Russia rejoices at Trump-Putin call as Zelensky rejects talks without Ukraine present

A tearful executive at the US Internal Revenue Service told staffers on Thursday that about 6,000 employees would be fired, a person familiar with the matter said, in a move that would eliminate roughly 6 percent of the agency’s workforce in the midst of the busy tax-filing season.
The cuts are part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping downsizing effort that has targeted bank regulators, forest workers, rocket scientists and tens of thousands of other government employees. The effort is being led by tech billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s biggest campaign donor.
Musk was on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, when Argentine President Javier Millei, known for wielding a chainsaw to illustrate his drastic policies slashing government spending, handed him one.
“This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy,” said Musk, holding the power tool aloft as a stage prop to symbolize the drastic slashing of government jobs.
Labor unions have sued to try to stop the mass firings, under which tens of thousands of federal workers have been told they no longer have a job, but a federal judge in Washington on Thursday ruled that they can continue for now.
Christy Armstrong, IRS director of talent acquisition, teared up as she told employees on a phone call that about 6,000 of their colleagues would be laid off and encouraged them to support each other, a worker who was on the call said.
“She was pretty emotional,” the worker said.
The layoffs are expected to total 6,700, according to a person familiar with the matter, and largely target workers at the agency hired as part of an expansion under Democratic President Joe Biden, who had sought to expand enforcement efforts on wealthy taxpayers. Republicans have opposed the expansion, arguing that it would lead to harassment of ordinary Americans.
The tax agency now employs roughly 100,000 people, compared with 80,000 before Biden took office in 2021.
Independent budget analysts had estimated that the staff expansion under Biden would work to boost government revenue and help narrow trillion-dollar budget deficits.
“This will ensure that the IRS is not going after the wealthy and is only an agency that’s really focused on the low income,” said University of Pittsburgh tax law professor, Philip Hackney, a former IRS lawyer. “It’s a travesty.”
Those fired include revenue agents, customer-service workers, specialists who hear appeals of tax disputes, and IT workers, and impact employees across all 50 states, sources said. The IRS did not respond to a request for comment.
The IRS has taken a more careful approach to downsizing than other agencies, given that it is in the middle of the tax-filing season. The agency expects to process more than 140 million individual returns by the April 15 filing deadline and will retain several thousand workers deemed critical for that task, one source said.
The Trump administration’s federal layoffs have focused on workers across the government who are new to their positions and have fewer protections than longer-tenured employees.

WAITING FOR DISMISSAL EMAIL
At the agency’s Kansas City office, probationary workers found all functions had been disabled on their computers except email, which would deliver their dismissal notices, said Shannon Ellis, a local union leader.
Ellis said she expects around 100 workers to be fired by the end of the day.
“What the American people really need to understand is that the funds that are collected through the Internal Revenue Service, they fund so many programs that we use every day in our society,” Ellis told Reuters.
The White House has not said how many of the nation’s 2.3 million civil-service workers it wants to fire and has given no numbers on the mass layoffs. Roughly 75,000 took a buyout offer last week.
The campaign has delighted Republicans for culling a federal workforce they view as bloated, corrupt and insufficiently loyal to Trump, while also taking aim at government agencies that regulate big business — including those that oversee Musk’s companies SpaceX, Tesla and Neuralink.
“I think our objective is to make sure that the employees that we pay are being productive and effective,” White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told reporters.
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team has also canceled contracts worth about $8.5 billion involving foreign aid, diversity training and other initiatives opposed by Trump. Both men have set a goal of cutting at least $1 trillion from the $6.7 trillion federal budget, though Trump has said he will not touch popular benefits programs that make up roughly one-third of that total.
Democratic critics have said Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority and hacking away at popular and critical government programs at the expense of legions of middle-class families.
Most Americans worry the cost-cutting could hurt government services, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Thursday.
Some agencies have struggled to comply with the rapid-fire directives Trump has issued since taking office a month ago. Workers who oversee US nuclear weapons were fired and then recalled, while medicines and food exports have been stranded in warehouses by Trump’s freeze on foreign aid.
Some workers were told they were fired for poor performance, despite receiving glowing reviews.
Those affected by Trump’s purge face an uphill battle if they want to contest their dismissal. A board that handles such disputes has been paralyzed by Trump’s effort to control it, and resolution can take months or years.

WASHINGTON: The Republican-controlled US Senate on Thursday confirmed Kash Patel, a staunch loyalist of President Donald Trump, to be director of the FBI, the country’s top law enforcement agency.
Patel, 44, whose nomination sparked fierce but ultimately futile opposition from Democrats, was approved by a 51-49 vote.
The vote was split along party lines with the exception of two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted not to confirm Patel to head the 38,000-strong Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Patel drew fire from Democrats for his promotion of conspiracy theories, his defense of pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and his vow to root out members of a supposed “deep state” plotting to oppose the Republican president.
The Senate has approved all of Trump’s cabinet picks so far, underscoring his iron grip on the Republican Party.
Among them is Tulsi Gabbard, confirmed as the nation’s spy chief despite past support for adversarial nations including Russia and Syria, and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be health secretary.
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, in a last-ditch bid to derail Patel’s nomination, held a press conference outside FBI headquarters in downtown Washington on Thursday and warned that he would be “a political and national security disaster” as FBI chief.
Speaking later on the Senate floor, Durbin said Patel is “dangerously, politically extreme.”
“He has repeatedly expressed his intention to use our nation’s most important law enforcement agency to retaliate against his political enemies,” he said.
Patel, who holds a law degree from Pace University and worked as a federal prosecutor, replaces Christopher Wray, who was named FBI director by Trump during his first term in office.
Relations between Wray and Trump became strained, however, and though he had three more years remaining in his 10-year tenure, Wray resigned after Trump won November’s presidential election.
A son of Indian immigrants, the New York-born Patel served in several high-level posts during Trump’s first administration, including as senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council and as chief of staff to the acting defense secretary.
There were fiery exchanges at Patel’s confirmation hearing last month as Democrats brought up a list of 60 supposed “deep state” actors — all critics of Trump — he included in a 2022 book, whom he said should be investigated or “otherwise reviled.”
Patel has denied that he has an “enemies list” and told the Senate Judiciary Committee he was merely interested in bringing lawbreakers to book.
“All FBI employees will be protected against political retribution,” he said.
The FBI has been in turmoil since Trump took office and a number of agents have been fired or demoted including some involved in the prosecutions of Trump for seeking to overturn the 2020 election results and mishandling classified documents.
Nine FBI agents have sued the Justice Department, seeking to block efforts to collect information on agents who were involved in investigating Trump and the attack on the Capitol by his supporters.
In their complaint, the FBI agents said the effort to collect information on employees who participated in the investigations was part of a “purge” orchestrated by Trump as “politically motivated retribution.”
Trump, on his first day in the White House, pardoned more than 1,500 of his supporters who stormed Congress in a bid to block certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory.