Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lashed out at President Donald Trump on Wednesday, suggesting that Trump is in a ‘disinformation space’ regarding peace talks with Russia.

Zelenskyy made the comments to reporters in Kyiv after canceling a trip to Saudi Arabia, where the U.S. and Russia held peace talks earlier in the week. 

‘Unfortunately, President Trump – I have great respect for him as a leader of a nation that we have great respect for, the American people who always support us – unfortunately lives in this disinformation space,’ Zelensky said.

Zelenskyy’s canceled trip to Saudi Arabia was widely seen as a rebuke of the agreements Trump’s team made with Russian counterparts during their Tuesday meeting there. Trump also followed up the meeting with aggressive criticism of Zelenskyy and Ukraine.

‘Today I heard, ‘Oh well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should’ve ended it after three years. You should’ve never started it. You could’ve made a deal,’ Trump said, appearing to suggest Ukraine was at fault in the war.

Trump envoy Keith Kellog, a retired 3-star general, arrived in Kyiv to hold talks with Zelenskyy on Wednesday. Ukrainian officials have emphasized that any peace deal will require U.S. security guarantees in order to ensure Russia does not continue the violence.

‘We understand the need for security guarantees,’ Kellog told Ukrainian media.

‘It’s very clear to us the importance of the sovereignty of this nation and the independence of this nation as well…. Part of my mission is to sit and listen,’ he added.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio led the U.S. delegation in Saudi Arabia, meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce also confirmed that Rubio’s team agreed to ‘lay the groundwork for cooperation’ with Russia on various issues in addition to Ukraine. They also agreed to appoint ‘high-level teams’ to begin working on a path to ending the conflict in Ukraine.

Their proposed framework for a peace agreement would see a ceasefire, followed by elections in Ukraine and the signing of a final agreement.

Reports from multiple foreign diplomatic sources say forcing Ukraine to hold new elections could be a key part of a peace deal. Both the U.S. and Russia believe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a low chance of winning re-election, the sources say.

‘Putin assesses the probability of electing a puppet president as quite high and is also convinced that any candidate other than the current President of Ukraine will be more flexible and ready for negotiations and concessions,’ the diplomatic sources said in a readout of the meeting.

Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich and the Associated Press contributed to this report

In its first appeal of its second term to reach the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is arguing that the judiciary is attempting ‘to seize executive power’ as courts have blocked the president from firing certain federal employees. 

Experts say the high court will likely be sympathetic to that argument and point to the ferocious dissent from a lower court judge, Trump appointee Greg Katsas, which they said laid the groundwork for Trump’s potential victory.

‘I am of the strong opinion that the devastating dissent written by Judge Katsas will strongly influence the current justices on the Supreme Court,’ Hans von Spakovsky, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital. 

The Justice Department filed an appeal to the Supreme Court in the case involving the firing of Hampton Dellinger, the head of the Special Counsel Office. Dellinger was fired from his role this month and shortly thereafter filed suit against the Trump administration, arguing that his termination was illegal and was ‘in direct conflict with nearly a century of precedent’ delineating proper removal of independent agency officials. 

A lower court judge initially issued an administrative stay that reinstated Dellinger to his position, to which he was appointed by former President Joe Biden. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to block that decision. 

The lower court then issued a temporary restraining order that reinstated Dellinger for 14 days. The DOJ appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which declined to lift the order on Sunday.

The panel, which voted 2-1, was split along party lines, with Katsas dissenting.

The Trump-appointed judge wrote that the order ‘warrants immediate appellate review’ as the issue at hand ‘directs the President to recognize and work with an agency head whom he has already removed.’

‘Where a lower court allegedly impinges on the President’s core Article II powers, immediate appellate review should be generally available,’ Katsas wrote. 

Katsas said the order ‘controlling how [the president] performs his official duties’ is ‘virtually unheard of.’ Katsas also wrote that the order ‘usurped a core Article II power of the President.’

In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the DOJ said the case ‘involves an unprecedented assault on the separation of powers that warrants immediate relief.’

‘Until now, as far as we are aware, no court in American history has wielded an injunction to force the President to retain an agency head whom the President believes should not be entrusted with executive power and to prevent the President from relying on his preferred replacement,’ the appeal reads. 

The Trump administration referred back to Katsas’ dissent numerous times in its appeal, arguing that the Court cannot allow courts ‘to seize executive power by dictating to the President how long he must continue employing an agency head against his will.’

Von Spakovsky called the appellate court’s decision declining to lift the order ‘really outrageous and an unprecedented abuse of their judicial authority.’

‘The Supreme Court itself has said that the president has the unrestricted authority to remove the single head of an executive agency, as Katsas points out, and yet these courts are thumbing their noses at the Supreme Court and blithely violating those precedents,’ von Spakovsky said.

Likewise, constitutional law attorney and Fox News Contributor Jonathan Turley said he expects the justices to ‘resonate’ with the arguments made in Katsas’ dissent. 

‘While the panel ruled on a technical barrier to the review of a temporary restraining order, the dissent correctly points out that this is an extraordinary claim of authority by the district court,’ Turley said.

Von Spakovsky called the appellate court’s decision ‘one of the worst examples of judicial activism we have seen’ and said ‘it needs to be immediately and decisively stopped by the Supreme Court.’

He continued on to advise that the court ‘should forgo its usual politeness and collegiality and severely criticize the district court judge for her contemptuous behavior as well as the appellate court judges for not stopping it.’

Nearly everyone agrees that the federal government has become this bloated monster that needs to be cut down to size.

The massive bureaucracy, attacked by some as evil, is absurdly overstaffed and wastes massive amounts of money.

What President Trump is doing in trying to shrink the size of government is popular – even if his billionaire budget-slasher, Elon Musk, is not – and many of the court battles are likely to be resolved in his favor.

But the equation is turned on its head when actual people feel the impact. And the media start highlighting sad cases of devastated folks. And Republican lawmakers start objecting to the cutbacks that hit home.

That’s why it’s so hard to cut the federal budget. It’s not like going into SpaceX and firing a bunch of software engineers. The political pressures can be intense.

Virtually every program in the federal budget is there because some group, at some time, convinced Congress it was a good idea. There are noble-sounding causes – cancer research, aid to veterans, subsidies for farmers.

In fact, farmers are threatened by the near-abolition of USAID – while most people hate foreign aid, food programs provide a crucial market for American farmers, many of whom are now stuck with spoiling surpluses or loans they can’t repay.

Now there’s plenty of game-playing that goes on with government programs. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that agencies could cut one of every 10 employees without damaging their core functions. 

Anyone who’s looked at the endless cycle of conferences, conventions, training confabs, office renovations and the like knows how much fat there is in these budgets. When you throw in lucrative payments to well-connected contractors, that figure skyrockets.

But when agency officials come under fire, they immediately insist that any cutbacks will instantly hurt the poor and downtrodden, or working-class folks living paycheck to paycheck. It used to be called the Washington Monument defense, the notion that any attempt to reduce funding for the Interior Department would cause the memorial’s immediate shutdown.

NIH, for instance, does world-class research that benefits the country. But the battle between Musk’s DOGE and the institute centers on how much is spent on indirect costs.

Musk says his aim is ‘dropping the overhead charged on NIH grants from the outrageous 60 percent to a far more reasonable 15 percent.’

But an NBC story is headlined: ‘NIH Cuts Could Stall Medical Progress for Lifesaving Treatments, Experts Say.’

The piece quotes Theodore Iwashyna, a physician at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, as saying his ‘father had pancreatic cancer, and the care plan developed for him existed only because of research funded through organizations like the NIH.’

Iwashyna says the overhead is needed for ‘computers, whiteboards, microscopes, electricity, and janitors and staff who keep labs clean and organized.’

Alabama Sen. Katie Britt, whose state is getting $518 million in NIH grants, mainly to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is raising objections. The conservative Republican told a reporter she wants the administration to take a ‘smart, targeted approach’ so as not to endanger ‘groundbreaking, lifesaving research.’

The examples are legion. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has asked the administration not to restrict funding for diversity programs among American Indian tribes.

As the New York Times puts it, ‘some Republicans’ have sought ‘carve outs and special consideration for agriculture programs, scientific research and more, even as they cheered on Mr. Trump’s overall approach.’

Musk’s DOGE team seems to be using a meat-ax method. Why lay off hundreds of FAA technicians and engineers just weeks after the fatal plane crash at Reagan National Airport, when there’s already a major shortage of air traffic controllers?

FEMA, which is already stretched thin after the Los Angeles wildfires and the Kentucky flooding, is preparing to fire hundreds of probationary workers, reports the Washington Post. Such workers, who have been with the government for one or two years, basically have no rights. 

But there has been zero effort to assess them. Some were told their performance was the issue, but showed the Post their evaluations. ‘Above fully successful,’ said one, for a fired GSA worker. ‘An outstanding year, consistently exceeding expectations,’ said the review for a fired NIH staffer.

But viewed from a different angle, the hometown paper and other outlets buy into the notion that federal employees should have tenure for life. Everyone in Washington knows that before Trump it was virtually impossible to fire such employees, even for cause. 

By contrast, Southwest Airlines just announced a 15% cut of its corporate workforce. No one is rushing to interview those laid off, because this sort of downsizing is routine in the private sector. But the Beltway ethos is that federal workers are entitled to their jobs.

Now intellectual honesty requires the observation that even radical cuts to the federal payroll won’t have much impact on the $840 billion budget deficit or the $36 trillion federal debt. The bulk of the budget consists of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending and interest on the debt.

Can Elon Musk and DOGE at least make progress on rooting out waste, fraud and abuse? Maybe. But the level of pain being inflicted on ordinary Americans, including in red states, and the natural tendency of politicians to shield local residents from that pain, and the media’s relentless spotlight on those suffering, are going to be a giant obstacle.

Medicaid is quickly emerging as a political lightning rod as House Republicans negotiate on a massive bill to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Some Republican lawmakers are worried about the level of spending cuts being sought by fiscal hawks to offset the cost of Trump’s policies, arguing the current deal could force potentially unworkable cuts on Medicaid and other federal safety net programs.

‘I’m concerned that $880 billion out of [the House Energy & Commerce Committee] is likely very steep cuts to Medicaid – and it’s the very thing President Trump asked us not to do,’ Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., told Fox News Digital on Tuesday.

GOP lawmakers are working to pass a broad swath of Trump policies – from investments in defense and border security to extending his 2017 tax cuts and eliminating taxes on tips – via the budget reconciliation process. The mechanism allows the party in control of both houses of Congress to pass a tax and budget bill without help from the opposing party.

But conservative spending hawks are looking for deep cuts in federal dollars to offset money going toward Trump’s priorities. The current resolution advancing through the House would aim to cut government spending by at least $1.5 trillion, while allocating $4.5 trillion toward Trump’s tax cuts.

An amendment added after conservatives balked at that deal would cut funding going toward Trump’s tax cuts by $500 billion if at least $2 trillion total spending cuts were not reached. 

Even before the additional cuts, however, some Republicans like Bacon are concerned that the $880 billion that the Energy & Commerce Committee is tasked with cutting will negatively impact their constituents.

Conservatives have pushed back, arguing that significant cuts could be found in Medicaid work requirements. But skeptics of that argument say that the level of spending cuts being sought go past what work requirements can cover.

‘We want to ensure that it’s not going to hurt… our hospitals, or our organizations that serve the developmentally disabled, and we’re asking for clarity on where the $880 billion in savings come from,’ Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., the only House Republican representing part of New York City, told Fox News Digital.

She did agree with GOP rebels that there was ‘mismanagement’ and waste to root out in those programs.

Malliotakis and other Republicans on the Ways & Means Committee tasked with writing tax policy are also uneasy about the new amendment that could cut funds allocated to their panel.

‘I don’t think that is doable without affecting beneficiaries, and I’ve expressed that concern to leadership and in talking to some of my colleagues,’ Malliotakis said.

Another House Republican who declined to be named told Fox News Digital that ‘there’s a bunch of us’ who think the proposed cuts ‘are too big.’

‘They’re trying to sell us $1.5 trillion, but in reality, there’s another $500 billion attached to it that they’re trying to cut. And it’s not going to pass,’ the GOP lawmaker said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Rob Bresnahan, R-Pa., who unseated a Democrat in a close race last year, wrote on X over the weekend, ‘I ran for Congress under a promise of always doing what is best for the people of Northeastern Pennsylvania. If a bill is put in front of me that guts the benefits my neighbors rely on, I will not vote for it.’

The budget reconciliation process allows legislation to advance with only GOP votes by lowering the threshold for Senate passage from two-thirds to a simple 51-seat majority. The House already operates on a simple majority.

But currently, Republicans can lose just one vote in the House to pass anything on party lines – meaning they can afford almost no dissent to get their reconciliation bill over the line.

Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a conservative on the House Budget Committee who would not have supported the resolution last week without the last-minute amendment, told reporters last week, ‘Medicaid’s got to be in it. You don’t get to the [$1.5 trillion figure], much less two, without it.’

‘And it’s not cuts to Medicaid. Work requirements have an $800 billion savings on it… able-bodied 40-year-old men who can work don’t need to be on Medicaid,’ Norman said.

Democrats are waiting to pounce on the discord.

The House Majority PAC, which is aligned with House Democratic leadership, released a memo on Tuesday accusing Republicans of seeking to make ‘deep cuts’ to Medicaid ‘to fund $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to Elon Musk and other billionaires.’

‘In battleground congressional districts across the country, House Republicans are putting Medicaid on the chopping block – a move that would rip life-saving health care away from tens of thousands of their own constituents – roughly half of whom are children,’ the memo said.

But according to Ways & Means Republicans, the average American household could see taxes raised by over 20% if the Trump tax cuts expired.

DOGE’s Elon Musk opened up in an interview alongside President Trump with Fox News Sean Hannity about a dinner party where he said he realized how ‘real’ Democratic animosity toward Trump can be.

‘I happened to mention the president’s name and it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained like methamphetamine and rabies,’ Musk said in the Tuesday night interview while recounting a situation where he mentioned Trump’s name at a dinner party and quickly received pushback.

Musk imitated people at the party going crazy and questioned why they couldn’t have a normal conversation.

‘It’s like they’ve become completely irrational,’ Musk said, adding in the interview that he didn’t realize the severity of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ was until he attended that dinner party.

During another point in the interview, Hannity asked if Musk would recuse himself from DOGE efforts if there was ever a conflict of interest.

‘If there’s a conflict he won’t be involved,’ Trump said. ‘I wouldn’t want that and he won’t want it.’

‘Right, and also I’m getting sort of a daily proctology exam,’ Musk added. ‘It’s not like I’ll be getting away for something in the dead of night.’

Musk and Trump sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Hannity where they discussed the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) work, the first 100 days of the Trump administration and more. It marks the duo’s first joint television interview.

‘He’s been so unfairly attacked,’ Musk said of Trump during the interview. ‘It’s really outrageous.’

‘I’ve spent a lot of time with the President, and not once have I seen him do anything mean or cruel or wrong.’

DOGE chief Elon Musk revealed details about his thought process on endorsing President Trump during a sit-down interview with Trump and Fox News anchor Sean Hannity on Tuesday night that the president said he had not heard before.

‘I was going to do it anyway,’ Musk said during the interview that aired Tuesday night when Hannity mentioned that his endorsement of Trump came after an attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania on the campaign trail.

‘That was it?’ Hannity said.

‘That was a precipitating event,’ Musk said. 

‘That sped it up a little bit?’ Trump then said to Musk. ‘I didn’t know that.’

Musk responded, ‘It sped it up, but I was going to do it anyway.’

Musk announced that he ‘fully supports’ former President Trump after gunshots rang out at his Pennsylvania rally in July in a move that many, including some Democrats, believe played a significant role in Trump’s campaign.

‘Not even just that he has endorsed [Trump], but the fact that now he’s becoming an active participant and showing up and doing rallies and things like that,’ Dem. Sen. John Fetterman told the New York Times in October, explaining that the enormously successful Tesla and SpaceX CEO is an attractive figure for the kinds of voters Harris needs to win.

‘I mean, [Musk] is incredibly successful, and, you know, I think some people would see him as, like, a Tony Stark,’ said Fetterman, referencing the popular Marvel Comics character. ‘Democrats, you know, kind of make light of it, or they make fun of him jumping up and down and things like that. And I would just say that they are doing that at our peril.’

In an interview with CNN, Fetterman added, ‘Endorsements, they’re really not meaningful often, but this one is, I think. That has me concerned.’

Fox News Digital’s Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report