The nation’s legal profession is being split between those that want to fight back against President Trump’s attacks on the industry and those that prefer to engage in the art of the deal.

Two big firms sued the Trump administration on Friday, seeking to stop executive orders that could impair their ability to represent clients. The lawsuits filed by Jenner & Block and WilmerHale highlight how some elite firms are willing to fight Mr. Trump’s campaign targeting those he doesn’t like, while others, like Paul Weiss and Skadden, have cut deals to appease the president.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has issued similarly styled executive orders against firms that he perceives as enemies and threats to national security. The orders could create an existential crisis for firms because they would strip lawyers of security clearances, bar them from entering federal buildings and discourage federal officials from interacting with the firms.

“I am heartened by the fact that Jenner and Wilmer are joining Perkins in pushing back on these illegal executive orders. It shows that capitulation is not the only route,” said Matthew Diller, a law professor and former dean of Fordham University School of Law. “In the long run, it will strengthen their reputations in the market as forceful advocates who stand up for principle, a quality that many clients will value.”

Jenner & Block said in a statement that its suit was intended to “stop an unconstitutional executive order that has already been declared unlawful by a federal court.” A third firm, Perkins Coie, has also sued the Trump administration over the same matter, and had some early success in stopping the executive order.

Jenner & Block also created a website — Jenner Stands Firm — to publicize its filing and to highlight newspaper editorials criticizing the executive orders and comments from law school professors questioning the legality of Mr. Trump’s actions.

On Friday evening, Judge John Bates of Federal District Court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order that bars the Trump administration from punishing Jenner & Block. The judge called the portion of the executive order that criticizes the pro bono legal work the firm does for organizations “disturbing” and “troubling.”

Later Friday, another federal judge in Washington, Richard Leon, issued a temporary restraining order granting WilmerHale most of the relief the firm sought from the executive order against it.

The effort to fight back in a public manner stands in contrast with the way other firms have handled Mr. Trump’s campaign against them.

Also on Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters that the White House had reached a deal with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom that would require the firm to provide $100 million in pro bono legal services to causes he supports. Skadden and Mr. Trump reached a deal after the law firm had reached out behind the scenes to head off the filing of an executive order against it.

“We very much appreciate their coming to the table,” Mr. Trump said.

In a statement, Skadden said, “We engaged proactively with the president and his team in working together constructively to reach this agreement.” The firm added that the agreement “is in the best interests of our clients, our people and our firm.”

Last week, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison announced an agreement in which Mr. Trump rescinded his executive order against the law firm in exchange for its committing to represent clients regardless of their political leanings and pledging $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues Mr. Trump has championed.

Paul Weiss reached its deal within days of Mr. Trump’s executive order after the firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, flew from New York for an Oval Office meeting with the president and some of his staff. Mr. Karp said in an email to the firm that he had moved quickly because Paul Weiss’s big corporate clients were threatened with the “loss of their government contracts and the loss of access to the government” if they stuck with the firm.

Mr. Karp cast the deal as a move to save Paul Weiss, which employs about 2,000 people. He also complained that other law firms had not come out to support Paul Weiss.

But that deal was widely criticized. The firm — which is stocked with Democrats who have opposed Mr. Trump — was seen as bending to the president to protect its bottom line.

“A large part of this are business decisions being made by law firms,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor and a professor at New York Law School who specializes in legal ethics. “These firms are calculating that their clients will feel aligned with their decisions.”

Mr. Trump has been going after big law firms that he contends have “weaponized” the legal system. He is initially targeting law firms that hired lawyers who were once involved in the many investigations of his actions during his first presidential term and his business dealings.

The executive orders have been premised on Mr. Trump’s notion that the law firms’ partisan representations and pro bono work for groups that he disagrees with could pose a threat to national security.

A White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, said in a statement: “Democrats and their law firms weaponized the legal process to try to punish and jail their political opponents. The president’s executive orders are lawful directives to ensure that the president’s agenda is implemented and that law firms comply with the law.”

The suit by Jenner & Block was filed in federal court in Washington, and the firm is asking a judge to step in immediately and stop the executive order, which was leveled against it by Mr. Trump this week. The firm is being represented by Cooley, another law firm. The lawsuit named numerous government agencies and officials as defendants.

WilmerHale filed its lawsuit in the same federal court and is being represented by Paul Clement, a solicitor general during the administration of President George W. Bush.

Jenner & Block and WilmerHale represent some of the nation’s biggest companies, and often deal with regulatory issues before government agencies. Jenner & Block has represented the defense contractor General Dynamics, as well as the entertainment giant Viacom, while one of WilmerHale’s major clients is JPMorgan Chase.

The executive order accused the firm of engaging “in obvious partisan representations to achieve political ends” and claimed the firm “discriminates against its employees based on race and other categories prohibited by civil rights laws, including through the use of race-based ‘targets.’”

The executive orders against both Jenner & Block and WilmerHale focused, in large part, on the work of lawyers with the federal investigation into ties between Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. The investigation was led by a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, a former director of the F.B.I. who was a partner at WilmerHale.

One of Mr. Mueller’s top assistants on that investigation was Andrew Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor and former partner at Jenner & Block.

Both Mr. Mueller and Mr. Weissmann rejoined their firms after the investigation was completed. The lawyers left their firms in 2021. But on the WilmerHale website, there is a page devoted to a lengthy interview with Mr. Mueller, who is normally media-averse, in which he discusses his “remarkable life and career.”

Jenner & Block’s complaint said Mr. Trump’s action was unconstitutional and would compromise the ability of the firm’s more than 500 lawyers to “zealously advocate for its clients.”

The lawsuit noted that Mr. Trump’s deal with Paul Weiss did not include any new security measures imposed on that firm.

In a statement, WilmerHale, which has about 1,000 lawyers, said the president’s executive order “is a plainly unlawful attack on the bedrock principles of our nation’s legal system — our clients’ right to counsel and the First Amendment.”

Perkins Coie, one of the first law firms targeted by Mr. Trump, sued him earlier this month. A federal judge temporarily halted Mr. Trump’s order, saying it was likely illegal and adding: “It sends little chills down my spine.”

Vanita Gupta, a civil rights lawyer and former senior Justice Department official in the Biden and Obama administrations, said the new lawsuits were necessary in a time of peril for the legal profession.

“The only way through this attack on the very foundations of our legal system is by fighting back,” Ms. Gupta said. “If firms want to be trusted to fight the biggest fights, they must not cave to blatantly unconstitutional government actions.”

She praised the three firms that are fighting the administration and said she hoped others would do the same because “collective action is the only way to pull through in this moment.”

Mr. Trump’s executive order against Paul Weiss was motivated in part by the fact that a former partner at that firm has worked with the Manhattan district attorney’s office in trying to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump after he lost the 2020 election.

One pattern of the executive orders is going after law firms that have employed attorneys whom Mr. Trump’s sees as his personal enemies. One of those is Mr. Weissmann, whom Mr. Trump has often lashed out against on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Mr. Weissmann has a reputation as an aggressive investigator. In recent years, he has emerged as a public critic of Mr. Trump, appearing frequently on MSNBC to provide legal analysis about the range of indictments Mr. Trump faced for his conduct.

In the complaint, the firm said Mr. Weissmann had not worked for it since 2021. It also noted that it has had prominent lawyers from all political parties on its staff.

Tyler Pager contributed reporting.

Charlie Javice, who made big headlines in 2023 when JPMorgan Chase accused her of faking her start-up’s customer list, was found guilty in federal court Friday of three counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit fraud.

She now faces the possibility of decades in prison.

The bank has its own civil lawsuit on standby as it attempts to claw back some of the $175 million it paid for her company, Frank. It sued her three years ago, and Ms. Javice was arrested at Newark Liberty International Airport not long after that.

Frank, which was founded in 2016, aimed to help customers fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid at a time when the FAFSA was notoriously complicated. Ms. Javice, 32, quickly became a go-to quote for journalists writing about paying for college and turned up on lists of under-30 and under-40 up-and-comers.

Not long after Ms. Javice sold Frank to JPMorgan, there was trouble. The bank ran a test of Frank’s customer list, hoping to persuade its young customers to open Chase accounts. Of 400,000 outbound emails, just 28 percent arrived successfully in an inbox.

At trial, a bank executive said that it had opened just 10 accounts via the Frank list. It was, as the bank put it in its own legal filing, “disastrous.”

An internal investigation ensued, and the bank claimed to have found evidence that Ms. Javice and Olivier Amar, Frank’s chief growth and acquisition officer, had faked much of its customer list. JPMorgan sued her, and the federal government followed with its own charges, which resulted in the verdict Friday.

Mr. Amar was charged and tried at the same time as Ms. Javice and was also found guilty on all counts. A JPMorgan spokesman declined to comment on the verdict.

During the trial, JPMorgan bank executives said that one appeal of Frank was its promise of over four million customers, with detailed contact information, whom the bank could pitch. The bank could hook young adults with a checking account and potentially keep them and their business through decades of mortgages and retirement savings.

One striking bit of testimony came from Adam Kapelner, an associate professor of mathematics at Queens College, part of the City University of New York. As JPMorgan was performing due diligence, Ms. Javice told him she was in an “urgent pinch” and asked him to use “synthetic data” to create a list of over four million customers from a Frank list she supplied, which had fewer than 300,000 people on it. He asked why, according to his testimony, but she would not tell him.

“I found my genius,” she said in a text to Mr. Amar at the time.

After Professor Kapelner did some quick work — including pulling an all-nighter — Ms. Javice asked him to remove any specifics about the data from his invoice and paid him $18,000 instead of the $13,300 on his original bill.

According to prosecutors, Ms. Javice and Mr. Amar knew and feared that the bank was going to use Frank’s list for marketing. The pair eventually bought real names and emails from commercial data providers to make it look like Frank really did have millions of customers who had given the company their names and contact information.

This, too, was a rush job to avoid getting caught, according to the prosecution. It produced a text message exchange in which Mr. Amar told Ms. Javice, “You’ll have 4.5 million users today.” She replied, “Perfect. Love you.” Ms. Javice asked for specifics to be removed from an invoice on this transaction as well.

To the prosecution, this was evidence that Ms. Javice was trying to hide her tracks. “Why would you make a fake customer list if you weren’t lying about your customers?” Micah F. Fergenson, an assistant U.S. attorney, said in court Wednesday.

Years before President Trump returned to the White House, his budget chief, Russell T. Vought, began mapping out a plan to shrink the federal government.

In Mr. Vought’s design, spending would be slashed by about $9 trillion over the next decade. Entire federal programs — from housing vouchers to student loans — would be eliminated. The government would fire thousands of civil workers, including those who investigated tax fraud. And Washington would restrict aid to the poor, requiring Americans to work in exchange for benefits.

The ideas formed the bedrock of Mr. Vought’s plan to end the “woke and weaponized” bureaucracy, a policy guide he issued in 2022 for fellow conservatives entering a key budget battle. His full vision did not come to fruition at the time, but the roughly 100-page blueprint has taken on heightened significance since Mr. Trump won re-election — and reinstalled Mr. Vought to his perch — foreshadowing their shared aim to reel in the size and reach of government.

In the perennial fight over the federal balance sheet, few officials are more important than Mr. Vought. As head of the Office of Management and Budget, he wields vast power over the United States government, its workers and the millions of people whose lives are shaped by the ebb and flow of federal funds.

Mr. Vought brings an aggressive style to the job, one revealed in podcast interviews and public writings, particularly in the years after Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat. A longtime budget expert, he sketched out a vision for expansive presidential power in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint prepared by the Heritage Foundation for Mr. Trump. And in 2021, Mr. Vought founded his own organization, the Center for Renewing America, which describes itself as dedicated to “God, country and community.”

There, Mr. Vought refined an ambition to marry extreme fiscal austerity with Christian values, pledging to eliminate federal programs seen as too wasteful, “woke” or secular. In scrutinizing the budget, his approach has made him a natural ally of Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Now back at O.M.B., Mr. Vought has assembled a team of like-minded advisers who are working to prepare Mr. Trump’s 2026 budget proposal. That blueprint may guide Congress in its work to extend a set of expensive and expiring tax cuts enacted in Mr. Trump’s first term.

Documents reviewed by The New York Times showed that as recently as late February, O.M.B. staff were compiling recommendations for sweeping cuts to programs that Republicans have long wanted to slash. Those cuts include imposing work requirements for recipients of food stamps, ending public service student loan forgiveness and phasing out certain federal Medicaid funds for states.

The president and Mr. Vought also subscribe to the idea that the White House should have expansive powers over the nation’s purse strings, halting or canceling federal spending even if Congress instructs otherwise. That stance has emboldened the White House to already interrupt the distribution of billions of dollars, including foreign aid, infrastructure spending and payments to food banks.

The delays have provoked lawsuits, and in a largely unnoticed move, they have triggered an investigation by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan watchdog established by Congress that acknowledged its inquiries in February. Some Democrats contend that the budget office has violated the law in other ways, after it quietly disabled a government website on Monday that tracked the regular outflow of federal dollars.

“Taking down this website is not just illegal, it is a brazen move to hide this administration’s spending from the American people and from Congress,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington and Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the leading Democratic appropriators, in a statement this week.

Mr. Vought declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed. In a preamble to his 2022 policy guide, he wrote: “The evidence of America’s fiscal brokenness is everywhere.”

Mr. Vought’s calls for austerity are hardly novel in Washington, where policymakers often lament the nation’s growing $36 trillion debt, but they carry new force at a moment when Mr. Trump looks to reshape the federal bureaucracy.

As DOGE agents blitz federal agencies — shuttering entire programs, dismissing thousands of workers and burrowing into sensitive federal computer systems — Mr. Vought has toiled quietly to lay the foundation for “making these cuts permanent in the long term,” he explained in an interview with Fox Business in February.

The same month, Mr. Vought ordered agencies to submit detailed plans by March and April indicating how they would cut spending, lay off workers and sell office buildings to save money and ensure they “advance the president’s policy priorities,” according to a memo sent to agency leaders.

James C. Capretta, a former O.M.B. official now serving as a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Mr. Vought’s actions reflected the view that “the federal executive branch really should be at the service of a president in a manner that goes beyond professional management of the agencies.”

The reorganization arrived weeks after the budget office, under interim leadership while Mr. Vought awaited Senate confirmation, froze nearly all federal spending. While political pressure and multiple lawsuits forced the White House to rescind that policy, budget officials have continued to halt the disbursement of some federal payments. Another arrived this week, when the Trump administration essentially refused to spend about $3 billion in emergency money to combat narcotics and fund other programs, a move that drew a rare bipartisan rebuke in the Senate.

“Every day, there is a headline about another institution, about funding that has been discontinued,” said Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward, a left-leaning advocacy group that has sued O.M.B. over its actions.

The freezes underscored Mr. Vought’s long-held belief that the budget office must serve as the White House “air-traffic control system,” as he wrote in a chapter for Project 2025. There, and in much of his work, Mr. Vought has long criticized civil workers, portraying some of their actions as motivated by their “own agenda.” He previously promised to put them “in trauma,” he said in a video first surfaced by ProPublica.

“They’re constantly hiding the ball,” Mr. Vought said during a May 2023 podcast interview, adding that Republicans needed to “micromanage the heck out of everything that is part of your agency, or make sure that your right arms are.”

With the help of Mr. Trump, the two men have established a team in recent weeks that echoes Mr. Vought’s views.

The roster includes Mark Paoletta, the budget office’s general counsel, who served with Mr. Vought during the first Trump administration and later at the Center for Renewing America. Mr. Paoletta represented Virginia Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, during a House investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power after the 2020 election. Mr. Paoletta drafted the since-revoked order that froze nearly all federal spending.

Jeffrey Bossert Clark, who is serving in a key O.M.B. office that oversees regulation, previously faced possible contempt of Congress charges for refusing to testify about accusations that he sought to undo the results of the 2020 race.

And Dan Bishop, whom Mr. Trump appointed as deputy director, is a former Republican congressman who, while serving in the North Carolina legislature, sponsored a bill that restricted transgender people from using their preferred public restrooms. The Senate confirmed his nomination on Wednesday.

Testifying this month, Mr. Bishop acknowledged that he agreed with those who believe the 2020 election had been rigged. The former congressman said the president had a mandate to pursue “an end to the waste and the Washington status quo.”

The comments angered Democrats, who recalled Mr. Trump’s first term, when he and Mr. Vought halted congressionally authorized aid to Ukraine in a standoff that laid the groundwork for House Democrats to impeach the president. The budget adviser maintained in 2021 — and, years later, at his own nomination hearing — that the White House had acted lawfully.

After the Senate confirmed him along party lines, Mr. Vought helped to secure a deal to stave off a government shutdown, wooing Republicans with a promise that the administration would take aggressive steps to slash spending. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump signaled that the White House could begin by submitting to Congress a formal list of proposed cuts, reflecting some of the savings identified by DOGE.

“I assume they’ll total everything up and get it to us,” Representative Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican and member of the House Budget Committee, said in an interview. “What the president will have will be sweet music to all of us who want a very conservative budget.”

At his Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought in 2022 previewed his pursuit of stark cuts, targeting benefit programs including Medicaid. He proposed limiting its funding and eligibility, an idea he has resurfaced in recent weeks.

“You can get sizable levels of savings and reforms,” Mr. Vought told the Senate Budget Committee this year.

The term “woke” appeared 77 times in Mr. Vought’s document. The proposal looked to slash the “woke agenda” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, targeting money meant for “niche and small population groups.” It proposed jettisoning billions of dollars in “woke foreign aid spending”; eliminating entire programs for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities; and striking the “secular, woke religion” of climate change from the federal ledger.

“That is the central and immediate threat facing the country — the one that all our statesmen must rise tall to vanquish,” Mr. Vought wrote in the preamble to his budget. “The battle cannot wait.”

Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.