Johnson declines to give a view on whether Elon Musk should allow Trump’s cabinet members to make their own decisions on personnel.

But he says he’s “excited” about Doge’s efforts as it is achieving its goal of scaling down the size and scope of government.

He says “we ought to be standing up and applauding” Musk’s prediction he can identify and eliminate $3tn in “waste” of taxypayer dollars.

Asked by a reporter to confirm unequivocally that there won’t be any cuts to Medicaid further down the line, speaker Mike Johnson claims the program is “hugely problematic” because of “a lot of fraud, waste and abuse” and needs “shoring up”.

He claims it wastes $50bn a year in taxpayer dollars in “fraud alone” and eliminating “fraudulent payments” will save “a lot”. He also claims there are “a lot” of savings to be achieved by ensuring illegal aliens are not enrolled (undocumented migrants are not eligible for Medicaid).

He repeats that the bill doesn’t mention Medicaid, but doesn’t explain where funding for the plan will otherwise come from.

Among the thousands of government workers culled by Musk’s agency were an educator, archaeologist and scientist, who have spoken to Alaina Demopoulos.

The scientist, who works on food sustainability issues in the north east, was 10 weeks away from the end of her three-year probationary period when the Trump administration launched its mass firings of federal workers. A new mom, she decided to take a deferred resignation so she could get severance pay. She said:

Government workers are real people with families who dedicated their lives and expertise to service. It feels like we’re being treated as grifters or terrorists, when we’re not. A lot of us have given up options for much higher incomes in order to do the work that we thought was going to help the world. This is a huge, huge loss for science, because now government researchers are going to shift into the private sector. There’s a lot of good work that the world won’t even know to miss, because we won’t get to do it.

An archaeologist who worked for the National Resources Conservation Services in North Dakota received a generic form letter that still said “template” in the document title, informing him he was being fired for performance-based reasons. He is exploring legal options.

An educator at a national forest in Oregon said:

I feel like we’re being attacked. There have always been people who are anti-government, but now I feel like people see all government employees as villains. I really cared about the work I did, and I didn’t go into this because I wanted to make six figures. The forest or park services have always been very bipartisan, and it’s not something you can easily throw away.

You can read the full piece here:

Responses to the Elon Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they had accomplished in the last week will reportedly be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether their jobs are necessary, three sources with knowledge of the system have told NBC News.

The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language, the sources said. The AI system will determine whether someone’s work is mission-critical or not.

Musk’s threats that federal employees could be fired if they failed to reply to the email caused mass confusion on Monday, as workers struggled with how – or whether – to respond. Several government agencies, including the FBI Pentagon, and state department, told their employees not to respond.

Musk repeated the threat on Monday evening, writing on X, which he owns: “Subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination.”

As of this morning, three House Republicans, have signaled their opposition to the budget resolution. The Republican majority is so narrow that should they vote against, and should all Democrats be present and also vote against, Mike Johnson’s budget plan is doomed.

Victoria Spartz, Tim Burchett and Thomas Massie have said they are opposed as they want deeper spending cuts, but still plan to speak to GOP leadership ahead of the vote. Massie wrote on X on Monday:

If the Republican budget passes, the deficit gets worse, not better.

Others like Warren Davidson have said they want answers about a government funding deal before they can vote for the budget resolution. Davidson posted on X on Monday:

Let’s be clear. There is no path to pass the @HouseGOP budget plan until it includes the plan for ALL spending. The current plan skips 3/14 altogether. Until that is addressed, there is no viable path to pass the budget resolution.

Jeff Van Drew, a Trump loyalist, told Time Magazine he’s prepared to vote against the budget resolution as the proposed cuts to Medicaid are too extreme. He said he called the president to express his opposition to the plan.

I told him I very well may not vote for this, and I’m certainly waiting until the last minute to see if some changes can be made, because I’m very unhappy.

Van Drew added that they’re “aligned” on not wanting to cut people’s access to health care, but the New Jersey Republican also said Trump didn’t ask him to support the budget resolution.

Other centrist Republicans remain undecided.

It’s coming down to the wire for beleaguered House speaker Mike Johnson, who is trying to rally GOP holdouts behind his budget plan for enacting Donald Trump’s agenda before the showdown vote this evening.

Amid Republican opposition threatening to derail his bill, Johnson was up late last night locked in talks with holdouts from across his party who remain skeptical of his outline plan for tax and spending cuts – as well as border security, energy and defense policy – via a single reconciliation bill.

The House proposal – the “one big, beautiful bill” which Trump endorsed last week – would add $4.5tn to the deficit through tax cuts while demanding enormous cuts to federal benefits programs to pay for them. Under the plan’s strict rules, Republicans must either slash a target $2tn from mandatory programs (such as Medicare, Medicaid and food assistance) to make up for current deficit projection or scale back their proposed tax breaks by an equal amount, which would create even bigger deficits in the short-term.

Since Trump was elected on the promise of sweeping tax cuts, Republican lawmakers are feeling the pressure to deliver on that. But at the heart of Johnson’s predicament is that he’s ideologically trapped between hardline deficit hawks who want deeper spending cuts on one wing of his party and nervous moderates who don’t want significant cuts to Medicaid on the other, particularly those in swing seats where large numbers of constituents rely on the program.

While Medicaid isn’t explicitly mentioned in the House GOP budget resolution, in reality a large chunk of the suggested cuts would have to come from the program to offset Trump’s tax cuts, border security buildup and other priorities, as the president has already ruled out any cuts to Social Security and Medicare. He told Fox News Medicaid would not be “touched” bar a clampdown on “fraud”, which seems … open to interpretation. Johnson is now scrambling to win over wavering moderates by convincing them frontline cuts to the program are off the table and he’ll find the staggering $880bn in savings in his budget plan through cuts to other programs.

Assuming every Democrat turns up and votes against the bill, with a thin majority in the House Johnson can’t afford to lose more than one Republican vote. But he told reporters last night he predicted he had enough support and expected the floor vote to go ahead as planned: “I think we’re on track.” He also asked for prayers.

The vote is expected to start at 6.05pm ET tonight.

The Kremlin appeared to contradict Donald Trump’s assertion that Russia was open to European peacekeepers being deployed in Ukraine, and referred reporters to an earlier statement that such a move would be unacceptable to Moscow.

Russia has repeatedly said it opposes having Nato troops on the ground in Ukraine, with foreign minister Sergei Lavrov saying last week that Moscow would view that as a “direct threat” to Russia’s sovereignty, even if the troops operated there under a different flag, Reuters reports.

Asked about Trump’s comment, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said:

There is a position on this matter that was expressed by the Russian foreign minister, Lavrov. I have nothing to add to this and nothing to comment on. I leave this without comment.

Trump said on Monday that both he and Putin accepted the idea of European peacekeepers in Ukraine if a settlement was reached to end the war.

“Yeah, he will accept that,” Trump said. “I specifically asked him that question. He has no problem with it.”

This report is from the Associated Press.

Some 40% of the federal contracts that the Trump administration claims to have canceled as part of its signature cost-cutting program aren’t expected to save the government any money, the administration’s own data shows.

Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” last week published an initial list of 1,125 contracts that it terminated in recent weeks across the federal government. Data published on Doge’s “wall of receipts” shows that more than one-third of the contract cancellations, 417 in all, are expected to yield no savings.

That’s usually because the total value of the contracts has already been fully obligated, which means the government has a legal requirement to spend the funds for the goods or services it purchased and in many cases has already done so.

Dozens of them were for already-paid subscriptions to the AP, Politico and other media services that the administration said it would discontinue. Others were for research studies that have been awarded, training that has taken place, software that has been purchased and interns that have come and gone.

An administration official said it made sense to cancel contracts that are seen as potential dead weight, even if the moves do not yield any savings. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

You can read the full story here.

‘He believes he is the law’: anti-Maga conservatives view Trump as threat to constitution

Joan E Greve

Michael Fanone, the former police officer who defended the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, looked out at the attendees of the Principles First summit and denounced Donald Trump in the strongest possible terms for pardoning roughly 1,500 people who participated in the insurrection.

“He pardoned them because he wants people to know that if you commit crimes on his behalf, he’s got your back,” Fanone said on Saturday. “They are operating under the assumption that, if they commit violent criminal acts on Donald Trump’s behalf, that he will pardon them for future violence.”

Fanone’s words appeared prescient later that afternoon, when he and three other officers were confronted by Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the far-right Proud Boys group. Tarrio received a prison sentence of 22 years for seditious conspiracy and other charges related to his role in the insurrection, but Trump pardoned him last month. In a video that Tarrio shared on social media, he taunted Fanone and the other officers – Daniel Hodges of the Metropolitan police department and former Capitol police officers Aquilino Gonell and Harry Dunn – as “fucking cowards”.

You can read the full report here:

One of Europe’s largest humanitarian organisations announced on Tuesday that it would have to suspend “lifesaving” US-funded aid in 21 countries this week.

The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), said in a statement that the crisis was triggered by the US government’s “continued failure to issue outstanding payments for completed and ongoing authorised work”,

Donald Trump has ordered the suspension of foreign assistance and called for the closure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAid), which distributes US humanitarian aid globally, Agence France-Presse reports.

The organisation said it had $20 million in outstanding requests to the United States, which had already been spent on “21 countries affected by wars, disasters, and displacement”.

The NRC said the funding situation had “created a liquidity crisis” that the organisation “can no longer absorb”, and that it would have to lay off aid workers.

Suspended projects include bakeries providing daily bread to people in Sudan, water and sanitation support in Sudan and the DRC, and emergency shelter and support for cyclone-affected families in Mozambique.

The NRC said it would suspend these programmes on 28 February, and called on the US government to release outstanding payments and “lift all stop work orders to best ensure lifesaving assistance is able to continue”.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously announced waivers for lifesaving humanitarian programmes, but NRC said “neither funding nor communication on when money will be transferred has since been received”.

The Kremlin said on Tuesday that Russia had lots of rare earth metal deposits and that it was open to doing deals to develop them after President Vladimir Putin held out the possibility of such collaboration with the United States.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said:

The Americans need rare earth metals. We have a lot of them.
We have our own plans to develop strategic resources, but there are quite broad prospects for cooperation here.

Putin told state TV on Monday that Russia was open to joint projects with American partners – including government and the private sector – under a future Russia-US economic deal, Reuters reports.

US president Donald Trump has pledged that “major economic development transactions with Russia” would take place.

Peskov said there was still a lot of work to be done to normalise relations between Moscow and Washington before any economic deals could be struck.

“Next on the agenda is the issue of resolving the Ukrainian crisis”, he said. “And then, especially since the Americans themselves have also spoken about it, it will be time to consider possible projects related to trade, economic and investment cooperation.”

Peskov added: “When there comes, let’s say, a moment of political will, we will be open to this (cooperation on rare earth metals),”

Hello and welcome to our rolling US politics coverage:

The fallout from Musk’s demand for government workers to justify their work in a bullet-point list continues.

The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which manages the federal workforce, walked back on an ultimatum issued by Elon Musk at the weekend that would have forced its workers to resign if they did not submit the requested list of their recent accomplishments.

It marks one of the first signs of internal pushback to the Tesla billionaire’s campaign to downsize the federal workforce.

The OPM announced that responding to Musk’s email was not mandatory and that failing to respond by midnight on Monday would not be considered a resignation, as Musk had warned.

Musk, however, continued to insist that workers will be expected to respond or they would lose their jobs.

“Subject to the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination,” Musk said on Monday afternoon.

Earlier in the day Donald Trump had spoken in support of the demand

“By asking the question, tell us what you did this week, what he’s doing is saying, are you actually working?” the president said.

But the ultimatum had already run into resistance with the FBI, the state department and the Pentagon among the agencies instructing employees not to answer the message. Other department heads advised staff to comply, while some told workers to wait for further guidance before responding.

Attorneys for federal workers said in a lawsuit Musk had violated the law with his weekend demand. An updated lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in California and was provided to the Associated Press, is trying to block mass layoffs.

In other developments:

• Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin would accept European peacekeepers in Ukraine as part of a potential deal to end the three-year war. Trump was speaking alongside French president Emmanuel Macron at the White House as the leaders sought to smooth over a transatlantic rift to achieve peace.

• The Trump-Macron meeting came as the US voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, siding with countries such as North Korea, Belarus and Sudan over European allies.

• Trump said the US and Ukraine are “very close” to coming to terms on a rare earth minerals agreement, in comments made during a visit from French president Emmanuel Macron amid European concerns over the US position on Ukraine.

• A federal judge on Monday denied a request by the Associated Press to immediately restore full access to presidential events for the news agency’s journalists, but said the issue required more exploration before ruling. The Trump administration barred the outlet earlier this month for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico in its coverage after the president renamed it the “Gulf of America”.

• A federal judge has blocked the government downsizing team Doge from accessing sensitive data maintained by the US education department and the US office of personnel management. US district judge Deborah Boardman in Greenbelt, Maryland issued the temporary restraining order at the behest of a coalition of labour unions.

• A federal judge has extended protections for trans women in prison. The judge, who blocked the Federal Bureau of Prisons from carrying out Donald Trump’s executive order that would have transferred three incarcerated trans women into men’s facilities earlier this month, has extended protections for nine additional women.

• A federal judge blocked immigration agents from conducting enforcement operations in houses of worship for some religious groups, the Associated Press reported. US district judge Theodore Chang found that the Trump administration policy could violate their religious freedom and should be blocked while a lawsuit challenging it plays out.

• Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has launched his campaign for Ohio governor.