Trump to speak to Putin and Zelenskyy about Ukraine ceasefire – US politics live

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Michael Sainato

Donald Trump’s bid to gut the top US consumer watchdog has left the agency unable to protect consumers amid mounting fears of recession, according to workers.

For months the Trump administration has pushed to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fire the vast majority of its workforce. Ripped-off Americans will have “nowhere to turn” if it succeeds, staff told the Guardian.

“The agency that Congress created after the last financial crisis to help prevent another financial crisis is currently completely handcuffed from working,” said one attorney at the CFPB, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “And we are on the verge of another major financial crisis, so it’s terrifying.

“The one thing we were created to do we can’t do – at a time when we’re most needed.”

Trump officials tried to axe about 1,500 of the CFPB’s 1,700 workers last month, only for his plan to be blocked by a federal judge.

“This whirlwind has been hard on everyone, but everyone comes back with more fight to keep the bureau going, because we know the harms that will be visited on people if it goes under,” said a software engineer at the agency. “When it comes to loans, mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, bank accounts, we’re out there protecting everyone.

“We have helped millions of people. We have returned billions of dollars. It isn’t the way it has to be that there is nowhere to turn to when a bank or credit card rips you off. That is something everyone is exposed to. That’s what’s heartbreaking to me about the possibility of my job disappearing.”

Two high-profile Catholics, Pope Leo XIV and US vice-president JD Vance, were meeting Monday ahead of a flurry of US-led diplomatic efforts to make progress on a ceasefire in Russia’s war in Ukraine, AP reported.

Vance’s motorcade was seen entering Vatican City just after 7.30am Vance, a Catholic convert, had led the US delegation to the formal Mass opening the pontificate of the first American pope.

Joining Vance at the Vatican was secretary of state Marco Rubio, also a Catholic, Vance spokesperson Luke Schroeder said.

The Vatican, which was largely sidelined during the first three years of Russia’s war, has offered to host any peace talks while continuing humanitarian efforts to facilitate prisoner swaps and reunite Ukrainian children taken by Russia.

Trump tax bill passes in key US House committee vote

Donald Trump’s sweeping tax-cut bill, stalled for days by Republican infighting over spending cuts, won approval from a key congressional committee on Sunday to advance toward possible passage in the House of Representatives later this week.

The action was a big win for Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson, after hardline Republican conservatives on Friday blocked the bill from clearing the House Budget Committee over a dispute involving spending cuts to the Medicaid healthcare program for lower-income Americans and the repeal of green energy tax credits, Reuters reports.

Four hardline members of the committee’s 21 Republicans allowed the legislation to advance by voting “present” in a rare Sunday night session. The bill passed in a 17-16 vote, with all Democrats voting against it.

The hardliners had spent much of the day in closed-door negotiations with House Republican leaders and White House officials.

“The deliberations continue at this very moment. They will continue on into the week, and I suspect, right up until the time we put this big, beautiful bill before the House,” House budget chair Jodey Arrington said.

Nonpartisan analysts say the bill, which would extend the 2017 tax cuts that were Trump’s signature first-term legislative win, would add $3tn to $5tn to the nation’s $36.2tn in debt over the next decade. Moody’s cited the rising debt, which it said was on track to reach 134% of GDP by 2035, for its decision on Friday to downgrade the US credit rating.

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent dismissed the cut’s significance in a pair of Sunday television interviews, saying the bill would spur economic growth that would outpace what the nation owed.

“I don’t put much credence in the Moody’s” downgrade, Bessent told CNN’s “State of the Union” program, echoing White House criticism.

Economic experts, meanwhile, warn the downgrade from the last of the three major credit agencies was a clear sign that the US has too much debt and should prompt lawmakers to either increase revenue or spend less.

Kremlin says Trump and Putin to talk at 5pm Moscow time on Monday, RIA reports

The Kremlin said that Russian president Vladimir Putin will hold a call with US president Donald Trump at 5pm Moscow time (10am EDT) on Monday, state news agency RIA reported.

RIA cited Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov as saying that the two leaders’ discussion of Ukraine would take into account the results of talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul last week.

Trump to speak to Putin and Zelenskyy about Ukraine ceasefire

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news throughout the next few hours.

Donald Trump is due to speak to both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an effort to stop what he called the “bloodbath” war in Ukraine.

Trump, posting on his Truth Social account on Saturday, wrote that he will speak to Putin on Monday morning. “THE SUBJECTS OF THE CALL WILL BE, STOPPING THE ‘BLOODBATH’ THAT IS KILLING, ON AVERAGE, MORE THAN 5000 RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN SOLDIERS A WEEK, AND TRADE,” Trump wrote, in his customary all-capitalized prose. The president has repeatedly cited a death toll for the conflict that is much higher than any official figures, or estimates based on an open-source investigation, without explaining why.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed to a state-run Russian news agency that preparations were under way for a call between the US and Russian presidents.

Trump’s call with the Russian president will be followed by a separate conversation with Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s leader, and Nato leaders as part of the US effort to end the war that has raged since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. “HOPEFULLY IT WILL BE A PRODUCTIVE DAY, A CEASEFIRE WILL TAKE PLACE, AND THIS VERY VIOLENT WAR, A WAR THAT SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED, WILL END,” Trump wrote.

It’s unclear what kind of progress Trump will be able to spur, if any, in the peace process. Russia and Ukraine have just concluded mostly fruitless talks, the first of their kind since the start of the war, in Istanbul. Ukraine said it was ready for a ceasefire but was faced by “unacceptable” demands from Russia.

In other news:

• Donald Trump’s acceptance of a $400m Boeing jet from Qatar is the “definition of corruption”, a top Democrat said on Sunday, as several senior Republicans joined in a bipartisan fusillade of criticism and concern over the luxury gift. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator for Connecticut, condemned the “flying grift” on NBC as he assailed the president’s trip to several Gulf states this week that included a stop in Qatar.

• As Trump wages a blunt attack on major law firms and the justice department, some lawyers are starting their own law firms and challenging the administration’s effort to cut funding and punish civil servants. The decision to start the firms come as the judiciary has emerged as a major bulwark against the Trump administration.

• The US retail company Walmart will “eat some of the tariffs” in line with Trump’s demands, the president’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has insisted, claiming he received the assurance in a personal phone call with the company’s chief executive, Doug McMillon. Walmart said last week it had no alternative to raising prices for consumers beginning later this month because it could not absorb the cost of the president’s tariffs on international trade.

• A proposed rule change making it easier to fire civil servants deemed to be “intentionally subverting presidential directives” could pave the way for the White House to fire statisticians employed to produce objective data on the economy but whose figures prove politically inconvenient, experts warn. With Trump under pressure to explain shrinking gross domestic product (GDP) figures amid economists’ warnings that tariffs could trigger a recession, the administration could use new employment rules to pressure workers into “cooking the books”.

• Former US president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office announced on Sunday, and he and his family are considering options for treatment. Donald Trump expressed concern on behalf of himself and first lady Melania Trump.

• US government debt may come under more pressure this week after the credit rating agency Moody’s stripped the US of its top-notch triple-A rating.