Elon Musk’s efficiency department pushes to access taxpayer data from IRS, says report – US politics live

Talks between US and Russian officials scheduled for Tuesday in Saudi Arabia are to determine what is possible to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said on Monday.

Bruce told reporters in Riyadh that the meeting, involving secretary of state Marco Rubio, White House national security advisor Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, was a step to determine if the Russians are serious about talks toward peace.

Bruce said:

This is a follow-up on that initial conversation between [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and President [Donald] Trump about perhaps if that first step is even possible, what the interests are, if this can be managed.

The Associated Press reports that the Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal mid-air collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National airport.

Probationary workers were targeted in late-night emails on Friday notifying them they had been fired, David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said in a statement.

The affected workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told the Associated Press. The air traffic controller was not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Spero said messages began arriving after 7pm on Friday and continued late into the night. More might be notified over the long weekend or barred from entering FAA buildings on Tuesday, he said.

The employees were fired “without cause nor based on performance or conduct”, Spero said, and the emails were “from an ‘exec order’ Microsoft email address” – not a government email address.

The firings hit the FAA when it faces a shortfall in controllers. Federal officials have been raising concerns about an overtaxed and understaffed air traffic control system for years, especially after a series of close calls between planes at US airports. Among the reasons they have cited for staffing shortages are uncompetitive pay, long shifts, intensive training and mandatory retirements.

Mike Mullett strains to see through sheets of misty rain while driving through working-class neighborhoods of Columbus, a quaint town in southern Indiana.

He’s trying to find the senior center, multi-family homes and rent-assisted properties – more than 530 in total – that he and many other locals hope will receive $4.42m in federal funding for solar electricity projects.

But now that money is at risk.

On 20 January, Donald Trump paused billions of dollars of federal grant funding for clean energy and other projects around the country initiated by the Biden administration’s Green New Deal.

“We’ve been slavishly working on a plan since April 2023 that would provide solar energy to hundreds of households in two low- and moderate-income Columbus neighborhoods,” says Mullett. The project was expected to be rolled out in April, with previously approved funding thought to have been made available by 14 February.

“Unless the Trump administration makes a 180-degree turn on funding, that expectation will obviously not be met.”

Read the full report here:

My colleague Jakub Krupa is leading our live Europe coverage today. He has more details on Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, commenting on the US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia.

In comments reported by the Associated Press and Reuters, he said Ukraine won’t take part in US-Russia talks this week on ending the war and won’t accept the outcome of the talks if Ukraine doesn’t take part.

Speaking to journalists on a conference call from the United Arab Emirates, Zelenskyy said his government had not been invited to Tuesday’s planned talks in Saudi Arabia.

He said they would “yield no results”, given the absence of any Ukrainian officials.

“Ukraine regards any negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine as ones that have no result, and we cannot recognise … any agreements about us without us,” he said.

Keith Kellogg, the Trump administration’s Russia-Ukraine envoy, is expected to visit Ukraine on Thursday.

You can read more on our Europe live blog:

Donald Trump has ramped up anti-immigration fervor into his second presidency, promising mass deportations, pushing to increase arrests and bolstering public relations efforts to amplify arrests. The moves have sent a wave of terror through the undocumented worker community that underpins large parts of the US economy.

“Every day I wake up and walk out the door, I go with the hope of going to work, but with the fear of not being able to come back,” said a construction worker and single parent in Texas who obtained immigration protection under the Biden administration. She requested to remain anonymous due to fears about her immigration status.

“Every day I worry if something happens, who will take my kids,” she said. “I have only one child born in the US. They are the only one who might be able to return, but me and the other kids would not be able to come back.”

She claimed that since Trump took office for his second term, there had been fewer opportunities to work construction jobs given the increased fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raids at workplaces.

Read the full report here:

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s radical drive to slash billions of dollars in annual federal spending with huge job and regulatory cuts is spurring charges that they have made illegal moves while undercutting congressional and judicial powers, say legal experts, Democrats and state attorneys general.

Trump’s fusillade of executive orders expanding his powers in some extreme ways in his cost-cutting fervor, coupled with unprecedented drives by the Musk-led so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) to slash many agency workforces and regulations, have created chaos across the US government and raised fears of a threat to US democracy.

Trump and Musk have also attacked judges who have made rulings opposing several of their moves after they ended up in court, threatening at least one with impeachment and accusing him of improper interference.

“In the US, we appeal rulings we disagree with – we don’t ignore court orders or threaten judges with impeachment just because we don’t like the decision. This is a coup, plain and simple,” Arizona’s attorney general, Kris Mayes, said.

Trump and Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s largest single donor, now face multiple rebukes from judges and legal experts to the regulatory and staff cuts they have engineered at the treasury department, the US Agency for International Development and several other agencies.

You can read the full report here:

Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) is making an unprecedented push for access to an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that houses detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the US, raising alarms over privacy, security, and government overreach, The Washington Post reports.

According to the publication, Doge is requesting access to a classified IRS system that contains the sensitive personal financial records of millions of Americans.

The request, which is reportedly under review, would give Doge officials “broad access to tax-agency systems, property and datasets. Among them is the Integrated Data Retrieval System, or IDRS, which enables tax agency employees to access IRS accounts — including personal identification numbers — and bank information,” the Washington Post reports.

A Trump administration official defended the move, stating that Doge staff are working to mission is to “eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, and improve government performance to better serve the people”.