Several Trump administration picks face bomb threats and ‘swatting.’

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, said several cabinet nominees and others were targeted with “violent, un-American threats to their lives and those who live with them.”

The threatening behavior included bomb threats and “swatting” — the act of contacting law enforcement to falsely claim a dangerous person is at a particular address. Swatting calls are designed to create a frantic armed police response to frighten, harass and endanger someone at their home.

Bomb threats and swatting calls are a growing problem for American law enforcement, as it has become easier to anonymously contact the authorities or leave threatening messages. Prominent public officials, schools and celebrities are often victims.

Ms. Leavitt said law enforcement and other authorities “acted quickly to ensure the safety of those who were targeted.”

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, Trump’s pick to be ambassador to the United Nations, was notified by the police that a bomb threat had been made against her home, according to a statement from her office. She and her family were not there at the time.

The former congressman Lee Zeldin, who is Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, said the police had contacted him about a pipe bomb threat made to his home. The Zeldin family was not there at the time, he said in a statement.

The group said it felt compelled to issue the notice out of uncertainty about whether the Education Department could be enlisted in a broader effort to locate undocumented immigrants under Mr. Trump’s administration, even though the advice cuts against its mission of helping students from disadvantaged backgrounds pay for higher education.

The notice effectively urged students who may themselves be in the country legally to consider forgoing federal student aid to avoid putting a relative at risk.

“This guidance may be particularly relevant to mixed-status families who would be participating in the federal aid application process for the first time,” the group advised. “NCAN understands the grave ramifications of this guidance and deeply regrets that we feel it is necessary to issue it.”

Some colleges and universities are also urging international students to be in the United States before Mr. Trump takes office on Jan. 20, sending travel advisories recommending that they make plans to cut short their winter vacations. The schools have warned that any rapid action by Mr. Trump to curtail immigration could leave students stranded if they’re not back in the country by then.

Susie Wiles, the incoming White House chief of staff, has been among those signaling in recent weeks that Mr. Trump intends make quick and purposeful use of executive orders to achieve some of his policy goals upon taking power. As a result, schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The University of Massachusetts, Amherst recently warned students that a flurry of such orders could throw visa processing into disarray or result in some students being denied entry to the United States.

Toward the end of Mr. Trump’s prior term, the Homeland Security Department began the process of more tightly restricting student visas, drawing legal challenges from a number of schools. Under those proposed rules, students from countries which were designated as state sponsors of terrorism, such as Iran, Syria or Sudan, would be eligible for only a two-year stay with the option to apply for an extension, instead of up to five years from the outset.

During his campaign this year, Mr. Trump also discussed bringing back some version of the ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries that he pursued in his first term, which could upend plans for students coming back from those countries.

For health secretary, Mr. Trump chose Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic with no medical or public health training who has accused drug companies of the “mass poisoning” of Americans.

Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is Dr. Dave Weldon, a former congressman from Florida who raised doubts about vaccines and pushed to move most vaccine safety research from the agency.

And Mr. Trump’s choice to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the former television host Dr. Mehmet Oz, has scant experience in managing a large bureaucracy like the one he may now oversee; the agency is in charge of health care programs that cover more than 150 million Americans.

In Mr. Trump’s first term as president, pharmaceutical executives largely cheered his health policy nominees. They had ties to the moderate wing of the Republican Party and decades of conventional experience, including at major drug companies.

John LaMattina, who was once the top scientist at Pfizer and is now a senior partner at PureTech Health, a firm that creates biotech startups, said of those officials: “You could disagree with them, but at least there’s a certain knowledge base and they’ve given serious thought to these issues.”

He added: “We’re now seeing some people without any sort of background, and that’s worrisome.”

The implications remain unclear for Americans who rely on medications or on widespread immunity from diseases that, for now, are rare. Some in the Trump administration want to speed drug approvals, potentially seeding the market with drugs of uncertain effectiveness. Mr. Kennedy has in some forums called for more independent safety reviews of established vaccines, and at other times he has demanded fewer constraints on unconventional and unproven treatments.

But Mr. Kennedy has also tapped in to veins of outrage among consumers and lawmakers, who have long vilified drug companies for setting high prices on certain drugs and reaping billions of dollars in profits rather than putting patients first.

In choosing such a vociferous critic as Mr. Kennedy, the president-elect stunned the sector, causing vaccine and biotechnology stocks to plummet temporarily.

And though Mr. Kennedy most recently said that he would not take vaccines away from Americans who want them, even a modest reduction in the number of people receiving certain shots could spook investors and translate into hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue. The industry is also concerned that drug approvals could be delayed if Mr. Kennedy makes good on his threats to fire drug regulators, or if they quit in droves to avoid working under his leadership.

“There was cautious optimism on Trump when he won, and that was very rapidly replaced with concern over R.F.K. Jr.,” said Brian Skorney, a drug industry analyst at the investment bank Baird.

Drug companies’ political action committees made millions of dollars in contributions to both Democrats and Republicans this election cycle, and the industry’s lobbying groups can wield considerable influence over policy and legislation.

Top pharmaceutical executives have said little publicly about Mr. Trump’s picks for health policy positions, seeking to avoid alienating the people who would regulate them. Their lobbying groups have publicly issued polite statements saying they want to work constructively with the administration.

But Derek Lowe, a longtime pharmaceutical researcher and industry commentator, has sharply criticized Mr. Kennedy on his blog, calling him “a demagogue whose positions on key public health issues like vaccination are nothing short of disastrous.”

“You really can’t engage with someone like that. There is no common ground,” Mr. Lowe said in an interview.

Drug industry officials have a long list of concerns about Mr. Kennedy, who did not return a request for comment for this article. They are particularly worried that he could seek to undermine childhood vaccines; one way would be for him to push to revise the government’s recommendations on immunizations.

Mr. Kennedy has also called for overturning legal protections that shield vaccine makers from litigation when people are seriously harmed by vaccines — a change that would upend an established compensation program and could expose the industry to costly lawsuits.

The stakes appear to be highest for companies that make vaccines. About a fifth of Merck’s revenue comes from two types of vaccines that Mr. Kennedy has targeted: a vaccine against the human papillomavirus that has averted thousands of cancer cases, and the shots that children receive to protect them against measles, mumps and rubella. (Merck declined to comment.)

Vaccine sales represent about 3 percent of the industry’s overall prescription drug revenues, according to IQVIA, an industry data provider. With some exceptions, vaccines tend to generate relatively low returns compared with profits from more expensive products used for diseases like cancer and arthritis.

Drug manufacturers also fear the effect Mr. Kennedy could have at the Food and Drug Administration. They often complain that the agency can be too onerous, but their business model is reliant on a well-staffed F.D.A. that can weed out would-be competitors that haven’t met its standards for safety and effectiveness.

Mr. Kennedy regularly lambastes the F.D.A. as “corrupt” and too close to the drug industry. He has denounced the fees the agency receives from makers of medical devices and drugs, which make up about half of its $7.2 billion annual budget.

It’s unclear how Mr. Kennedy’s views will mesh with those of Jim O’Neill, a Silicon Valley investor and former government official who would serve as his deputy if he is confirmed. Mr. O’Neill, a former top aide to the billionaire Peter Thiel, has called for approving drugs once they’ve been shown to be safe but before they have been shown to be effective. That idea goes well beyond the deregulation favored by most pharmaceutical executives.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s transition who will be his press secretary, described the president-elect’s choices for administration posts as “highly qualified” and reflective of “his priority to put America First.”

Although lawmakers in both parties frequently criticize the drug industry for charging high prices, Mr. Kennedy paints pharmaceutical companies in a much harsher light.

In an interview last year, Mr. Kennedy called vaccine makers “the most corrupt companies in the world” and “serial felons.” He has advanced falsehoods about the science underlying some of the industry’s most influential products, suggesting that vaccines cause autism and that H.I.V. may not be the true cause of AIDS. He has embraced an increasingly popular notion that healthy food and lifestyle changes — not pharmaceutical products — will heal sick people. Referring to drug companies, he wrote on X this year, “The sicker we get the richer and more powerful they become.”

“His view of our world seems to be that everything is a conspiracy,” said Brad Loncar, a former biotech investor who now runs BiotechTV, an industry media company. “If you really know our industry, it’s made up of well-intentioned, smart people, and it’s one of the most innovative sectors of our entire economy.”

Pharmaceutical officials were relieved by Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the F.D.A., Dr. Martin Makary, who has a contrarian bent but has been aligned with scientific consensus on vaccine safety and is not seen as a threat to unwind the status quo.

Drug companies hope to have an ally in Vivek Ramaswamy, who made his fortune as a biotechnology executive and has been named to lead a government efficiency effort alongside Elon Musk. Mr. Ramaswamy has been critical of what he describes as regulatory red tape that slows new drug approvals.

And Mr. O’Neill, the president-elect’s choice for deputy health secretary, has close ties to some biotechnology and medical technology companies, though he is less well-connected to major industry players.

Bracing for the potential of public attacks and new proposals that could hurt their bottom lines, drug companies are said to be reaching out to contacts close to Mr. Trump in hopes of influencing the incoming administration. Some are also considering new ways to defend their businesses from government initiatives they consider detrimental.

“There’s no playbook for dealing with these disruptive figures like Kennedy,” said Sam Geduldig, managing partner of the right-leaning lobbying firm CGCN Group.

Other lobbyists said they are instructing pharmaceutical clients not to hit the panic button yet. Once Congress returns after the Thanksgiving break, Mr. Kennedy is expected to make the rounds on Capitol Hill.

He could face trouble winning the support he needs from Senate Republicans to be confirmed because ofhis record on vaccines, his past support for abortion rights and his ideas about overhauling the food system.

Drug industry officials have long regarded Mr. Trump as a wild card, just as likely to be a boon as a foe.

In 2020, the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed worked closely with drug makers and poured billions of dollars into producing highly effective Covid shots in record time, saving countless lives. Mr. Trump’s pandemic-era health secretary, Alex Azar, spoke with admiration that year about “our partners in the private sector.”

But this year, Mr. Trump spoke little about Operation Warp Speed.

With some exceptions, the drug industry has been in something of a slump since the heights of the pandemic, when it enjoyed a boost in its public image and investors eager to get in on huge gains poured money into drug stocks.

But trust in vaccines and public health institutions has eroded at the same time as the bubble in the biotech markets has deflated. Among major Covid vaccine makers, Moderna’s stock price is down tenfold, and Pfizer’s stock price has fallen by half, from their high-water marks in 2021. An index of smaller biotechnology stocks is down by close to half.

Drug company officials still see opportunities to benefit from Mr. Trump’s win.

The industry is looking forward to Mr. Trump replacing Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, as he is expected to do. She has been aggressive in taking on big business, including pharma.

The industry is also hopeful that Trump could help reverse its worst policy defeat in recent memory. Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature policy achievement, Democratic lawmakers empowered Medicare to directly negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs — cutting into manufacturers’ profits and raising the specter of similar price cuts in the commercial market. Republicans in Congress have said that they want to repeal the negotiation program.

“Together, Jay and RFK Jr. will restore the NIH to a Gold Standard of Medical Research as they examine the underlying causes of, and solutions to, America’s biggest health challenges, including our Crisis of Chronic Illness and Disease,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his choice to lead the N.I.H.’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.

If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Bhattacharya would lead the world’s premier medical research agency, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, each with its own research agenda, focusing on different diseases like cancer and diabetes. Dr. Bhattacharya, who is not a practicing physician, has called for overhauling the N.I.H. and limiting the power of civil servants who, he believes, played too prominent a role in shaping federal policy during the pandemic.

He is the latest in a series of Trump health picks who came to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic and who hold views on medicine and public health that are at times outside the mainstream. The president-elect’s health choices, experts agree, suggest a shake-up is coming to the nation’s public health and biomedical establishment.

Dr. Bhattacharya is one of three lead authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto issued in 2020 that contended that the virus should be allowed to spread among young healthy people who were “at minimal risk of death” and could thus develop natural immunity, while prevention efforts were targeted to older people and the vulnerable.

Through a connection with a Stanford colleague, Dr. Scott Atlas, who was advising Mr. Trump during his first term, Dr. Bhattacharya presented his views to Alex M. Azar II, Mr. Trump’s health secretary. The condemnation from the public health establishment was swift. Dr. Bhattacharya and his fellow authors were promptly dismissed as cranks whose “fringe” policy prescriptions would lead to millions of unnecessary deaths.

Dr. Bhattacharya also became a go-to witness in court cases challenging federal and state Covid policies. He joined a group of plaintiffs in suing the Biden administration over what he called “Covid censorship,” arguing that the administration violated the First Amendment in working with social media companies to tamp down on Covid misinformation.

He also argued against mask mandates for schoolchildren in Florida and Tennessee. Judges in both states dismissed him as unqualified to make medical pronouncements on the matter.

“His demeanor and tone while testifying suggest that he is advancing a personal agenda,” Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee wrote in 2021, adding that he was “simply unwilling to trust Dr. Bhattacharya.”

More recently, amid widespread recognition of the economic and mental health harms caused by lockdowns and school closures, Dr. Bhattacharya’s views have been getting a second look, to the consternation of his critics, who have accused those entertaining his ideas of “sane-washing” him.

Perhaps the most notable reflection has come from Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health. In 2020, Dr. Collins called Dr. Bhattacharya and his co-authors “fringe epidemiologists.” Last year, Dr. Collins suggested that he and other policymakers might have been too narrowly focused on public health goals — saving lives at any cost — and not attuned enough to balancing health needs with economic ones.

“I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mind-set — and that was really unfortunate, it’s another mistake we made,” Dr. Collins said in December 2023, at a conversation hosted by Braver Angels, a group that addresses political polarization. He did not address Dr. Bhattacharya or the Great Barrington Declaration specifically.

But Dr. Bhattacharya still provokes extremely strong feelings. Dr. Jonathan Howard, an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, who treated patients at Bellevue Hospital at the height of the pandemic, has assailed Dr. Bhattacharya in a book, “We Want Them Infected.”

Dr. Howard said Dr. Bhattacharya “bungled basic facts” about the pandemic. In March 2020, for example, Dr. Bhattacharya suggested in a Wall Street Journal opinion essay that the pandemic was not as deadly as it was being made out to be, and that the death toll might top out at 40,000 Americans; in the end, 1.2 million died.

Dr. Bhattacharya responded on social media by calling Dr. Howard “unhinged” and his book “inane,” advising him to “take an epidemiology class if you don’t want to keep embarrassing yourself.”

The Great Barrington Declaration grew out of a meeting in Great Barrington, Mass., convened by the American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank dedicated to free-market principles. Its authors, who included doctors, scientists and epidemiologists, wrote that they had “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing Covid-19 policies.” They called their approach “Focused Protection.”

Alarmed and angry, 80 experts published a manifesto of their own, the John Snow Memorandum (named after the 19th-century English epidemiologist), saying that the declaration’s approach would endanger Americans who had underlying conditions that put them at high risk from severe Covid-19 — at least one-third of U.S. citizens, by most estimates — and result in perhaps a half-million deaths.

“I think it’s wrong, I think it’s unsafe, I think it invites people to act in ways that have the potential to do an enormous amount of harm,” Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, a Harvard infectious disease specialist, said at the time. Dr. Walensky later became director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when President Biden took office.

Last month, Dr. Bhattacharya hosted a forum on pandemic policy at Stanford, saying he had hoped to bring together people of different views who would “talk to each other in a civil way.” But the forum itself became the target of attacks — a development that Stanford’s president, Jonathan Levin, called “dispiriting.”

One of Dr. Bhattacharya’s Stanford colleagues, Dr. Pantea Javidan of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, was quoted in The San Jose Mercury News as saying the symposium gave “a platform for discredited figures who continually promote dangerous, scientifically unsupported or thoroughly debunked approaches to Covid.”

As the director of the N.E.C., Mr. Hassett will work closely with the Treasury secretary to push forward Mr. Trump’s economic plans, focused on cutting taxes, increasing tariffs and expanding energy production. The role is one of the most expansive in the administration and will put Mr. Hassett at the center of the most pressing policy debates.

“He will play an important role in helping American families recover from the Inflation that was unleashed by the Biden Administration,” Mr. Trump said in a statement. “Together, we will renew and improve our record Tax Cuts, and ensure that we have Fair Trade with Countries that have taken advantage of the United States in the past.”

Mr. Trump has been rounding out his economic team, having last week picked Scott Bessent to run the Treasury Department and Howard Lutnick, the former chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, to lead the Commerce Department. Those positions, unlike the N.E.C. directorship, require Senate confirmation.

Mr. Trump also selected Jamieson Greer, a lawyer and former Trump official, to lead the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

Mr. Greer is a partner in international trade at the law firm King & Spalding. During Mr. Trump’s first term, he served as chief of staff to Robert E. Lighthizer, the trade representative at the time. He was involved in the Trump administration’s trade negotiations with China, as well as the renegotiation of NAFTA with Canada and Mexico.

“Jamieson will focus the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on reining in the Country’s massive Trade Deficit, defending American Manufacturing, Agriculture, and Services, and opening up Export Markets everywhere,” Mr. Trump said.

Although Mr. Trump has considered giving top economic jobs to Mr. Lighthizer and Peter Navarro, a China hawk who previously served as his trade adviser, the president-elect instead settled on candidates that some would view as more moderate.

Mr. Hassett was an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, when Mr. Trump chose him to serve as the administration’s top academic economist in 2017. In that role, he was a vocal defender of Mr. Trump’s tax cuts and trade policies. He departed the administration in mid-2019.

Since leaving Mr. Trump’s White House, Mr. Hassett has remained a close adviser to Mr. Trump, often lending credibility to economic ideas that many economists view as unconventional. Mr. Trump has called for even larger tariffs and has promoted tax cuts that some budget experts estimate could cost as much as $15 trillion over a decade.

While he has defended Mr. Trump’s trade policies publicly, Mr. Hassett brought a more traditionally conservative view of economics to the Trump administration and has acknowledged that tariffs — Mr. Trump’s trade weapon of choice — can weaken economic growth.

Mr. Hassett advised Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, during his presidential run. His research has long focused on the potential to expand economic growth and middle-class earnings by cutting corporate tax rates.

When Mr. Hassett was tapped to join Mr. Trump’s first administration, he drew criticism from some of Mr. Trump’s supporters because of his work that argued that immigration spurs economic growth.

Mr. Greer is a partner in international trade at the law firm King & Spalding. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Greer served as chief of staff to Robert E. Lighthizer, the trade representative at the time. He was involved in the Trump administration’s trade negotiations with China, as well as the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

Before that, Mr. Greer served in the Air Force, where he was a lawyer who prosecuted and defended U.S. airmen in criminal investigations. He was deployed to Iraq.

“Jamieson will focus the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on reining in the Country’s massive Trade Deficit, defending American Manufacturing, Agriculture, and Services, and opening up Export Markets everywhere,” Mr. Trump said.

The position of trade representative has historically been fairly low profile, but it has taken on greater importance under Mr. Trump. In his first term, the office helped wage a trade war against China, imposed substantial tariffs on its products and negotiated a series of trade deals.

In his next term, Mr. Trump has promised to again make aggressive use of the government’s authority over trade. On Monday, he said he would impose tariffs on all products coming into the United States from Canada, Mexico and China on his first day in office.

In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump said he would use an executive order to levy a 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico until drugs and migrants stopped coming over the border. In a separate post, he threatened an additional 10 percent tariff on all products from China, saying that the country was shipping illegal drugs to the United States.

Mr. Trump could be using the threats as an opening wager in negotiations. But they have threatened to disrupt America’s diplomatic and economic relationships, and if enacted, the tariffs would scramble global supply chains and impose costs on American businesses including auto manufacturers, farmers and food packagers.

The U.S. trade representative, a cabinet-level official who carries the rank of ambassador, is charged with carrying out trade negotiations and resolving economic disputes with other countries, as well as working with lawmakers, farmers and business owners to shape trade policy. The representative leads a small agency of more than 200 people that has offices in Washington, Geneva and Brussels.

In addition to carrying out Mr. Trump’s tariff plans, the office is also likely to play an important role in negotiating trade terms with Canada and Mexico. In 2026, the countries are set to revisit the terms of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade pact Mr. Trump renegotiated in his first term to replace the NAFTA.

It remains to be seen how exactly Mr. Trump will organize the trade policy posts in his administration. In a post on Truth Social last Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that Howard Lutnick, his selection for commerce secretary, would “lead our tariff and trade agenda, with additional direct responsibility for the Office of the United States Trade Representative.”