“Under normal conditions there would be extended debate and back and forth, but under this emergency some of those things will get through with less scrutiny,” said David Lapan, a former spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration. “It is a way to use this national emergency or pandemic to push through some of these quickly that might not get through in the normal course of business.”

Mr. Trump, for instance, has claimed the “country is full” and wanted to shut the southwestern border to border crossers seeking asylum, but the courts have repeatedly said he must extend due process rights. So this week, using legal authorities granted to the surgeon general to pursue public health, he said he would move forward with sending foreigners who illegally cross the border, including asylum seekers, immediately back to Mexico for fear of spreading the coronavirus to detention facilities and Border Patrol agents.

Days later, the Federal Labor Relations Authority published a little-noticed rule that would make it easier for federal workers to stop the withholding of their union dues, saying it would increase wages at a time of economic crisis. Everett Kelley, the national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, called the proposed rule “just another in a series of activist steps the F.L.R.A. has taken to advance this administration’s goal of busting unions.”

Mr. Kelley said it was “disgraceful” that the administration would push forward with the rule “in the midst of a pandemic” that depended on federal employees like caregivers at the Veterans Affairs Department, airport screeners and food inspectors, all of whom are performing their jobs under hazardous conditions.

In the midst of the outbreak, Mr. Trump pressured his top economic adviser to push Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, to rapidly and drastically cut interest rates as concern grew that the spreading disease could tip the United States into a recession. While Mr. Powell slashed rates by half a percentage point in one of the earliest global central bank responses to the virus, he was reluctant to cut them as aggressively as the president wanted him to before the outbreak.