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As the Justice Department investigation into the attack on the Capitol grinds ever closer to former President Donald J. Trump, it has prompted persistent — and cautionary — reminders of the backlash caused by inquiries into Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is intent on avoiding even the slightest errors, which could taint the current investigation, provide Mr. Trump’s defenders with reasons to claim the inquiry was driven by animus, or undo his effort to rehabilitate the department’s reputation after the political warfare of the Trump years.

Mr. Garland never seriously considered focusing on Mr. Trump from the outset, as investigators had done earlier with Mr. Trump and with Mrs. Clinton during her email investigation, people close to him say. As a result, his investigators have taken a more methodical approach, carefully climbing up the chain of personnel behind the 2020 plan to name fake slates of Trump electors in battleground states that had been won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.

As prosecutors delve deeper into Mr. Trump’s orbit, the former president and his allies in Congress will almost certainly accuse the Justice Department and F.B.I. of a politically motivated witch hunt. The template for those attacks, as Mr. Garland and the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, well know, was “Crossfire Hurricane,” the investigation into the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, which Mr. Trump continues to dismiss as a partisan hoax.

The mistakes and decisions from that period, in part, led to increased layers of oversight, including a major policy change at the Justice Department. If a decision were made to open a criminal investigation into Mr. Trump after he announced his intention to run in the 2024 election, as he suggests he might do, the department’s leaders would have to sign off on any inquiry under an internal rule established by Attorney General William P. Barr and endorsed by Mr. Garland.

“Attorney General Garland and those investigating the high-level efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election are acutely aware of how any misstep, whether by the F.B.I. or prosecutors, will be amplified and used for political purposes,” said Mary B. McCord, a top Justice Department official during the Obama administration. “I expect there are added layers of review and scrutiny of every investigative step.”

Mr. Wray appears to be proceeding with the same level of caution, in hopes of armoring the bureau against future attacks by making sure his agents operate by the book and keeping Justice Department leadership informed. That means following the F.B.I.’s stringent rules and “not just doing the right thing, but doing it in the right way,” Mr. Wray has often said. It also means Mr. Wray would not go it alone, as his predecessor, James B. Comey, famously did.

The typically aggressive bureau, which used every investigative tool in its arsenal during the Russia investigation, had not even opened a case targeting fake electors by early fall 2021, months after details of the wide-ranging scheme were known publicly, two former federal law enforcement officials said.

In 2015, amid the outcry over Mrs. Clinton’s use of a personal email account, senior F.B.I. officials — without consulting with top department officials, including Mr. Comey — opened a criminal investigation into whether she had mishandled classified information.

In May 2017, the F.B.I. opened an obstruction investigation into Mr. Trump on its own, catching the leadership of the Justice Department off guard and setting off a political firestorm. The decision also fueled the suspicions of Mr. Trump and his supporters that the so-called deep state wanted to undermine his presidency.

In the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s stunning election victory, Mrs. Clinton and her supporters blamed Mr. Comey, contending that his unusual public statements about the status of the investigation into her emails had inadvertently shaped the outcome of the race. The new president would soon find fault with the director, too.

Mr. Trump’s willingness to attack the Justice Department was front of mind for officials in the department and the bureau as they scrambled to respond to the Jan. 6 attack, and other efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s loss, current and former officials said.

The lawyers running the department at the time, including the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and the acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, had managed to stop Mr. Trump from usurping their power so he could remain in office illegally. They had no illusions about his willingness to undermine any investigations.

They also knew that many of their decisions would someday be made public. That fortified their inclination not to make any bold moves before President Biden’s team took over, in the event that their actions were publicly scrutinized in oversight hearings — especially if Republicans regained control of Congress.

The afternoon that rioters stormed the Capitol, Mr. Garland was finishing a speech on the rule of law. He watched on television as Congress turned into a crime scene that he would soon need to investigate.

Everyone who witnessed the attack “understands, if they did not understand before, the rule of law is not just some lawyer’s turn of phrase,” Mr. Garland said at a ceremony the next day. “Failure to make clear by words and deed that our law is not the instrument of partisan purpose” would imperil the country, he added.

Mr. Garland had been mulling the Justice Department’s role in democracy since the 1970s, when he worked for Attorney General Benjamin R. Civiletti to help codify changes that addressed Watergate-era presidential abuses of power.

In late March, when Mr. Garland took over the department, he embraced the bottom-up tactics already being used by the Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney in Washington: round up and apprehend the assailants, and then perhaps their communications and interviews would yield information that would lead them to more powerful targets.

That approach — summed up by the mantra of investigating “crimes, not people” — sometimes led to tensions between top officials and the federal prosecutors in Washington who run the investigation day to day.

From the start, Mr. Garland and his top deputy, Lisa O. Monaco — a former senior official at the F.B.I. and a detail-oriented former federal prosecutor — set the bar high. But they did not constrain prosecutors from pursuing avenues they saw as supported by evidence: Ms. Monaco urged prosecutors to devote additional resources to investigating the funding of rioters, and potential links to foreign governments, according to a former department official.

The department did not appear to immediately seize on public revelations made in the fall of 2021 that a top Trump lawyer, John Eastman, had been pushing the fake electors scheme.

Yet gradually, mostly hidden from public view, they began to pursue that lead, and others that eventually led them to more directly question Mr. Trump’s involvement.

At the time, Christopher R. Kavanaugh, who had gained extensive domestic terrorism experience as a prosecutor in Charlottesville, Va., after the deadly far-right rally there in 2017, was assigned to manage the sprawling Jan. 6 investigation. The inquiry touched on nearly every state in the country and included hundreds of suspects.

When Mr. Kavanaugh left the office after hundreds of arrests in early October to become the U.S. attorney in Charlottesville, he was replaced by Thomas P. Windom, an aggressive if little-known federal prosecutor from Maryland who had also handled high-profile domestic terrorism cases.

Mr. Windom expanded the electors investigation, according to people with knowledge of the situation. He also kept a close eye on a separate inquiry by the department’s inspector general into Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who had been central to Mr. Trump’s unsuccessful effort in late 2020 to strong-arm the nation’s top prosecutors into supporting his claims of election fraud.

Both of those investigations were already gathering steam as the House committee examining Jan. 6 accelerated its far more public inquiry — one meant to pressure Mr. Garland into moving more quickly to pursue Mr. Trump.

By April, prosecutors had retrieved emails from senior officials in the Trump White House.

In June, the inspector general obtained warrants for the electronic devices belonging to Mr. Clark, Mr. Eastman and Ken Klukowski, another former Justice Department official. A lawyer for Mr. Klukowski did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

And on Wednesday, after news broke that two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence had appeared before a grand jury, Mr. Windom filed a notice with U.S. District Court in New Mexico. It disclosed that a federal agent had obtained a second search warrant earlier this month for the phone of Mr. Eastman — the first time Mr. Windom’s name has appeared on a public case filing in a Trump-related matter.

In the wake of those search warrants, the Justice Department set up a so-called filter team to deal with any potentially privileged information gleaned from those warrants, according to the filing.

Previously, it had only been known that the department’s inspector general had obtained a search warrant for Mr. Eastman for a narrower internal department inquiry that had begun after the Jan. 6 riot.

In his public statements, Mr. Garland has exhibited an awareness of the extraordinary perils his department, and the country at large, face as investigators close in on a once and perhaps future presidential candidate whose popularity is firmly tied to his claim that he is being persecuted by the Washington establishment.

Last week, Mr. Garland sat in his conference room at the Justice Department, flanked by oil portraits of two predecessors he admires — Robert F. Kennedy and Edward H. Levi — to declare that no one, not even Mr. Trump, was “above the law.”

That statement, which he has made in public before, was widely disseminated on social media.

But just before that, Mr. Garland said something that, in some ways, better reflects his cautious approach to an investigation that he has characterized as both the biggest and most important in the department’s 152-year history.

“We have to hold accountable every person who is criminally responsible for trying to overturn a legitimate election, and we must do it in a way filled with integrity and professionalism, the way the Justice Department conducts investigations,” he said.

“Both of these are necessary in order to achieve justice and to protect our democracy.”

Michael S. Schmidt and Alan Feuer contributed reporting.

It was happy hour at a gay bar in Harlem, 4West Lounge, and the after-work crowd had come to drink rum punch and watch “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

But instead, perched on stools, the men talked about the rapidly spreading monkeypox virus: their efforts to snag a coveted vaccine appointment, in a city where demand for the shots far outstrips supply; the slow government rollout of vaccines and treatment; and their confusion about how the disease spreads and how to stay safe.

“It feels like survival of the fittest, with all the pandemic waves and now monkeypox and all these vaccine problems,” said James Ogden, 31, who secured a vaccine appointment after weeks spent navigating the city’s glitchy online sign-up process.

Kelvin Ehigie, 32, the bartender, agreed. When asked about the future, he said: “I do not feel confident.”

For gay and bisexual men in New York, the summer has been consumed with similar conversations as monkeypox cases spike among men who have sex with men.

There is widespread fear of the virus, which primarily spreads through close physical contact and causes excruciating lesions and other symptoms that can lead to hospitalization. There is fear of the isolation and potential stigma of an infection, since those who contract monkeypox must stay home for weeks. And some fear the vaccine itself, in an echo of the hesitancy and mistrust that hindered the coronavirus response.

Many are also furious at the lags and fumbles in the government’s effort to contain the disease, including delayed vaccines and mixed messaging about how the virus spreads and how people should protect themselves.

And some are anxious that monkeypox could be twisted into a political weapon to be used against gay and transgender people, whose rights have come under increasing fire from Republicans in recent months.

Last week, the World Health Organization declared monkeypox a global health emergency, after it spread from parts of Africa where it is endemic to dozens of countries and infected tens of thousands of people around the world over the course of three months. As of Thursday, there were more than 3,000 confirmed cases in the United States, and 1,148 in New York, but experts suggest cases are being undercounted.

Mr. Ehigie received the first shot of the two-dose vaccine regimen after a referral from his therapist, but worried the city might never give him a second.

And, while he said everyone understands how H.I.V. spreads, monkeypox still felt like a mystery to him and many others. “Especially being in New York,” he said, “where everyone is in close contact with everyone else all the time, it’s scary.”

Nearly all of the cases outside of Africa have been in men who have sex with men. In New York, only 1.4 percent of monkeypox patients self-identified as straight, with the rest describing themselves as gay, bisexual or declining to say, according to city data.

The disease is rarely fatal, and no deaths have been reported outside of Africa.

But the combination of government failure and a virus that has so far primarily affected gay and bisexual men has drawn frequent comparisons to the early years of the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic.

Those years were marked by acts of homophobia that remain seared in the minds of many gay Americans. The White House press secretary made jokes about AIDS at a 1982 press briefing. Churches refused to provide funerals for the dead. And President Ronald Reagan did not deliver a public speech on the epidemic until 1987, by which point roughly 23,000 Americans had died of the disease.

Disagreements within the New York City Department of Health about how to communicate the risks of the disease spilled into public view last week. Some epidemiologists have argued that officials should more explicitly advise men who have sex with men to reduce their number of partners, or even consider short-term abstinence. (The director general of the W.H.O. made a similar recommendation this week, including that men should reconsider having “sex with new partners,” according to STAT News.)

A department spokeswoman has said messages advising men to abstain from sex in particular could stigmatize gay and bisexual men and repeat the mistakes of the past.

That history was on many people’s minds (and many people’s banners) at a protest last week in Manhattan that was organized by activist groups including ACT UP, which formed in 1987 in response to government inaction on H.I.V./AIDS.

“I am sad that we have to be here,” said Erik Bottcher, a city councilman whose district includes Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, neighborhoods that have been hit hard by the outbreak.

“We have been forced to do this for so long, we have been forced to fight for our own health care when we got let down by the government,” he said. “Shame on the government for letting us down again.”

Nearby, protesters carried signs comparing President Biden to Mr. Reagan.

Jon Catlin, 29, a graduate student, said he knew several people with monkeypox in New York and many more in Berlin, where he lives part time to do research. He said he studies the evolution of the idea of catastrophe in German thought, and “whose suffering counts as a crisis.”

“Because it is happening to queer people,” Mr. Catlin said, the government has been slow to treat monkeypox as a true crisis, waiting to deploy vaccine doses until cases had grown exponentially.

“AIDS wasn’t treated as a crisis at first either,” he added, before citing a homophobic saying from that time. “The quip about the ’80s is ‘the right people were dying.’”

But as much as the protesters wanted to combat what they described as indifference, many were also concerned that increased attention could bring with it hostility from heterosexual people.

Speaking at the rally in Manhattan, Mordechai Levovitz, the clinical director at Jewish Queer Youth, warned the crowd of about 100 people that the L.G.B.T.Q. community could become a scapegoat in the event of a larger and more widespread monkeypox outbreak.

“You know what will happen,” he shouted into a microphone. “A few months from now, on the cover of every magazine, there will be children with monkeypox on their face, and they will come after us.”

That was a concern shared by some of the men at 4West Lounge.

Chavis Aaron, 33, the bar manager, said the public focus on gay and bisexual men made him uneasy. He knew two gay people with the disease, and understood the statistics on who the outbreak was impacting most, but still thought “this is really everybody’s problem,” he said.

“The situation is still all foggy and crazy,” he added. “We are getting information from Instagram and the news and each one is saying something different.”

Some people are improvising different ways to protect themselves against an illness that can last for a month, but their methods can be dangerous and deeply unscientific.

“Most of my friends are not having sex or they are just being really selective,” said Mr. Ehigie, the bartender. He also knows men who are opposed to vaccines in general “because they think the vaccines have a political agenda or will cause bad side effects.”

Two years of pandemic isolation have made people eager for human connection. There has so far been little appetite in the L.G.B.T.Q. community to cancel events.

Some events have made minor concessions to monkeypox, including Pines Party, a large annual gathering on Fire Island in July, which asked partygoers to get vaccinated and not attend if they feel unwell.

But the outbreak has caused the cancellation of other events in the city, including several regular sex parties that are less high profile but more high risk than dance parties.

At smaller bars like 4West Lounge, things have been quieter lately. Some of that probably had to do with the hot weather, or with a clientele that partied too hard during Pride Month in June, its staff said.

But some of it was also the result of the outbreak, they said. Mr. Aaron said he could think of a few regular customers who stopped coming in as much after the monkeypox case numbers began to climb in July.

“After Covid, a lot of people have PTSD,” he said. “They’d rather not go out than take the risk.”

In Mississippi, which brought the abortion case that ended Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court, Gov. Tate Reeves vowed that the state would now “take every step necessary to support mothers and children.”

Today, however, Mississippi fares poorly on just about any measure of that goal. Its infant and maternal mortality rates are among the worst in the nation.

State leaders have rejected the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, leaving an estimated 43,000 women of reproductive age without health insurance. They have chosen not to extend Medicaid to women for a full year after giving birth. And they have a welfare program that gives some of the country’s least generous cash assistance — a maximum of $260 a month for a poor mother raising two children.

Mississippi embodies a national pattern: States that have banned abortion, or are expected to, have among the nation’s weakest social services for women and children, and have higher rates of death for infants and mothers.

According to a New York Times analysis, the 24 states that have banned abortion (or probably will) fare worse on a broad range of outcomes than states where abortion will probably remain legal, including child and maternal mortality, teenage birthrates and the share of women and children who are uninsured. The states likely to ban abortion either have laws predating Roe that ban abortion; have recently passed stringent restrictions; or have legislatures that are actively considering new bans.

The majority of these states have turned down the yearlong Medicaid postpartum extension. Nine have declined the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, which provides health care to the poor. None offer new parents paid leave from work to care for their newborns.

“The safety net is woefully inadequate,” said Carol Burnett, who works with poor and single mothers as executive director of the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative, a nonprofit. “All of these demonstrated state-level obstacles prevent moms from getting the help they need, the health care they need, the child care they need.”

Many anti-abortion activists have acknowledged that improving the health and livelihoods of mothers and young children is an important goal for their movement: “This has been my lecture to the pro-life movement for the last year,” said Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life. “No woman stands alone in the post-Roe America.”

But in many of these states, skepticism of government aid runs as deep as opposition to abortion. And racism has played a role over generations in weakening safety nets for all poor residents, researchers and historians say.

Studies have repeatedly found that states where the safety net is less generous and harder to access tend to be those with relatively more Black residents. That has further implications for Black women, who have a maternal mortality rate nationally that is nearly three times that of white women.

Social spending is not the only answer to poverty and poor public health, and some in the anti-abortion movement stress that they want to help women and children — just not with more government spending. But there is a strong link between state policy choices and outcomes for mothers and children, researchers have found.

Perhaps the clearest example is health insurance. Numerous studies have tied it to improved health and financial security for poor Americans. Since 2014, states have had the option to expand their Medicaid programs to cover nearly all poor adults, with the federal government paying 90 percent or more of the cost. But nine of the states planning to ban abortion have not expanded it, citing opposition to Obamacare, which Republicans have long vowed to repeal; a disinclination to offer health benefits to poor Americans who do not work; or concerns about the 10 percent of the bill left to state governments to finance.

“Closing the Medicaid gap is the first and best option for women’s health care,” said Allison Orris, a senior fellow focused on health policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Since 2021, states have also had the choice to expand Medicaid to cover women for a full year after a birth instead of two months. Just 16 states have declined to do so or opted for a shorter period — all but three of them are also banning or seeking to ban abortion.

Women who are poor and pregnant are eligible for Medicaid across the country, and the program pays for four in 10 births nationwide. But health experts say it also matters that women are covered for an extended period after birth, and for the years leading up to pregnancy. Conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease and substance abuse can lead to pregnancy complications and poor infant health. Research suggests that Medicaid expansion can reduce maternal mortality. Medicaid also pays for contraception.

Paid family leave and subsidized child care are another example. None of the states that have banned abortion (or are likely to) guarantee parents paid leave from work to care for and bond with their newborns. Just 11 states and the District of Columbia do. Paid leave has been shown to benefit infants’ health and mothers’ physical and mental health as well as their economic prospects.

In most states, there is no guaranteed child care for children until they enter kindergarten at age 5. Subsidies available to low-income families cover a small segment of eligible children, ranging from less than 4 percent in Arkansas (which now bans abortion) to more than 17 percent in Vermont (which passed abortion rights legislation).

In many states, the subsidies also present a conundrum: Parents are required to work to get them, yet they can’t find or start work without child care. Some states add other obstacles. Mississippi requires single mothers to file for child support from fathers before they can receive subsidies. Also, a job paying minimum wage — which is not higher than the federal floor of $7.25 in 20 states — doesn’t necessarily pay enough to cover even subsidized care.

Support for families is different in some states once children are 3 or 4. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia offer or have committed to offering universal preschool. Unlike with other family benefits, anti-abortion states are roughly as likely as other states to offer public preschool. Six of those 13 states ban abortion or probably will.

“This is consistent with a view that education is a public responsibility,” said Steven Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers, while other safety-net programs “fall outside the accepted sphere of public responsibility in the conservative states.”

Poorer states may have fewer resources to fund benefits like parental leave, or state supplements to the federal earned-income tax credit. But what they choose to do with federal grants can be revealing, said Zachary Parolin, a professor of social policy at Bocconi University in Milan who has studied how states use the broad discretion given to them by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families welfare program.

“You can’t say Alabama gives very little cash assistance for low-income families with children because it can’t afford” the program, Mr. Parolin said. “It has a TANF program, and it’s primarily funded by the federal government.”

But in 2020, Alabama spent only about 8 percent of its welfare funds on direct cash assistance to families. Mississippi spent 5 percent. Instead, states often spend these grants on a wide range of other programs like pro-marriage advertising campaigns and abstinence-only sex education (in 2020, a state auditor in Mississippi found that the state misspent millions of federal welfare dollars, including on speeches that were never delivered by the former quarterback Brett Favre).

Mr. Parolin’s research has shown that states with larger Black population shares tend to spend the least on cash assistance, widening the poverty gap in America between Black and white children. The Times analysis similarly found that states likely to ban abortion devote a smaller share of welfare funds to basic assistance.

States with less generous safety-net programs also frequently use complex rules and paperwork to further limit access to benefits, said Sarah Bruch, a professor of social policy and sociology at the University of Delaware. States could help women and families, she said, not just by investing more in the safety net, but also by making it easier to find and use.

Angela Rachidi, a senior fellow studying poverty and safety-net programs at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said the government has some role to play, but not alone: “We have a broader responsibility as a society — employers, churches, community organizations — to ensure moms feel they can bring those kids into the world.”

Evidence so far suggests that those organizations will struggle to meet the growing need.

After the Supreme Court decision, other governors banning abortion trumpeted their commitment to pregnant women and children. “Being pro-life entails more than being ‘pro-birth,’” wrote J. Kevin Stitt, the governor of Oklahoma, in an executive order signed July 11.

Oklahoma ranks among the bottom 10 states on measures of child poverty, infant mortality and the share of women of reproductive age without health insurance.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement that the state has “prioritized supporting women’s health care and expectant mothers in need.”

He pointed to Texas’ decision to offer mothers six months of postpartum Medicaid coverage. But the state declined the full year of coverage offered by the federal government. Texas has also used techniques to purge children from Medicaid coverage for paperwork lapses. It has a higher rate of uninsured children and women of reproductive age than any other state.

In its legislation restricting abortion, Texas set aside $100 million over two years for a program that connects women with counseling, education and supplies, called Alternatives to Abortion. That funding pales in comparison with another benefit, which Texas has declined — the estimated $6 billion in federal funds each year that it’s losing by choosing not to expand Medicaid.

Josh Katz contributed reporting.

Summary table:

Sources: Poverty data (2019) from the American Community Survey; uninsurance data (2019) from the American Community Survey; low-birthweight-babies data (2019) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; teen births data (2019) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; maternal mortality data (2018-20) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; infant mortality data (2018-19) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Medicaid expansion data (2022) from the Kaiser Family Foundation; paid leave data (2022) from the National Partnership for Women and Families; prekindergarten data (2022) from the National Institute for Early Education Research; minimum wage data (2022) from the Department of Labor.

Outcomes table: Maternal mortality data (2018-20) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; infant mortality data (2018-2019) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; poverty data from the American Community Survey (2019); uninsurance data from the American Community Survey (2019).

Policies table: Medicaid expansion data (2022) from the Kaiser Family Foundation; paid leave data (2022) from the National Partnership for Women and Families; prekindergarten data (2022) from the National Institute for Early Education Research; minimum wage data (2022) from the Department of Labor.

By the time the U.S. Justice Department announced last month that it would investigate the New York Police Department’s handling of sex crimes, rape survivors and victim advocates had spent years pushing city and state officials to act.

In public testimony and private meetings with the Police Department, City Hall and the attorney general’s office, they detailed encounters with investigators in which their experiences were dismissed and their cases fumbled. They gave interviews to city investigators who blamed police leaders in a pivotal report. Some filed a federal lawsuit accusing the police of gender bias. Even Gloria Steinem, the feminist leader, joined a protest at City Hall.

Despite their efforts, no one with power over the department compelled it to fix longstanding problems in the unit responsible for investigating sex crimes, the Special Victims Division. Officials failed to institute uniform policies for handling cases or stabilize the leadership in the unit after a period of turnover.

And they failed to quell the anger of survivors who then turned to the Department of Justice, writing about their grievances and prompting federal prosecutors to take the rare step of investigating the police.

Now, the Police Department could be forced to adopt changes supervised by a federal monitor, an expensive and time-consuming practice that already governs its political surveillance and stop-and-frisk practices.

“We tried all these avenues and we got nowhere,” said Mary Haviland, former executive director of the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault and the author of a 12-page letter that advocates sent to the Justice Department last July. “We came to the point of feeling that D.O.J. was our only help.”

The local inertia shows how efforts to hold law enforcement accountable in America’s largest city have stalled since the #MeToo movement prompted the nation to grapple with the pervasiveness of sexual assault. The cases that defined #MeToo largely involved white women leveling accusations against powerful men in prominent industries like film and politics. But in New York, the vast majority of the 8,600 sex crimes reported each year involve Black and Hispanic victims who know their assailants in some way.

The Police Department’s response to those assaults has been “negligent and sexist,” violating the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, 17 survivors and two of their mothers said in a letter to the Justice Department. In her own letter, Gina Tron, 39, described how a stranger lured her to his car after a book club meeting 12 years ago and drove her to his Sunset Park house, where he attacked her. Ms. Tron said a Special Victims detective told her she was wasting his time with an “iffy rape case.”

“The N.Y.P.D. and other officials say what they need to say, what they think that people want to hear, to make it look like they’re doing something,” she said in an interview. “Nothing has changed since I was attacked in 2010.”

Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, is now responsible for delivering change, a test of his will and ability to overcome years of Police Department resistance. And a change that he promised to take seriously.

“We welcome this review,” said Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor, adding that the administration “will cooperate fully in this investigation, and will continue to take all steps necessary to provide justice to victims of sexual assault and fix the problems that have been more than a decade in the making.”

A Troubled Unit

The Special Victims Division was created in 2003 to investigate sex offenses and child abuse as well as monitor sex offenders. But its staffing has stagnated for years.

Victims described how their cases were assigned to officers who did not seem to know how to investigate them or did not care to make the effort, if they had time at all. Some investigators failed to return to crime scenes, collect surveillance video or speak to witnesses. Victims said investigators pressured them to sign forms that prematurely closed cases. Some victims even footed the bill for forensic testing and medical procedures.

Errors by investigators ruined cases, the victims said, an assertion supported by an evaluation conducted last year at the Police Department’s request. Researchers from the firm RTI International found that more than half of sexual assault cases were closed for lack of evidence, despite suspects having been identified in more than 80 percent of reports.

In most cases, the assailant was someone like a boyfriend, co-worker, neighbor or relative. For Meghan G., it was a man she had just met at a bodega who raped her in a Bushwick park in October 2015. (The Times does not identify sex crime victims without their consent, and Meghan, 27, agreed to use part of her name.)

In an interview, she said her memory of that night was hazy because she had been drinking. Case files she obtained suggest that no one made much of an effort to help shed more light on what happened.

A friend who sent Meghan home in a cab was not interviewed, nor was the driver. Surveillance video was not collected. Witnesses who might have heard her screams were not sought.

Instead, Special Victims detectives insisted that Meghan call the perpetrator to see if he would incriminate himself.

The technique, known as a controlled phone call, can be a crucial tool in cases of acquaintance rape, the most common kind, where the central question is not whether sex occurred, but if it was consensual. In practice, however, investigators often do not have experience or time to properly prepare the victim.

Meghan refused the call, and the police closed her case.

A month later, investigators reopened it after a DNA test on the underwear she wore when she was raped. When they contacted her in January, she was 11 weeks pregnant by her rapist and had decided to get an abortion. Moments before her operation, the police asked her to postpone so that they could collect the fetus’s DNA. She reasoned that it would not prove she was raped, and went through with the abortion.

The case was closed again. The police described her in the file as “uncooperative.”

She shared her experience publicly last fall at a City Council hearing, where women who had reported attacks as recently as 2020 recounted similar experiences. Many later spoke to federal prosecutors.

Investigators “continue to act the same with the same results, and they leave behind a trail of victims,” Meghan said in an interview.

The Police Department declined an interview request about the unit’s performance.

“The N.Y.P.D. has made significant improvements to ensure that its investigators provide the best possible service to survivors of sexual assault,” the department’s press office said in a written statement.

A Road Map

The problems burst into public view in 2018, when the inspector general for the Police Department, an office within the city’s investigations agency, released a blistering report blaming police leaders for failing to act on years of warnings that the unit was understaffed and overwhelmed.

Survivors now saw their cases in the context of systemic failures. Two survivors — one who said she was raped by a boyfriend after declining sex and another who reported being gang-raped by a Lyft driver and two other men — cited the findings in a lawsuit accusing the police of gender bias.

The report called on the Police Department to double the size of the sex crimes squads by hiring more experienced investigators, training them better and creating greater promotion opportunities to attract seasoned detectives. The previous year, the watchdog reported, the division had 67 sex crimes investigators with 5,661 cases — a load 66 percent higher than in 2009, and 20 times higher than that of homicide detectives.

Police increased the number of investigators to 121. But the overall level of experience dropped as officials assigned unseasoned officers, and training has been inconsistent, city investigators and RTI researchers have said in separate reports.

The division has also lacked steady leadership. At least 10 supervisors have retired or transferred in the past four years, including two disciplined this year in connection with an internal affairs investigation of absenteeism and lost rape kits. Three commanders have led the division since 2018.

After the inspector general’s report, the City Council quickly passed legislation requiring the department to provide information about staffing and caseloads at the Special Victims Division, as well as implement training for all officers responding to sex crimes.

Helen Rosenthal, the council member who led the push for the changes, joined advocates and survivors in quarterly meetings with the police commissioner before the pandemic. Officials offered assurances, but she became frustrated with the lack of progress.

“We felt that we were being ‘yes ma’amed,’” she said.

She tried to meet with Mayor Bill de Blasio, but managed only to grab him for a minute after an event in 2020, where she asked him to approve upgrades to spaces where victims meet investigators.

“What I asked him to do was the lowest, lowest-hanging pieces of fruit,” she said. “He did that. He did nothing else.”

Stymied Oversight

Outside the Police Department itself, no one had the power to do more than the mayor, who appoints the commissioner and has ultimate say over the department’s priorities. But Mr. de Blasio, critics say, made little effort.

When the inspector general’s report was released, Mr. de Blasio echoed police officials in questioning its credibility. Months later, he fired the city’s top investigations official, Mark Peters, over an unrelated matter. Mr. Peters, in a letter to the City Council, accused police officials of obstructing the report by withholding documents and directing witnesses not to appear for interviews.

Michael G. Osgood, who was removed as the commander of the Special Victims Division after the audit, said in a wrongful-termination lawsuit that department lawyers instructed him to stonewall city investigators. Instead, he provided them with dozens of memos detailing the division’s problems and sat for interviews under oath — actions that he said led to his ouster.

The division’s performance seemed to get worse. Rape clearance rates, which measure how often cases are solved by arrest or are closed because of circumstances beyond investigators’ control, fell from about 47 percent in the last quarter of 2017 to 31 percent over the same period last year.

Mr. de Blasio did not grant an interview request from The Times. In a statement emailed by a spokesman on July 14, he said the federal investigation “must get to the truth, and anyone who didn’t do their jobs should be held fully accountable.”

But Donovan Richards, a former chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, said Mr. de Blasio’s unquestioning support emboldened the department to resist efforts to fix its response to sexual assault.

“It’s very hard to make transformational change when you have a Police Department that the mayor backed,” said Mr. Richards, now the Queens borough president. “Everything’s a fight.”

In 2018, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo authorized the attorney general to investigate how the Police Department and the Manhattan district attorney’s office handled sexual assault complaints. The office of Attorney General Letitia James, elected that year, told The Times on July 11 that the probe continues.

Opportunity Arises

Rape victims began contacting the Department of Justice after President Biden’s administration opened investigations into police practices in other cities.

A broad coalition of survivors, City Council members and victim-advocacy groups wrote letters asking federal prosecutors to examine whether the failure to fix the Special Victims Division amounted to gender bias.

Federal prosecutors responded within days of receiving the main letter from victims and their mothers, who were recruited by the Women’s Equal Justice Project, a nonprofit that helps survivors navigate the criminal justice system. They conducted more than a dozen interviews last fall.

Ms. Tron spoke to them in November. She said she had been nervous about talking to law enforcement officials again.

“It was cartoonish how bad the Special Victims Division treated me,” she said. By contrast, she said, the federal interview was “healing.”

Prosecutors laid out their investigation for survivors and advocates during a virtual meeting on July 8. They said that if they found violations and the city refused to undertake reforms, the Justice Department could sue.

Mr. Adams and Police Commissioner Keechant L. Sewell have pledged their full cooperation. In a public service announcement this year, the mayor labeled sexual violence a “crisis.”

Before the Justice Department stepped in, Mr. Adams did not publicly discuss the problems in the Special Victims Division.Mr. Levy, the mayor’s spokesman, said Mr. Adams had several conversations with officials in his administration about the division and replaced its commander.

Survivors and advocates say they hope Mr. Adams takes advantage of the opportunity the Justice Department investigation affords.

After all, Ms. Tron said, his signature issue is public safety.

When three of the most prestigious Shakespeare companies in the world staged “Richard III” this summer, each took a different approach to casting its scheming title character in ways that illuminate the fraught debate over which actors should play which roles.

At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, Richard was played by the actor Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, which means he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb. The company said it was the first time it had cast a disabled actor to play the character, who describes himself in the opening scene as “deformed.” The production’s director, Gregory Doran, who was until recently the Royal Shakespeare’s artistic director, told The Times of London earlier this year that having actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III” would “probably not be acceptable” these days.

The Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, took a different tack: It cast Colm Feore, who is not disabled, to play a Richard who has a deformed spine but who is not a hunchback. And in New York City, the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park went in yet another direction, casting Danai Gurira, a Black woman who does not have a disability, as the duke who schemes and kills his way to the throne of England.

Their varying approaches came at a moment when an intense rethinking of the cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic license have led to impassioned debates, and battles, over casting.

It has been decades since major theaters have had white actors play Othello in blackface, and, after years of criticism, performances by white actors playing caricatured Asian roles are growing rarer in theater and film, and are being rethought in opera and ballet.

Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine that today he would, rightly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl”) or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic.)

While many celebrate the move away from old, sometimes stereotyped portrayals and the new opportunities belatedly being given to actors from a diverse array of backgrounds, others worry that the current insistence on literalism and authenticity can be too constraining. Acting, after all, is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.

“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said the Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” though Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. “Once we impose any kind of control over it, it’s no longer free.”

And while the recent insistence on more authentic casting promises greater diversity in some respects, it threatens less in others — coming as many women and actors of color are getting more opportunities to play some of the greatest, meatiest roles in the repertory, regardless of whatever race or gender or background the playwrights may have initially envisioned.

Sometimes such casting is considered “colorblind,” in which case audiences are asked to look beyond an actor’s race or ethnicity, or other features. But in recent years the trend has been toward “color-conscious” casting, in which an actor’s race, ethnicity or identity becomes part of the production, and a feature of the character being portrayed.

Some of the varied approaches were underscored by this summer’s productions of “Richard III,” and the different directions each theater took when choosing an actor to play Richard.

Richard tells the audience in the opening scene that he is:

Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them

The remark by Mr. Doran, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company production, that it would “probably not be acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play Richard caused a stir in theater circles.

Not only is Mr. Doran a renowned Shakespearean, but his husband, Antony Sher, who died last year, was one of the most memorable Richards of recent decades, using crutches in an acclaimed 1984 production and writing a book about his portrayal.

Mr. Doran, whose production in Stratford-upon-Avon was critically lauded, later clarified his thinking about its casting, explaining that while any actor might be a successful Richard, he believed the role should be reserved for disabled actors until they “have the opportunities across the board now more widely afforded to other actors.”

The new staging in Stratford, Ontario, featuring Mr. Feore, listed a “disability consultant” in its credits. His depiction was inspired by the discovery of Richard’s bones nearly a decade ago — the skeleton suggested a form of scoliosis — and rested on the idea that his physique “was less of a medical disability than a social and cultural one,” the company’s spokeswoman, Ann Swerdfager, said in an email. The critic Karen Fricker wrote in The Toronto Star: “As much as I admired Feore’s performance, it did lead me to wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor making a star turn as a disabled character on the Stratford stage, given crucial conversations currently happening around deaf and disability performance.”

And in New York, Ms. Gurira, who has appeared in “Black Panther” and the television series “The Walking Dead,” tried to explore the underlying reasons for Richard’s behavior. “There is a psychological reason for what he becomes,” she said in an interview. “He’s looking at the rules in front of him, and he feels he’s most capable, but the rules disallow him from manifesting his full capability.”

The production’s director, Robert O’Hara, said that they made Richard’s difference key to the interpretation. “Richard’s otherness becomes an entire reason for his behavior,” he said in an interview. “He feels like now he has to play a part people projected onto him.”

The rest of the cast for the production, which ended its run earlier this month, was notably diverse, and included several actors with disabilities in roles that are not usually cast that way. Ali Stroker, a Tony-winning actress who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne; Monique Holt, who is Deaf, played Richard’s mother, the two typically communicating onstage via American Sign Language.

“I wanted to open up the conversation from ‘Why isn’t Richard being played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role considered able to be played by a disabled actor?’” Mr. O’Hara said.

Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University and a Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater who consulted on its “Richard III,” argued that the growing embrace of color-conscious casting reflected contemporary understandings of how different attributes inflect both actors’ identities and audiences’ perceptions.

“All of our bodies carry meaning on stage, whether or not we want to acknowledge that. And that’s going to affect storytelling,” Ms. Thompson said.

She pointed to an example from another play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of Hamlet’s, whom other characters often confuse for each other. “If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are played by Black actors and the Hamlet family is all-white,” she said, “the inability to distinguish carries a whole set of different meanings.”

Many productions upend traditional casting to interrogate classics. Women played every role in a trilogy of acclaimed Shakespeare productions directed by Phyllida Lloyd at Donmar Warehouse in London, seen in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse. A “Julius Caesar” directed by Mr. Doran reset the scene from ancient Rome to modern Africa. Even Hollywood has reimagined some blockbusters, as with the gender-swapped 2016 “Ghostbusters.”

But as there is a push for greater casting freedoms in some areas, there is an argument for more literalism in others, especially from actors with certain backgrounds who lack opportunities.

Some disabled actors are upset when they see Richard III, one of the juiciest disabled characters in the canon, go to someone else. “We all want a level playing field where everybody can play everybody,” said Mat Fraser, an English actor who is disabled and has played Richard, “but my entire career I’ve not been allowed to play hardly anybody.”

In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said that he hoped to be “the last cisgender male to play a transgender female.” Now, with a “Transparent” stage musical being created in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, vowed in an interview: “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”

The conversation on casting has been evolving in recent years.

“It used to be that part of the measurement of greatness was your ability to transform yourself,” said Isaac Butler, the author of “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” a new history of Method acting. “Is versatility still the hallmark of good acting? And how do you approach it if there are certain identity lines you cannot cross? And which are those identity lines?”

Gregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, has played roles that are not traditionally portrayed as disabled, as he did playing two monarchs in “Richard III” in New York, and sometimes plays characters written as having cerebral palsy, as he will this fall in a Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cost of Living.”

“I spent years trying to pretend my disability didn’t exist in life and onstage, which is ridiculous, because it does,” Mr. Mozgala said.

“Every character I ever play is going to have cerebral palsy — there’s nothing I can do about that,” he added. “I have to bring my full humanity to every character I play.”

Some still hold out hope for a day when identity will recede in the conversation.

“A hundred years from now, do I hope white actors could play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director. “Sure, because it would mean racism wasn’t the explosive issue it is now.”

KYIV — When Ihor Sumliennyi, a young environmental activist, arrived at the site of a recent missile strike, the rubble had barely stopped smoking.

Police officers guarded the street. People who had lived in the smashed apartment building stared in disbelief, some making the sign of the cross next to him. He started poking around.

And then, bam! His eyes lit up. Right in front of him, lying near the sidewalk, was exactly what he was looking for: a mangled chunk of shrapnel, a piece of the actual Russian cruise missile that had slammed into the building.

He scooped it up, pricking himself in the process on the jagged steel edges, stuffed it in his backpack and briskly walked the hour home — “I didn’t want the police to stop me and think I was a terrorist.”

That ugly chunk of steel has now become the star of his “war trophies” collection, which spans everything from ammunition tins and a used rocket-propelled grenade shaft to a pair of black Russian boots he found in the battered city of Bucha.

“Those have really bad energy,” he said.

It might seem eccentric, even macabre, to collect war debris like this. But Mr. Sumliennyi isn’t the only one. Across Ukraine, many civilians and soldiers are foraging for shrapnel pieces, mortar fins, spent bullet casings and bits of bombs.

Ukrainian artists are weaving them into their work. Auction houses are moving discarded pieces of weapons and other battlefield finds, raising thousands of dollars for Ukrainian soldiers. One woman is even making sculptures from the uniforms of dead Russians.

It clearly speaks to something bigger. So many Ukrainians want to be on the front lines — or to somehow feel connected to the cause even if they are far from the fighting or don’t see themselves as cut out for combat. With patriotism cresting and their country’s existence at stake, they are seeking out something tangible they can hold in their hands that represents this enormous, overwhelming moment. They crave their own little piece of history.

“Each piece has a story,” said Serhii Petrov, a well-known artist working in Lviv. He’s now incorporating spent bullet cartridges into the masks he makes.

As he handled one, he mused, “Maybe it was someone’s last bullet.”

At a charity auction in Lviv on Sunday, Valentyn Lapotkov, a computer programmer, paid more than $500 for an empty missile tube that had been used, the auctioneers said, to blow up a Russian armored personnel carrier. He said that when he touched it he felt “close to our heroes.”

Memorializing the war, even when it’s likely far from over, is a way to show solidarity with the soldiers and those who have suffered. One of Kyiv’s biggest museums recently staged an exhibition of war artifacts collected since the Russians invaded in February. The rooms are full of gas masks, missile tubes and charred debris. The message is clear: See, this is what real war really looks like.

On a personal level, Mr. Sumliennyi is doing something similar. Thirty-one years old, he’s an auditor by training but a climate justice activist by heart. From Kyiv, he works with Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement, organizing social media campaigns against fossil fuels, and during the hundreds of video calls he makes, he shows off his war trophies. He also sends some out of the country with female activists to “go on tour” (he can’t travel himself, because of Ukraine’s ban on military-age men leaving the country).

“It’s very interesting,” explained Mr. Sumliennyi, who is tall and lean and lives in a tiny apartment with his mother. “You don’t feel the war through television or the news. But if you show people these pieces, they feel it.”

That’s exactly what one young Polish woman said after Mr. Sumliennyi leaned out of the frame during a video call and returned with his trophies.

“It was mind-blowing,” said the woman, Dominika Lasota, a climate justice activist from Warsaw. “I automatically started to laugh at it, in shock, but then realized how dystopian this moment was.”

“Ihor seemed to be all chill about it,” she added of Mr. Sumliennyi. “He actually showed that piece of the bomb with pride — he was smiling.”

It’s a coping mechanism, he explained. “Without black humor, we can’t live in the war,” he said. “It’s a protection reaction for the organism.”

Still, he and his friends handle the war objects carefully, almost as solemnly as soldiers would fold a flag for a fallen comrade.

“When I touch this,” he said of the missile piece he recovered in April, “I feel really bad energy in my fingers.”

He said he had spoken to weapons experts and determined the five-pound chunk was part of the tail of a Russian Kalibr cruise missile.

In Lviv, Tetiana Okhten helps run the UAID foundation, a volunteer network that, among the many things it’s doing, has sold more than 15 pieces of war debris, including several missile and rocket tubes used by the Ukrainian military that are big hits. All told, the war debris has netted more than $4,000, which the foundation spends on protective vests, medicine and other supplies for Ukrainian troops.

“We are taking things used to kill people to now save lives,” she said.

She said that one young Ukrainian soldier fighting in the Donbas region has been a huge help in finding things from the front lines. He has jumped out of trenches even as Russian shells were exploding around him and fellow soldiers were yelling at him to take cover. But, she said, he’s close to a bunch of volunteers and yells back, “I have to go. My friends need this stuff!”

In frontline areas, some shellshocked residents were surprised to learn that pieces of war debris were becoming collectors’ items.

“That’s crazy,” said Vova Hurzhyi, who lives in a Donbas town that the Russians keep attacking. “This stuff is coming here to kill you.”

Still, Mr. Sumliennyi keeps hunting. A few weeks ago, he and some environmentalist friends drove to Bucha, a Kyiv suburb where Russian troops slaughtered hundreds of civilians, to take photos for a social media campaign about the connection between fossil fuels and Russia’s war machine.

Just by chance, they stumbled into a backyard where they found a Russian military jacket and the pair of black boots (size 10). They remain among his prized items.

“We didn’t go to Bucha looking for this,” he said. “We just got lucky.”

Diego Ibarra Sanchez contributed reporting from Lviv and Oleksandra Mykolyshyn from Kyiv.

WASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a key centrist Democrat, announced on Wednesday that he had agreed to include hundreds of billions of dollars for climate and energy programs and tax increases in a package to subsidize health care and lower the cost of prescription drugs, less than two weeks after abruptly upending hopes for such an agreement this summer.

The package would set aside $369 billion for climate and energy proposals, the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress, and raise an estimated $451 billion in new tax revenue over a decade, while cutting federal spending on prescription drugs by $288 billion, according to a summary circulated Wednesday evening.

The product of a deal announced by Mr. Manchin and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, it would reduce the federal deficit by about $300 billion, while seeking to push down the cost of health care, prescription medicines and electricity.

The plan falls far short of the ambitious domestic policy and tax package President Biden proposed last year, but Democrats, looking toward midterm elections that are likely to be shaped by voters’ concerns about soaring costs, pitched it as a targeted attack on the rapid price increases that have socked American consumers in the wallet this year, with inflation running at a 40-year high.

The announcement suggested that Democrats could move in the coming days to salvage a major piece of their domestic agenda, which only weeks ago appeared doomed given Mr. Manchin’s refusal to quickly sign on. Top Democrats released legislation on Wednesday evening, aiming for votes as early as next week.

“This is the action the American people have been waiting for,” Mr. Biden said in a statement, calling on both chambers to quickly pass the measure. “This addresses the problems of today — high health care costs and overall inflation — as well as investments in our energy security for the future.”

It was not clear what had changed Mr. Manchin’s mind since he said not even two weeks ago that he could not support such a package until he saw inflation numbers for July, which are not scheduled to be issued for two more weeks. But quiet negotiations had resumed between Mr. Manchin, Mr. Schumer and their staffs in recent days, according to a person familiar with the talks.

The abrupt announcement came only hours after passage of a huge industrial policy bill aimed at bolstering American competitiveness with China that Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, had said he would never support as long as Democrats continued their efforts to push through their marquee domestic policy bill over G.O.P. opposition. But that legislation still needs to clear the House, and Republican leaders in that chamber said they would instruct their ranks to oppose it after news of the deal.

With the Senate divided 50 to 50 and Republicans uniformly opposed, Democrats need unanimous support within their party and the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris to pass the plan under special rules that shield certain budget bills from a filibuster. Mr. Manchin’s resistance has been the primary obstacle to doing so all along, handing him effective veto power over its contents — and the final say over whether any measure could pass the Senate.

His embrace of the plan did not guarantee it would move forward. Several senators declined to comment on the deal upon hearing of it on Wednesday evening until they learned more about it. That included Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat who has been another holdout on her party’s domestic policy measure. (A spokeswoman said the senator needed to review the legislation.)

But by the evening, several key liberal Democrats were rallying behind the plan.

“By a wide margin, this legislation will be the greatest pro-climate legislation that has ever been passed by Congress,” Mr. Schumer declared in a separate statement, thanking Mr. Manchin for “his willingness to engage and his commitment to reaching an agreement.”

The tax increases included in the agreement would fall largely on multinational corporations and private equity firms, and would be accompanied by a crackdown on high-earning individuals and businesses that seek to avoid paying the taxes they owe.

One possible clue to Mr. Manchin’s change of heart came in a line of his joint announcement with Mr. Schumer that they had secured a commitment from both Mr. Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California that Congress would approve a separate measure to address the permitting of energy infrastructure, potentially including natural gas pipelines, before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

That could ease the way for a project in which Mr. Manchin has taken a personal interest, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would transport Appalachian shale gas from West Virginia to Virginia.

Democrats said the Senate could take up the legislation by next week, although a number of parliamentary and procedural hurdles remain. It must adhere to strict budgetary rules since Democrats plan to move it under the arcane budget process known as reconciliation that allows certain fiscal measure to pass with only a simple majority.

The legislation “will make a historic down payment on deficit reduction to fight inflation, invest in domestic energy production and manufacturing, and reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030,” Mr. Manchin and Mr. Schumer said in their joint statement. The two senators added that “we urge every member of the U.S. Senate to support this important legislation.”

Republicans balked at the announcement, reiterating their opposition to the Democrats’ plan.

“Democrats have already crushed American families with historic inflation,” Mr. McConnell said on Twitter. “Now they want to pile on giant tax hikes that will hammer workers and kill many thousands of American jobs. First they killed your family’s budget. Now they want to kill your job too.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, expressed disbelief that Mr. Manchin “is agreeing to a massive tax increase in the name of climate change when our economy is in a recession.”

“I hope that common sense will eventually win the day,” he added. “What I am hearing about the terms of this latest reconciliation deal make no sense.”

But in his own separate statement, Mr. Manchin cheered the agreement as good for the economy, the climate and people’s pocketbooks.

“Rather than risking more inflation with trillions in new spending, this bill will cut the inflation taxes Americans are paying, lower the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs, and ensure our country invests in the energy security and climate change solutions we need to remain a global superpower through innovation rather than elimination,” Mr. Manchin said.

He noted the bill is called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, making a clear distinction between it and the ambitious multitrillion-dollar domestic policy plan Mr. Biden proposed and Democrats in Congress spent most of last year toiling to pass.

“Build Back Better is dead, and instead we have the opportunity to make our country stronger by bringing Americans together,” he said.

Mr. Manchin also pre-emptively swatted away a lingering demand from some House Democrats to lift the cap on the state and local tax deduction as part of the final package, adding “our tax code should not favor red state or blue state elites with loopholes like SALT.”

The agreement falls far short of Mr. Biden’s initial proposals to vastly expand social safety net programs and pay for them by taxing corporations and high earners. But it is substantially larger than a package aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drugs and extending expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies that Democrats had reluctantly concluded was the most they could hope to pass this summer after Mr. Manchin privately told party leaders this month that he would not support any climate or tax proposals in the short term.

The two health care pieces would allow Medicare to directly regulate the price of prescription drugs for the first time beginning in 2023. It would also extend through 2025 an expansion of premium subsidies that Democrats first pushed through in 2021 as part of their $1.9 trillion pandemic aid bill, preventing a lapse at the end of the year.

The plan would raise most of its new tax revenue, an estimated $313 billion, by imposing a minimum tax on the so-called book income of large corporations, like Amazon and FedEx, that currently use tax credits and other maneuvers to reduce their tax rates below the 21 percent corporate income tax rate in the United States.

It would raise another $14 billion by reducing a preferential tax treatment for income earned by venture capitalists and private equity firms, which has long been a goal of Democrats.

It invests $30 billion in production tax credits for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and critical minerals processing; $10 billion in tax credits to build clean technology manufacturing facilities; and $500 million to be used through the Defense Production Act for heat pumps and critical minerals processing.

The deal also includes a means-tested $7,500 tax credit to make new electric vehicles more affordable, and a $4,000 tax credit for used electric vehicles, according to a summary of the package. Both credits will be offered only to lower and middle-income consumers.

The measure also includes a methane fee that will start in 2025.

Also included will be $60 billion to address the disproportionate burden of pollution on low-income communities and communities of color, $27 billion for a “green bank” aimed at delivering financial support to clean energy projects and $20 billion for programs that can cut emissions in the agriculture sector.

The announcement of the deal stunned environmental advocates.

“I honestly don’t know what to say,” said Samuel Ricketts, co-founder and senior adviser of Evergreen Action, an environmental group. “We’re going to need to see the details, obviously, but people have been hard at work to salvage a deal. This has the opportunity to be an enormous breakthrough for climate progress.”

Mr. Manchin said the plan includes a “realistic energy and climate policy” that will “allow us to decarbonize while ensuring American energy is affordable, reliable, clean and secure.”

“As the superpower of the world, it is vital we not undermine our superpower status by removing dependable and affordable fossil fuel energy before new technologies are ready to reliably carry the load,” Mr. Manchin said in a statement, which highlighted investments in fossil fuel energy as well as renewable power.

Mr. Biden has vowed to cut U.S. emissions roughly 50 percent by the end of this decade, a target scientists say is critical to helping keep the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the danger of catastrophic heat waves, fires and floods rises significantly.

If the package is enacted, it could get the United States close to Mr. Biden’s goal, according to a summary of the deal put out by Democrats.

Catie Edmondson and Stephanie Lai contributed reporting.

For years, Facebook’s sales grew without fail and kept on growing, defying the laws of gravity even as the company was battered by scandals over privacy and misinformation.

Not anymore.

On Wednesday, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, reported a 1 percent decline in quarterly revenue from the previous year. It was the first time the social media giant’s revenue had fallen since it went public a decade ago, as it confronts increased regulatory scrutiny and a turbulent economy while trying to build a new frontier of digital communication.

Meta’s revenue for the second quarter was $28.82 billion, down from $29.07 billion a year earlier. Profit was $6.69 billion, down 36 percent from a year earlier. Wall Street analysts had predicted profits of $7.04 billion on revenue of $28.9 billion, according to data compiled by FactSet.

The results compounded what was a dismal day for Meta, which was also sued on Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission over a deal to buy a virtual reality company called Within. The lawsuit directly strikes at the ambitions of Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, who has been spending billions of dollars to create an immersive world of social interaction in the “metaverse,” which is a combination of virtual and augmented realities that will be bound by commerce and online relationships.

Mr. Zuckerberg has told investors, technologists and others that his vision for the metaverse will take years to come to fruition and that the endeavor will be costly. Some investors are skeptical that the effort will pay off in the long term.

Still, there were bright spots in Meta’s earnings report. The company said its daily active people increased to 2.88 billion, up 4 percent from a year earlier. That exceeded analysts’ expectations that the company was losing visitors. The Facebook app also saw user growth within the United States, an area that some believed was saturated.

Mr. Zuckerberg said that he was encouraged by other areas of Meta’s business that are driving growth and engagement, like the Reels video product, a feature within Instagram that is similar to TikTok’s video offering. Investments in artificial intelligence recommendation algorithms had also driven more people to use the service and for longer periods, the company said.

“It was good to see positive trajectory on our engagement trends this quarter coming from products like Reels and our investments in A.I.,” he said in a statement. “We’re putting increased energy and focus around our key company priorities that unlock both near- and long-term opportunities for Meta and the people and businesses that use our services.”