Trump and Musk to give joint interview as more officials quit amid cost-cutting and crackdowns – US politics live

The Trump administration has begun firing hundreds of employees at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), including some who maintain critical air traffic control infrastructure, despite four deadly crashes since inauguration day.

According to the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (Pass) union, “several hundred” workers received termination notices on Friday.

Many of the workers were probationary employees, those employed for less than a year and lacking job protections, which makes them low-hanging fruit for the Trump administration’s streamlining efforts.

According to the US Office of Personnel Management, there are about 200,000 probationary employees within the federal government.

The firings at the FAA do not include air traffic controllers, but did appear to include engineers and technicians.

A spokesperson for the union said no probationary technicians had been fired, citing about 133 job cuts so far.

The positions terminated included maintenance mechanics, aeronautical information specialists, environmental protection specialists, aviation safety assistants and management administration personnel, but did not include airway transportation systems specialists who maintain and certify air traffic control equipment.

The full story is here:

In this back-to-the-future world, Russia is fully restored to the top table while Ukraine and Europe are made to sit outside as the US and Russia sharpen their carving knives, writes my colleague Julian Borger.

The culmination of the Riyadh process, the US delegation made clear, will be a summit encounter between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, two leaders who share an imperial bent that leans towards great power spheres of influence.

It will not be the first time superpowers meet in the Middle East to divide a European state. The Tehran Conference in 1943 put a line right through eastern Europe. In Riyadh, Trump will take the Roosevelt role and Putin will play Stalin. It is long past the time when there was a place for a Churchill. Britain has joined the anxious European voices a long way offstage.

To the Ukrainians, and many Europeans, this does not feel like Tehran. They fear a new Munich, with the gilded chambers and acres of polished marble of the Diriyah Palace auditioning for the role of a latter-day Führerbau, the venue in September 1938 for the betrayal and carve-up of Czechoslovakia.

In Munich, the Czechoslovak delegation were kept in an adjoining room to await details of when and how they would surrender the Sudetenland to Hitler. On Tuesday, the Ukrainians were not even in the same country. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was nervously waiting for news in Turkey. He is due in Saudi Arabia next month to be briefed by the royal court and make his feelings clear.

As the chairs were being put away and the floors mopped in the Diriyah Palace, a new paradigm seemed to be coming into focus, one that was familiar from the 19th century and the cold war: great powers will make the decisions, while lesser states will anxiously wait for the big boys’ meetings to finish, and then call Riyadh to find out what has been decided.

In this back-to-the-future world, Russia is fully restored to the top table, its status assured by the size of its nuclear arsenal. [Sergei] Lavrov was delighted with the outcome of Tuesday’s meeting, noting the two sides “did not just listen to each other, but heard each other”. He predicted that follow-on talks would begin “as soon as possible”.

[Mohammed] Bin Salman emerged on Tuesday as the consigliere and hotelier to the mighty, there as a facilitator rather than dealmaker, but very much on the inside, unlike Europe. In the age of Trump, the Gulf monarchy takes precedence above Washington’s old democratic allies, even in European matters.

You can read Julian’s full analysis here:

Elon Musk’s rampage through government shows us how we can finally close the book on what Trumpism is all about, writes Guardian columnist Osita Nwanevu.

By now, it should be clear to all who don’t have an emotional, political or professional investment in believing or pretending to believe otherwise that the American constitutional order has developed a kind of autoimmune disease. The very mechanisms the founders crafted to protect the republic are now an existential threat to it; in their greed and determination to implement the conservative agenda, Trump, Musk and Republicans empowered by those mechanisms are happily ignoring or working to override the parts of the constitution that don’t advantage them or suit their ends. As a matter of substance, this is a system that needs to be dramatically reformed or reimagined rather than rescued; as a matter of politics, one of the central lessons of this past election is that critical constituencies Democrats need to improve with in order to stay competitive federally care far less about protecting our sickly institutions than they care about a great many other things that they hoped Donald Trump would accomplish. As of now, even amid the mess in Washington, voters aren’t giving him marks that are all that terrible – a recent CBS poll found solid majorities of Americans describing his leadership so far as “tough”, “energetic”, “focused” and “effective”.

Democrats should be positioning themselves not as the guardians of America’s institutions but as the defenders of the American people’s concrete interests ⁠– showing and telling voters about all the federal government does for them every day and how the conservative agenda Trump, Musk and the Republican party are pursuing threatens and has always threatened them. The perversity of a man getting to rework their government purely because he happens to be the wealthiest person in the world and financially backed Trump’s campaign should, of course, also be underscored.

The especially ambitious might even try arguing to the American people that all the goings-on in Washington illustrate the danger of having so much wealth accumulate in the hands of a few in the first place. Elon Musk is gliding towards becoming the planet’s very first trillionaire. His access to the levers and gears of the federal government now could help him along in myriad ways. Even an improved political system would struggle to constrain the amount of power he possessed as a private citizen and has now leveraged into a public office; democratic republican governance will never be secured in America without turning our attention to the structure of our economic system as well. Dismantling the federal government to prevent that from happening was a key object of the conservative project before Trump. It has remained so with him at the head of the Republican party and will remain so whenever his time is up. Right now, that project is succeeding.

Osita’s full column is here:

Here is some more detail from CNN on the resignation of senior federal prosecutor Denise Cheung, citing what she called an improper demand by appointees of Donald Trump’s administration to launch a criminal probe of a government contract awarded under former president Joe Biden.

Cheung, who supervised criminal cases at the US attorney’s office in Washington, said she had been ordered to open a probe into a Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency funding decision.

When she declined to launch a grand jury investigation citing a lack of evidence and calling such a move “premature”, she said she was ordered instead to pursue an asset seizure to prevent the recipient of the contract from drawing down the government funds.

“I have been proud to serve at the U.S. Department of Justice and this office for over 24 years,” Cheung wrote in the letter to interim US attorney Ed Martin. “During my tenure, which has spanned over many different administrations, I have always been guided by the oath I took … to support and defend the Constitution.”

Spokespeople for the US attorney’s office and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Her resignation is the latest by career Justice Department prosecutors to protest what they see as improper political interference by the Trump administration in criminal investigations.

Donald Trump’s administration targeted bank regulators, rocket scientists and tax enforcers on Tuesday as it sought to fire thousands more federal employees in an unprecedented assault on the civil service, Reuters reports.

With tax-filing season underway, senior officials at the Internal Revenue Service identified 7,500 employees for dismissal, with possibly more on the chopping block, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has swept through federal agencies slashing thousands of jobs since Trump became president last month and put Musk in charge of a drastic overhaul of government.

The White House has not said how many people it plans to fire and has given no numbers on the mass layoffs so far. The information to date has come from employees of federal agencies.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which oversees banks, said it has fired an unknown number of new hires, according to an email seen by Reuters. The cuts could potentially worsen staffing problems at a 6,000-person agency where more than one in three workers are eligible for retirement.

Roughly 1,000 new hires, including rocket scientists, at NASA were expected to be laid off on Tuesday as well, according to two people familiar with the space agency’s plans, with more cuts possible.

“People are scared and not speaking up to voice dissent or disagreement,” said one employee at the 18,000-person agency who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Layoffs were also expected at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which handles flood insurance and disaster response, as well as its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, sources said.

The Trump administration plans to fire hundreds of senior Department of Homeland Security employees this week, according to an administration official and a second source familiar with the matter.

The planned firings, first reported by NBC News, would target people viewed as not aligned with Trump, the sources said. Among the workers swept up in the overhaul of dozens of agencies are those reviewing Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink and others monitoring an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu that has infected millions of chickens and cattle this year.

Donald Trump’s re-election has “turbocharged” climate accountability efforts including laws which aim to force greenhouse gas emitters to pay damages for fueling dangerous global warming, say activists.

These “make polluters pay” laws, led by blue states’ attorneys general, and climate accountability lawsuits will be a major front for climate litigation in the coming months and years. They are being challenged by red states and the fossil fuel industry, which are also fighting against accountability-focused climate lawsuits waged by governments and youth environmentalists.

On day one of his second term, the US president affirmed his loyalty to the oil industry with a spate of executive actions to roll back environmental protections and a pledge to “drill, baby, drill”. The ferocity of his anti-environment agenda has inspired unprecedented interest in climate accountability, said Jamie Henn, director of the anti-oil and gas non-profit Fossil Free Media.

“I think Trump’s election has turbocharged the ‘make polluters pay’ movement,” said Henn, who has been a leader in the campaign for a decade.

Ukraine officials say US is ‘appeasing’ Russia with talks in Riyadh

Luke Harding

Ukraine reacted with gloom and dismay on Tuesday to the meeting between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia, with officials in Kyiv saying the Trump administration was “appeasing” Moscow.

They said negotiations between the two delegations got under way in Riyadh just hours after Russia attacked Ukraine with dozens of drones. At least two people were killed and 26 injured in strikes across the country.

It was absurd for Moscow to talk about peace while killing Ukrainians, said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office. The latest salvo of 176 drones fired at Ukraine represented Russia’s actual “negotiating position”, he posted.

Without criticising the Trump administration directly, he said the high-level US-Russia talks had not been properly prepared, adding that they were merely a forum for more Russian “ultimatums”.

“Encouragement rather than coercion, a voluntary and bizarre renunciation of strength in favour of disheartening and unmotivated appeasement of the aggressor,” Podolyak wrote, summing up Kyiv’s negative reaction.

There is widespread scepticism that Russia would abide by any ceasefire deal unless it was underpinned by security guarantees – from the US and other western powers. Podolyak said there was no point in having a “fake peace” that would lead to “an inevitable continuation of the war”.

You can read Luke’s report here:

The head of the food division at the US Food and Drug Administration has quit in protest over sweeping staff cuts that he warns will hamper the agency’s ability to protect public health.

Jim Jones, who joined the agency in September 2023, cited “indiscriminate” layoffs to 89 staff members, including key technical experts. In his resignation letter to the acting FDA commissioner, Sara Brenner, seen by Bloomberg News, Jones said the cuts would make it “fruitless” to continue in his role given the Trump administration’s “disdain for the very people” needed to implement food safety reforms.

“I was looking forward to working to pursue the department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food,” Jones wrote.

Some of those recent efforts include the January banning of controversial food dye Red No 3, a bright red color additive that was found to cause cancer in male lab rats.

Specialists in nutrition, infant formula and food-safety response, including 10 staff members responsible for reviewing potentially unsafe food ingredients, were targets of layoffs, according to the letter.

The FDA did not respond to a request for comment.

The full story is here:

Donald Trump is set to sign new executive orders later today while his first joint television interview with adviser Elon Musk will air in prime time.

The White House has not commented on the new executive orders Trump will sign at his Mar-a-Lago golf club and home. It is expected to begin at 4pm ET.

Trump has signed more than 50 executive orders since returning to the presidency in January, including enacting steep tariffs, ending birthright citizenship, curbing DEI and “gender radicalism” in the military and pardoning January 6 rioters. (Here is a compilation of all the executive orders Trump has signed so far).

Trump and Musk’s interview is with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity and is scheduled to air at 9pm ET.

In an excerpt from the interview, Musk said he “used to be adored by the left” but “less so these days” because of the work he is doing at Trump’s direction.

“They call it Trump derangement syndrome. You don’t realize how real this is until you can’t reason with people,” Musk said, adding that normal conversations with Democrats about the president are impossible because “it’s like they’ve become completely irrational.”

The Trump administration is giving America’s schools and universities two weeks to eliminate diversity initiatives or risk losing federal money, the Associated Press reports.

In a memo on Friday, the education department gave an ultimatum to stop using “racial preferences” as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring or other areas. Schools are being given 14 days to end any practice that treats students or workers differently because of their race.
The sweeping demand could upend education in myriad ways. The memo targets college admissions offices, ordering an end to personal essays or writing prompts that can be used to predict an applicant’s race. It forbids dorms or graduation events for students of certain races. Efforts to recruit teachers from underrepresented groups could be seen as discrimination.

It’s meant to correct what the memo described as rampant discrimination in education, often against white and Asian students.

“Schools have been operating on the pretext that selecting students for ‘diversity’ or similar euphemisms is not selecting them based on race,” said Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights. “No longer. Students should be assessed according to merit, accomplishment and character.”

The memo itself doesn’t change federal law but reflects a change in the federal government’s interpretation of anti-discrimination laws. Under its broad language, nearly any practice that brings race into the discussion could be considered racial discrimination.

As legal justification for the new memo, it cites the 2023 Supreme Court decision barring race as a factor in college admissions. Although the ruling applied only to admissions, the memo says it “applies more broadly.”

“Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,” it said.

The move is an extension of Donald Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

On Monday the education department announced it also cut $600 million in grants for organizations that train teachers. The programs promoted “divisive” concepts like DEI, critical race theory and social justice activism, the department said.

My colleague Joanna Partridge has this helpful explainer on Trump’s DEI rollback here:

A Republican congresswoman has proposed making Donald Trump’s birthday a public holiday, in an effort probably doomed to failure in Congress but obviously intended to curry favor with the president.

Claudia Tenney, a representative from New York’s Finger Lakes region, introduced legislation on Friday aiming to combine the US annual commemoration of Flag Day with a new observance of Trump’s birthday on 14 June, arguing that the president is “the most consequential … in modern American history”.

“His impact on the nation is undeniable,” Tenney said in a news release. On X, she suggested that Trump’s birthday deserved the same treatment as that of George Washington, which is observed annually as a federal holiday on the third Monday of February.

Among other differences, Washington helped the US win its independence from Great Britain and served as its first president. Trump was the first to be elected after being found guilty of felonies – specifically, 34 related to falsifying business records involving hush-money payments to the adult film star Stormy Daniels right before the 2016 election that he won.

Many users on X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, who has overseen the slashing of various federal agencies on behalf of the Trump administration, mocked Tenney’s proposal. “Is this satire?” one asked.

The full story is here: