or in glove compartments. According to U.S. prosecutors, the Sinaloa Cartel spends only $800 on chemicals to produce a kilo that can net a profit of up to $640,000 in the United States.

Mexico has been the source of almost all of the fentanyl seized by U.S. law enforcement in recent years, and the amount crossing the border has increased tenfold in the past five years. But federal data shows it is brought in not by migrants but by American citizens recruited by cartel organizations. More than 80 percent of the people who have been sentenced for fentanyl trafficking at the southern border are U.S. citizens.

“All that makes it incredibly harder to go after and control the market,” said Jaime López-Aranda, a security analyst based in Mexico City.

Ms. Sheinbaum’s administration has already stepped up efforts to combat fentanyl since she took office in October, including the largest seizure of the drug — about 20 million doses — ever recorded in Mexico. Security forces regularly report advances on arrests and dismantled drug-production labs.

But experts question how much of a dent these efforts truly represent. “Mexico can keep carrying out symbolic actions like it has been doing lately,” Mr. López-Aranda said, “but there is little more it can do.”

Waging a full war on the cartels would likely backfire and set off more waves of violence across Mexico, analysts say. The country has experienced those consequences before.

Upon taking office in 2006, President Felipe Calderón declared a war on criminal groups. The idea was to eradicate them and loosen their grip on the country. But targeting cartel leaders and engaging in direct confrontations only led to these groups splintering into more violent, brutal cells, leading to one of Mexico’s bloodiest periods.

“What is even going to happen after we destroy all the labs?” said Mr. Guajardo. “These guys are just going to focus more on extortion, theft and killings. Mexico will be left to deal with the problem alone.”

Under the agreement announced on Monday, Mexico will also bolster security forces at the border. Unlike the United States, Mexico does not have a specific security force dedicated to patrolling the border, instead relying on a combination of the military and National Guard.

Experts questioned how effective a deployment of 10,000 additional troops would be at delivering Mexico’s promised results when it came to fentanyl.

“Ten thousand members perhaps sounds like a lot, but it’s all in the details,” said Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, a drug policy researcher at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at U.C. San Diego. “If you’re only going to have them at the border, that doesn’t address the entire fentanyl production chain.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, noted that this is the third time in six years that Mexico has committed to sending a large deployment of National Guard to the U.S. border.

While Mexico’s forces will “try to achieve results at all costs,” a more effective strategy would be to have officials from both countries share more intelligence and information to stop the flow of drugs, said Jonathan Maza, a Mexican-based security analyst.

The lack of cooperation was something that American officials complained about during the administration of Ms. Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Given the importance to Mexico of avoiding tariffs, Mr. Maza, said the National Guard may achieve results in the short and medium term. But, he warned, criminal groups are likely to adapt.

On curbing migration and illegal crossings at the border, Mexico may have a more straightforward path to success, having adopted several effective measures in the last year.

National Guard troops are deployed to immigration checkpoints from north to south, and migration officials have also instituted a policy of “decompression” in which migrants are bused from concentrated areas in the north farther south to keep pressure off the border. The Mexican authorities have used busing on occasion for years, but its expansion in 2024 highlighted the country’s toughening policies on migration.

Breaking up migrant caravans headed for the United States is another step Mexican officials have taken in recent years. When several emerged in the weeks leading up to Mr. Trump taking office, they were all disbanded.

Mexico’s tougher stance, paired with President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s executive order last summer to essentially prevent undocumented migrants from receiving asylum at the border, contributed to a dramatic reduction in illegal immigration at the border in 2024. In December, U.S. Border Patrol officials recorded only 47,326 illegal crossings — a sharp drop from the record 249,740 documented a year earlier.

The Mexican authorities have also introduced bureaucratic hurdles for migrants and asylum seekers.

“Mexico’s strategy has exhausted and worn down migrants,” said Mauro Pérez Bravo, the former head of the National Migration Institute’s citizen council, which evaluates the country’s migration policies. “What it did was to emotionally and physically drain people to keep them from getting to the United States.”

In exchange for deploying troops to the border and stemming the flow of fentanyl and migrants into the United States, Ms. Sheinbaum said she secured Mr. Trump’s agreement to do more to prevent American-manufactured firearms from entering Mexico.

“These high-powered weapons that arrive illegally arm the criminal groups and give them firepower,” she said.

This is not the first time that Mexico has made that argument.

In 2021, the country sued several gun makers and one distributor, blaming them for the devastating, decades-long bloodshed from which Mexico has struggled to recover. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide this year whether Mexico may sue gun manufacturers in the United States. A recent analysis showed that nearly 9,000 gun dealers operate across cities in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas.

But in his own remarks, Mr. Trump did not make any mention of Ms. Sheinbaum’s request. It is unclear how his administration could actually fulfill such a commitment and what, if anything, Mexico would do should it fail to do so.

James Wagner, Paulina Villegas and Simon Romero contributed reporting.

Canada secured a 30-day postponement in the application of U.S. tariffs on its exports just hours before they were scheduled to go into effect after a call between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and President Donald J. Trump late Monday afternoon yielded a border deal that seemed to satisfy both sides.

Mr. Trudeau had earlier pledged to retaliate against U.S. tariffs by imposing tariffs against U.S. goods, too. In the end, he seemed to make modest concessions to Mr. Trump on the border policies, including having 10,000 “frontline” personnel stationed at the border.

“I just had a good call with President Trump,” Mr. Trudeau said in a social media post and laid out the terms of the agreement. “Proposed tariffs will be paused for at least 30 days while we work together.”

The deal brought relief and de-escalation into what had turned into a brewing trade war between the two close allies and top trading partners, although its 30-day horizon did indicate that more negotiations could take place down the line.

Specifically, Mr. Trudeau said that Canada would create a new position for a Fentanyl czar and redouble its efforts to tackle the opioid crisis — one that kills Canadians daily — by listing cartels and gangs as terrorist entities, like Mr. Trump has said he wants to do in the United States.

He also said that Canada would commit 200 million Canadian dollars to fresh intelligence-gathering efforts around the fentanyl and drug trade.

Mr. Trudeau also said that as part of the agreement with Mr. Trump, Canada would continue to implement a new border-tightening plan it had already announced weeks earlier.

That involves the expenditure of $1.3 billion Canadian dollars in fresh funds over the next several years, the deployment of new technology at the borders and the deployment of more border guards. Canada last month deployed two Blackhawk helicopters and 60 U.S.-made drones to the border to increase surveillance.