Trump Administration Live Updates: Ukraine and Allies Said to Agree on Security Guarantees
Where Things Stand
Russia-Ukraine: Negotiators from Ukraine, the United States and Europe are said to have agreed on security guarantees for Kyiv that resemble those for NATO members as they attempt to hammer out a peace proposal that could be acceptable to Russia. While two U.S. officials said talks in Berlin with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had made significant progress, the crucial matter of drawing the countries’ border would be left to Mr. Zelensky and Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. Read more ›
National Guard: Monday is the deadline for the Trump administration to remove California National Guard troops from Los Angeles. An appeals court ruling last week upheld a decision that found the federal government had illegally prolonged the military presence in the city months after intense protests over immigration enforcement had died down. Read more ›
Award ceremony: President Trump will award a medal to members of the military who have been deployed to operations that support immigration operations at the border with Mexico. Since returning to office in January, Mr. Trump has set aside billions of dollars to hire more immigration officers and increase deportations.
Reporting from Washington
The Trump administration on Monday began a recruiting effort aimed at bolstering the government’s ranks of technology workers, starting a program that will hire tech employees to join federal agencies and work on projects related to artificial intelligence and modernization.
The project, called the U.S. Tech Force, is the first targeted recruiting program of its kind for the administration, which kicked off its tenure by firing federal workers and pressuring tens of thousands to resign. The government has long needed more tech workers, but that deficit most likely worsened this year, when an unknown number departed.
“We have some resources, but certainly it’s an area that we need to build out more,” Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, which is leading the program, told reporters on Monday.
The goal is to hire about 1,000 top-level technical employees and supervisors to work on projects at agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Defense Department. The government is seeking software engineers, data scientists and product managers. After two years, Mr. Kupor said, they can stay in government or take a higher-paying job in the private sector.
The Tech Force resembles other efforts by the federal government to recruit more technologists. The U.S. Digital Corps, a program initiated in 2021 under the Biden administration, also seeks to bring tech workers into federal jobs for two-year terms, but it targets candidates in earlier stages of their careers. That program was intended to allow participants to help the government modernize its technology before eventually moving on to higher-paying jobs in the tech industry.
Another program was the U.S. Digital Service, founded in 2014, which the Trump administration fashioned into a home for the Department of Government Efficiency and renamed the U.S. DOGE Service. The project, spearheaded by Elon Musk, also sought to bring tech workers into government jobs for rapid modernization. But DOGE made sweeping job cuts as well — including senior technologists in the Digital Service and others in the wing of the General Services Administration that runs the Digital Corps. DOGE also eliminated 18F, a digital services agency created in 2014 that developed software and technology products for various federal agencies and employed nearly 100 people.
In February, Mr. Musk posted on X that 18F had been “deleted” and reposted another social media message that called it a “far-left government wide computer office.”
Mathias Rechtzigel, who left the U.S. Digital Corps over the summer through the administration’s resignation incentive program and previously worked at the Digital Service, said the new Tech Force sounded like an effort to replace the more senior tech talent that DOGE had fired.
The government was in need of more “smart technologists,” Mr. Rechtzigel said. The Tech Force, he said, appeared to be recruiting people a lot like him.
“I do think that this is a reaction to DOGE not going well,” said Mr. Rechtzigel, who now works at a tech start-up.
Mr. Kupor distinguished the Tech Force from DOGE, which is still active but is not as prominent since Mr. Musk left this year.
“If you think about a lot of what the DOGE engineers did, a lot of things, but a big portion, of course, was looking for waste, fraud and abuse, which you know is ongoing, and it’s still a very important thing,” Mr. Kupor said. “Our hope here is that these individuals will really focus on, broadly, modernization efforts.”
Mr. Musk was widely criticized for his chain-saw approach to shrinking the government instead of studying agencies and recommending more specific job cuts.
The job market in the tech sector has softened in recent years, and many large tech companies have had widespread cuts, making it less certain that a worker could easily return to the industry after a temporary stint in the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management said major tech firms like Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and OpenAI were teaming up with the Tech Force, pledging to recruit workers from within their companies and potentially hiring ones leaving the program.
From his first days in office, President Trump has thrown his support behind artificial intelligence, answering the lobbying wishes of Silicon Valley. One of his first actions was to unwind Biden-era directives for safety standards.
In July, the Trump administration introduced an A.I. action plan aimed at accelerating the growth of domestic artificial intelligence companies by cutting red tape on the development of A.I. data centers and opening up exports of A.I. chips and technologies, including to China. Last week, Mr. Trump signed an executive order seeking to neuter state A.I. laws that protect consumers and require safety testing of the largest systems.
Kate Conger contributed reporting from in San Francisco, and Cecilia Kang from Washington.
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Reporting from Washington
President Trump seized on the stabbing death of Rob Reiner and his wife to make a baseless attack on the Hollywood director less than a day after reports of his killing, suggesting that Mr. Reiner’s criticism of Mr. Trump may have led to his murder.
The president wrote on Truth Social on Monday that Mr. Reiner’s death was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
The Reiners’ 32-year-old son has been “booked for murder,” according to the Los Angeles police chief, Jim McDonnell. There was no indication from the authorities that the couple’s political beliefs had anything to do with their deaths.
Mr. Reiner was killed alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, at their home in Los Angeles.
Mr. Trump’s attack brought immediate outrage, even from some fellow Republicans.
“Regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, wrote on social media on Monday. “I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid? I challenge anyone to defend it.”
Over the years, Mr. Trump has at times showed little empathy over the death of a perceived rival. He criticized Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, after his death; and suggested a deceased Democratic lawmaker, John D. Dingell of Michigan, was looking up from hell.
His attack on the Reiners came as many were still in shock over their violent deaths.
“This statement is wrong,” Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, wrote on social media. “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, also said that this was no time to attack one’s political rivals.
“This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies,” she wrote on social media.
The couple were found stabbed to death on Sunday in their Los Angeles home in an apparent homicide.
Their son, Nick Reiner, was arrested on Sunday night and is being held in a jail in Los Angeles County on $4 million bail, according to county jail records.
Nick Reiner had spoken over the years about his struggles with drug abuse and bouts of homelessness beginning in his teenage years.
Mr. Trump “knows no shame,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, wrote in response to the president’s post.
The United States, Ukraine and Europe have agreed on a NATO-like guarantee for the future security of Ukraine, two U.S. officials told reporters on Monday after negotiations over a peace agreement that they said President Trump thinks he can sell to President Vladimir V. Putin.
After two days of talks in Berlin, the American officials said they had resolved or significantly closed gaps on 90 percent of their differences on the 20-point draft agreement to end the war. But they acknowledged that the volatile question of where to draw a new Ukraine-Russia border in the Donbas, where much of the fighting continues, remained unresolved.
“For now we have different positions, to be honest,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said at a brief news conference on Monday. “But I think my colleagues have heard my personal position.” Mr. Zelensky has said it would be impossible for Ukraine to give up territory, mostly in Donetsk, that Russia has not taken on the battlefield. Mr. Trump has told him, officials say, that he should surrender that territory, because he will most likely lose it in coming months if the fighting continues.
Ultimately, the two American officials said, that negotiation would be left to Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky — and privately American and European officials say that is one of several issues that could derail what have been the most extensive negotiations on ending the fighting since Russia invaded Ukraine just shy of four years ago. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity under rules set by the Trump administration for the negotiations.
Most of the conversations over the past two days, the officials said, focused on the security guarantee, which is intended to deter Russia from invading Ukrainian territory again in coming years. The two officials were vague about the specifics, though they said that Mr. Trump was willing to submit any final agreement on American commitments to Ukraine to the Senate for approval. They did not say whether the guarantee would become a formal treaty — akin to what the United States has with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and other allies — or whether any vote would simply be intended to show a bipartisan commitment.
Mr. Trump has said the United States would not contribute ground troops to a security force. But last summer he offered to patrol the skies, and enforce a no-fly zone, in addition to continuing to provide Ukraine with intelligence from U.S. satellites and signals intercepts. Senior officials say that offer still stands.
European officials, who had been skeptical of Mr. Trump’s willingness to play a central role in Ukraine’s security, said they emerged from the meeting impressed.
“In recent days, we have seen significant diplomatic momentum, perhaps the most since the war began on Feb. 24, 2022,” said Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, standing next to Mr. Zelensky during the news conference on Monday. “We now have the opportunity for a genuine peace process for Ukraine,” he said.
But despite the enthusiastic characterization of the talks, there is plenty of reason for caution. The negotiations that were continuing Monday night with a dinner of European leaders, which Mr. Trump was expected to join by phone or video link, did not include Russia.
And in recent days senior officials have acknowledged that as the draft agreement is amended to address more of Ukraine’s concerns, the more difficult it will be to persuade Mr. Putin to sign on. His strategy so far, senior American officials say, has been to encourage the conversation while continuing to pound Ukraine’s electrical and heating infrastructure with near-nightly missile and drone attacks, in hopes of breaking the will of the Ukrainian population over a long, cold winter.
Mr. Zelensky has been pressing since February, when he had his surprising televised confrontation with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, for ironclad guarantees that Western allies would come to Ukraine’s aid if Russia attacked anew, either directly or indirectly. Mr. Trump was resistant for months.
“Only reliable guarantees can deliver peace,” the Ukrainian leader wrote on X over the weekend, recalling that the guarantees in a 1994 accord, called the Budapest Memorandum, failed to deter a war that has resulted in more than 1.5 million casualties.
Reporting was contributed by Jeanna Smialek from Brussels and Maria Varenikova from Kyiv, Ukraine.
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Reporting from Washington
Republicans in Congress accused Washington, D.C.’s police department of lowering its crime statistics by reclassifying certain incidents as lesser charges, in their latest effort to buttress President Trump’s federal takeover of law enforcement and the National Guard deployment in the capital city.
In a report published on Sunday, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee said interviews with the city police’s seven district commanders showed the department’s leadership had put an aggressive emphasis on lowering crime numbers and fed “a culture of fear, intimidation, threats and retaliation” under its police chief, Pamela A. Smith.
The committee said the department’s leadership had encouraged categorizing certain cases of assaults with deadly weapons and burglaries as less serious charges, such as “endangerment with a firearm” and unlawful entry, citing excerpts from interviews with the district commanders. Those lesser categories were excluded from the daily crime statistics reported out to the public, the report said.
The committee also interviewed an eighth commander who was put on leave this year as the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C. investigated alleged altering of crime statistics.
Ms. Smith said last week that she was resigning as police chief at the end of the month, citing a desire to spend more time with her family. She said in an interview with a local Fox affiliate that she had not encouraged the manipulation of crime statistics and denied there was a problem. In any cases of manipulated data, “when it’s brought to my attention, we will hold those members accountable,” she said.
The Justice Department and the president have also heavily criticized Ms. Smith and the Metropolitan Police Department and claimed its data was altered. The accusations came as Mr. Trump faced resistance in declaring a crime emergency in the capital city in August.
His critics cited the trend of decreasing violent crime numbers in Washington and other major cities in recent years to question the president’s rationale for taking over D.C.’s police department and deploying about 2,000 National Guard troops. Mr. Trump called Washington’s crime statistics “phony” and suggested there was a conspiracy, despite having cited those numbers earlier to take credit for the city’s drop in violent crimes.
Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky and the chairman of the Oversight Committee, said in a statement that Ms. Smith had “coerced staff to report artificially low crime data and cultivated a culture of fear to achieve her agenda.” He suggested that Ms. Smith’s resignation “should not be seen as a voluntary choice” but the result of her “manipulating crime statistics.”
Experts have said that while it is possible the city underreports some crime data on its public website, its official reports to the F.B.I. are still reliable and do show a decline in violent crime.
Jeff Asher, a national crime data analyst, said in an interview that the Republican-led report raised questions that the Police Department might be underreporting certain cases of crime. He said it fell short, however, of providing clear evidence of deliberate or widespread underreporting.
Mr. Asher said his own analysis of Washington’s crime data showed a mismatch between the violent crime numbers that its police department reported to the F.B.I. and the department’s public data. But the overall trend of a decline in violent crime since 2023 in Washington still holds true in the face of some discrepancies, he said.
The Metropolitan Police Department “would be well served to figure out why the underreporting is happening and what they can do to fix it,” Mr. Asher said. “But the decline is clear, well-defined and based on multiple sources.”
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser of Washington praised Ms. Smith and the city’s police officers in an emailed statement for a “precipitous decline in crime” and “their hard work and dedication.”
“I thank Chief Smith for her commitment to the safety of D.C. residents and for holding the Metropolitan Police Department to an exacting standard, and I expect no less from our next chief of police,” Ms. Bowser said. The Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
In recent months, Republican lawmakers have tried to impose stricter federal control over the capital city, especially on law enforcement, with the support of some moderate Democrats.
House lawmakers passed bills that would nullify local Washington laws such as those that gave more lenient sentencing to people younger than 25 and allowed cashless bail. Unlike other cities, the District of Columbia is subject to significant federal oversight that allows Congress to review its legislation and rewrite its laws.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington is also investigating whether city police officials falsified crime data, which has prompted criticism that the administration is using the levers of the criminal justice system to pursue the president’s political opponents.
Sara Guerrero, a spokeswoman for Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, said her Republican colleagues in the panel were “trying to use this investigation to justify President Trump’s authoritarian power grab.”
“Democrats remain committed to reducing crime by supporting cities in hiring more police and by advancing proven policies like investing in communities and combating gun violence,” she said.
Michael Gold contributed reporting.
Reporting from Los Angeles
The Trump administration must remove California National Guard troops from Los Angeles by Monday, a federal appellate court ruled. The decision upheld a lower court order that halted the mobilization that had roiled the nation’s second-largest city for six months.
The ruling late Friday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit substantially upheld a district court decision from earlier this week that found the federal government had illegally prolonged the military presence in Los Angeles months after intense protests over immigration enforcement had died down.
The decision by the three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit effectively blocked the Trump administration from using the remaining 100 or so National Guard troops in California — at least, for the moment.
But the appellate judges temporarily blocked a key part of the order by District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer that would have forced the Trump administration to return control of the troops to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who ordinarily commands them.
California officials celebrated the move as a partial victory in a battle that has dragged on for months.
“The Ninth Circuit’s decision means that, come Monday, there will be no National Guard troops deployed in California. Let me repeat: For the first time in six months, there will be no military deployed on the streets of Los Angeles,” the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, said in a statement.
“California did not ask to be a testing ground for the president’s militarized vision of America,” he added. “There is no crisis to justify the National Guard’s continued presence, and we look forward to continuing to prove that in court.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At the deployment’s high point in June, about 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines were commandeered by the Trump administration and dispatched to Los Angeles. State and local officials objected strenuously to the move, calling it an inflammatory overreaction to scattered demonstrations that were being ably handled by local and state law enforcement agencies.
Mr. Newsom sued over the initial deployment, but the administration argued that the troops were responding to an emergency and were needed to protect federal agents and property. In June, the Ninth Circuit ruled that conditions in Los Angeles were sufficient for Mr. Trump to take control of the state’s National Guard and direct troops to provide protection during the enforcement of immigration laws.
The administration began gradually drawing down the number of federalized troops in July as public condemnation grew and protests abated. As of last month, about 300 California National Guard members remained under the president’s command, and most were in the process of being released to their usual duties, which generally involve part-time service controlled by the state.
State officials said on Friday that the California deployment consisted of about 100 troops on federal orders that were scheduled to last into February. Last week, Judge Breyer ruled that any emergency the president might have cited as justification for the deployment had long since ended, and that all remaining troops should be released from federal orders and returned to the governor’s command.
Lawyers for the Trump administration argued that the law required an emergency only at the time the president decided to federalize National Guard troops, after which he could extend the deployment as long as he deemed necessary. They also said that troops were still needed to protect federal workers from threats stemming from immigration raids that have been intensely unpopular in immigrant-heavy Southern California.
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