US, Russia meet on Ukraine ceasefire negotiations. Ukraine shut out of talks. | The Excerpt
On Wednesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: The U.S. and Russia met Tuesday on Ukraine ceasefire negotiations, while Ukraine and other European nations were shut out of the talks. Paste BN Democracy Reporter Erin Mansfield discusses a complaint filed by lawyers, arguing President Donald Trump's mass firing of probationary employees was illegal and not performance-based. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is scrambling to rehire fired employees who play a key role in the agency's response to bird flu. Plus, a judge won't block Elon Musk's records access because states couldn't show 'irreparable harm.' Paste BN Money and Personal Finance Reporter Medora Lee talks about the possibility of IRS staffing cuts and what that might mean for taxpayers.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Wednesday, February 19, 2025. This is The Excerpt. Today we examine this week's talks between the US and Russia plus lawyers in a new complaint pushed back against the mass firings of probationary workers. And if we see IRS staffing cuts, what's that mean for tax season?
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In the first major negotiations for a ceasefire in Ukraine since Russia's invasion nearly three years ago, US officials and their Russian counterparts met in Saudi Arabia after refusing to include Ukraine or other European countries in the talks. As the gathering wrapped yesterday, it was still unclear what terms could lead to an end in the fighting. The meeting marked the first fall, though, in US-Russia relations in years. Talks covered security guarantees and territory according to the US delegation. The meetings come after President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone last week. Meanwhile, Ukraine's leaders pushed back against being left out of the talks as did several other European leaders, fuming at the US for moving forward with talks without Europe's cooperation. Many of them held their own emergency meeting in Paris.
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The recent firings of federal employees who were new to their jobs violate federal laws about merit-based hiring and layoffs. That's according to the lawyers for a group of fired probationary workers in a complaint last week. I spoke with Paste BN Democracy Reporter Erin Mansfield to learn more. Hello, Erin.
Erin Mansfield:
Hi, how are you?
Taylor Wilson:
Good, good. Thanks for wrapping on today, Erin. So let's just reset the stage to get into this story, if you don't mind. I mean, what have we seen with Trump's recent mass firings? What happened here?
Erin Mansfield:
So what we have is a lot of people, largely on Friday night, who have been in their job, usually under a year, got noticed that they were no longer going to be employed at their federal agency. It happened at agencies all across the government, transportation, education, so on and so forth. If you can think of a three-letter agency, they probably had some kind of layoff. It's been really hard on people, and now we have a legal complaint related to it, and that's what I'm here to talk to you about.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah, well, let's dig into that. I mean, what did the lawyers really say here and who are we talking about here? Who are the players who brought this complaint?
Erin Mansfield:
Yeah, so this is not a lawsuit, I just need to be clear. This is a group of lawyers, Democracy Forward, which is an advocacy group and then a private law firm. They decided to go to this office that exists within the federal government that essentially helps out federal workers. They most notably protect whistleblowers who get retaliated against. They went to that group, it's called the Office of the Special Counsel, and they said, "We don't think these firings are legal. We think this was basically a reduction in force," which is a legal term, "and we don't think these were based on performance, and we want you to help us reverse them and stop further firings."
Taylor Wilson:
Erin, in this piece, you mentioned this 1883 law that Congress passed out ostensibly to, I guess, root out corruption that sometimes happens when presidents put in their allies to federal jobs instead of qualified professionals. Can you talk through that law a little bit and how it maybe pertains to this conversation?
Erin Mansfield:
That law is really the basis for what we call civil service. But the general concept is that there are all these different laws protecting federal employees, and it's not to make their jobs easier. It's because we used to have a system called spoils. You talk about the winter spoils, victor spoils maybe in a board game, and what would happen is a president, the way that they could get elected and then they could just install their friends. So you don't want someone in a medical post with no medical degree. You don't want someone who's not qualified for a position. So what this 1883 law did was it essentially established the civil service protecting workers, making it harder to fire them, and it was because they wanted people who were best qualified and could perform the jobs as opposed to whoever was maybe the closest with a political party or some other politician.
Taylor Wilson:
Erin, after this complaint from the lawyers, I mean, have we heard from the White House at all in response or defense to any of this?
Erin Mansfield:
So I have not personally heard from the White House, but they did previously address questions to one of our reporters, a spokesperson for the White House, Harrison Fields told Paste BN previously, "President Trump returned to Washington with a mandate from the American people to bring about unprecedented change in our federal government to uproot waste, fraud, and abuse. This isn't easy to do in a broken system, entrenched in bureaucracy and bloat, but it's a task long overdue," he said. I also reached out to the Office of the Special Counsel, which was the recipient of that complaint. I have not heard from them, and whether they plan to carry that ball forward.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Erin Mansfield covers democracy for Paste BN. As always, the listeners can go find the full piece with the link in today's show notes. Thank you, Erin.
Erin Mansfield:
Thank you. You have a great day.
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Taylor Wilson:
The Department of Agriculture is scrambling to rehire several fired employees who play a key role in the agency's response to bird flu. That's according to an NBC news report citing an unnamed agency spokesperson. The news of the mistaken firings comes as President Donald Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk slashes the federal workforce.
And in other DOGE news, a federal judge yesterday refused to block Musk's access to sensitive records at several federal departments after another judge limited the Department of Government Efficiency's access to the Treasury Department. US District Judge Tanya Chutkan held hearings on the request from 14 states, which argued that Musk was exercising unchecked power to gain access to sensitive information, terminate personnel, and end contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But Chutkan ruled that the states had not shown they would suffer imminent irreparable harm unless she blocked DOGE. You can read more about that with a link in today's show notes.
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The IRS is facing a hiring freeze and the potential to lose thousands of workers in the next couple of weeks as part of President Donald Trump's aggressive attempt to downsize the federal government. What might that mean for tax season? I spoke with Paste BN Money and Personal Finance Reporter Medora Lee for more. Hello, Medora.
Medora Lee:
Hi, how are you?
Taylor Wilson:
Good, good. Thanks for hopping on today. So let's just start hearing, we've talked a lot about these federal staffing cuts here on the show. What's happened with federal staffing cuts and what's the expectation now for IRS positions?
Medora Lee:
Yeah, so Donald Trump is on an aggressive attempt to downsize the federal government as everybody knows. He's taken drastic cost-cutting measures that have already touched a wide bridge of agencies, including Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education where he's just offered buyouts to thousands of federal employees as well as axed some of these jobs. So now he has the IRS in his view, and the scuttlebutt is that there are going to be some thousands of layoffs in the next, maybe this week or next week. That's in addition to a hiring freeze that they already had at the IRS. So the IRS is now facing a double whammy of the hiring freeze and possibly losing thousands of workers in the next couple of weeks.
Taylor Wilson:
Wow, okay. So what might all this mean, Medora, for taxpayers and tax filers if we do see any of those IRS staffing cuts?
Medora Lee:
Tax season's already started. So if this comes in the middle of tax season, this could be really difficult for taxpayers who are looking to get a fast refund check, or especially if they need assistance. When there are fewer people, they may have to reallocate their resources and shift people around to do different duties and customer service, which is, I'm pretty sure everybody already knows, isn't the greatest that the IRS. How long is that wait on hold? That it could be actually even longer. And we even had a bunch of Democratic senators who've come out with a letter to the administration saying that these moves could delay refunds and make taxpayer service a lot worse. And seeing that millions of Americans really rely on the biggest payday of the year, these refunds, these senators are saying that these IRS cuts are going to end up causing serious financial hardship for people.
If they do these IRS cuts, there might be fewer in-person service centers because they won't have the staff for it. So that's other than the customer service lines and longer wait times on hold. That might happen. And this is interesting, there might be fewer jobs for military personnel and their spouses, because according to the former IRS Chief Charles Rettig, almost 10% of current IRS employees including on-probation new hires are military veterans, and then a lot of the IRS employees they hire to work during the filing season are spouses of current military personnel.
Taylor Wilson:
Does a smaller IRS have benefits for anyone in America, Medora?
Medora Lee:
We can think of one possibly. The former IRS Chief Charles Rettig said in a LinkedIn post that he thinks that possibly non-compliant taxpayers might benefit. We need compliance activities to get people to be honest in their tax filings. And if we can't be compliant and we have to cut down on audits, especially complex ones because we don't have the resources to have these auditors, we don't have time to train them, then we are going to not be able to do as many of these and people will not be so self-policing.
Taylor Wilson:
All right. Well, that April 15th deadline is still, what, a couple months off, but what can taxpayers do to prepare for possible IRS disruptions?
Medora Lee:
So the biggest thing that CPAs, I know they always say file early, file early, but this time they say they really, really mean it because they want you to try to get your return in before there are these massive potential job cuts at the IRS, because once those job cuts start to hit, processing returns might be slower. So they're telling you to try to file as early as possible, get your return processed, and if you can, for e-filing and direct deposit so you can get that refund as fast as possible. Everything is good. Sometimes you can get it in as little as eight days, and I think 90% of people who go that route get their refunds within less than 21 days.
And something else is if you have to call the IRS, which I'm sure everybody avoids as much as possible, try to do it as early as possible so the lines don't get clogged and the staffing is not great later in the day. And some lines are staffed as early as 7:00 A.M. Eastern. So wake up early, set your alarm and call the IRS. And if you have any open audits or claims, try to settle them as soon as possible because even though IRS employees that accepted a buyout offer have to work through May 15th, a lot of IRS employees may leave as soon as April when tax season is about over and they just want to move on. So those are some things to really think about.
Taylor Wilson:
Great pointers. Medora Lee covers money and personal finance for Paste BN. Thank you, Medora.
Medora Lee:
Thank you. Have a good day.
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Taylor Wilson:
Lorne Michaels, the creative force behind Saturday Night Live, made the show into a cultural institution. Biographer Susan Morrison says it's all part of the show's DNA.
Susan Morrison:
He realized that like New York City, which is the show's home, SNL exists to be in a permanent state of flux. Buildings will come down, new buildings will go up in the same way the cast has to remake itself again and again like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
Taylor Wilson:
You can hear Susan's conversation with my colleague Dana Taylor, right here on this feed today, beginning at 4:00 P.M. Eastern Time. And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.