President Donald Trump issued an unsmiling warning to bureaucrats on Tuesday, ordering that leaders of government agencies begin to be ‘radically transparent’ about spending.

The White House published a memo entitled ‘Radical Transparency About Wasteful Spending’ on Tuesday afternoon, directed at the heads of executive departments and agencies.

The memo begins by arguing that the American government ‘spends too much money on programs, contracts, and grants that do not promote the interests of the American people.’

‘For too long, taxpayers have subsidized ideological projects overseas and domestic organizations engaged in actions that undermine the national interest,’ the note continues. ‘The American people have seen their tax dollars used to fund the passion projects of unelected bureaucrats rather than to advance the national interest.’

‘The American people have a right to see how the Federal Government has wasted their hard-earned wages.’

Trump continued the memo by ordering that all heads of executive departments and agencies must ‘take all appropriate actions to make public, to the maximum extent permitted by law…the complete details of every terminated program, cancelled contract, terminated grant, or any other discontinued obligation of Federal funds.’

‘Agencies shall ensure that such publication occurs in accordance with all applicable laws, regulations, and the terms and conditions of the underlying contract, grant, or other award,’ Trump continued.

The memo came as Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) commission continues to audit government agencies with a mission to reduce waste. On Monday night, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared on ‘Hannity’ to express support for DOGE’s audits.

‘[L]isten to the words from those Democrat politicians, you would think you are listening to President Trump, Elon Musk and our entire administration, who are saying the exact same things that Democrat politicians promised the American people they would do for decades,’ Leavitt said. ‘President Trump is just the first president in our lifetimes to actually do it.’

‘And now you see the Democrat Party and the mainstream media spiraling out of control about a very simple promise: rooting out waste, fraud and abuse from our federal bureaucracy,’ she continued. ‘This is a promise President Trump campaigned on. He is now delivering on it.’

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday to expand access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and other fertility treatments through the reduction of out-of-pocket costs.

IVF has become unaffordable for many Americans, and Trump’s executive order directs the Domestic Policy Council to find ways to make IVF and other fertility treatments more affordable.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted about the order shortly after it was signed.

‘PROMISES MADE. PROMISES KEPT: President Trump just signed an Executive Order to Expand Access to IVF!’ she wrote on X. ‘The Order directs policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments.’

Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., expressed gratitude on X after learning the president had expanded access to IVF.

‘Thank you, @POTUS! Yet another promise kept,’ Britt wrote. ‘IVF is profoundly pro-family, and I’m proud to work with President Trump on ensuring more loving parents can start and grow their families.’

Trump pledged on the campaign trail that if he won a second term, he would mandate free in vitro fertilization treatment for women.

‘I’m announcing today in a major statement that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for — or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for — all costs associated with IVF treatment,’ Trump told the crowd at Alro Steel in Potterville, Michigan,  back in August. ‘Because we want more babies, to put it nicely.’

IVF treatments are notoriously expensive and can cost tens of thousands of dollars for a single round. Many women require multiple rounds, and there is no guarantee of success.

Trump’s announcement, which was short on details, came after he faced intense scrutiny from Democrats for his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, sending the issue of abortion back to the states. 

Trump has tried to present himself as moderate on the issue, going as far as declaring himself ‘very strong on women’s reproductive rights.’

Fox News Digital’s Bradford Betz contributed to this report.

Initial discussions between Trump administration officials and Russia in Saudi Arabia Tuesday marked a ‘significant milestone’ in securing peace between Russia and Ukraine, according to the White House press secretary. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff met in Riyadh with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Putin’s foreign affairs advisor Yuri Ushakov to hash out ways to end the conflict. Ukraine was absent from the negotiations in Saudi Arabia. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to provide specifics about the discussions, but she said the Trump administration was committed to brokering a peace deal to end the conflict between the two countries. 

‘What I will tell you is that today, sitting down at the table was a significant first step toward peace,’ Leavitt told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said during a joint press conference with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Tuesday that an invitation to the talks wasn’t extended to Ukraine and that he was postponing a scheduled trip to Saudi Arabia until March. 

Zelenskyy has stressed that Ukraine must be involved in negotiations, and said Sunday that Ukraine wouldn’t accept a peace deal if his country were absent from negotiations. 

But Leavitt said that everyone would have a seat at the negotiating table — including other European allies — as the Trump administration seeks to advance a peace deal. 

‘We’re ensuring that all parties are heard,’ Leavitt said in an interview with Fox New’s ‘America Reports’ Tuesday. ‘But you have to speak to both sides of the war in order to truly negotiate a deal and problem solve. And this is a significant first step toward peace.’

Leavitt said that President Donald Trump was in correspondence with Zelenskyy, and spoke with other European allies like French President Emmanuel Macron Monday. Additionally, she said that Trump will meet with the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the White House next week. 

Trump and Zelenskky also spoke over the phone Wednesday about the negotiations, and Zelenskyy said he relayed that he believes Putin isn’t interested in peace with Ukraine. 

‘I said that [Putin] is a liar,’ Zelenskyy said in an interview with NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ that aired Sunday. ‘And he said, ‘I think my feeling is that he’s ready for these negotiations.’ And I said to him, ‘No, he’s a liar. He doesn’t want any peace.”

While Zelenskyy voiced gratitude for U.S. support, he said that there is no ‘leader in the world who can really make a deal with Putin without us, about us.’ 

‘I will never accept any decisions between the United States and Russia about Ukraine,’ Zelenskyy said on ‘Meet the Press.’ 

But Trump has offered reassurances that Zelenskyy would be involved in peace conversations, and told reporters Sunday on the tarmac at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Florida that Ukraine would get a seat at the negotiating table. 

The first action the U.S. plans to take following the meetings with Russian officials is to ‘reestablish the functionality of our respective missions in Washington and in Moscow,’ Rubio told reporters from The Associated Press and CNN. 

‘For us to be able to continue to move down this road, we need to have diplomatic facilities that are operating and functioning normally,’ Rubio said, according to a State Department transcript. 

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and Trump vowed on the campaign trail in 2024 that he would work to end the conflict if elected again. 

Fox News’ Emma Colton and Andrea Margolis contributed to this report. 

A federal judge on Tuesday declined to block Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing government data or firing federal employees. 

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan declined to grant the plaintiffs’ request to issue a temporary restraining order, citing what she said was their failure to demonstrate evidence of ‘irreparable harm’ caused by DOGE’s access. 

‘Plaintiffs legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight,’ Chutkan, an Obama appointee, said Tuesday. 

‘In these circumstances, it must be indisputable that this court acts within the bounds of its authority. Accordingly, it cannot issue a TRO, especially one as wide-ranging as Plaintiffs request, without clear evidence of imminent, irreparable harm to these Plaintiffs. The current record does not meet that standard.’

The decision from Chutkan is a blow to the coalition of 14 Democratic state attorneys general who sued last week to temporarily restrict DOGE’s access to federal data about government employees.

Plaintiffs argued that the leadership role held by Musk, a private citizen, represents an ‘unlawful delegation of executive power’ and threatened what they described as ‘widespread disruption’ to employees working across various federal agencies and government contractors.

‘There is no greater threat to democracy than the accumulation of state power in the hands of a single, unelected individual,’ said the lawsuit, filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez.

Attorneys general from Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington also joined him in the request.

While Judge Chutkan at times appeared sympathetic to the views brought by Torrez and other plaintiffs during Monday’s hearing, she also suggested she was not convinced that plaintiffs had adequately satisfied the high legal standard of ‘imminent harm’ required for a temporary restraining order.

‘The things I’m hearing are troubling indeed, but I have to have a record and findings of fact before I issue something,’ Chutkan said Monday.

The hearing is the latest in a growing flurry of emergency lawsuits filed across the country seeking to block or restrict DOGE’s access to sensitive government data.

Similar legal challenges are playing out in federal courts across the country, from New York and Maryland to Virginia and D.C., with plaintiffs citing fears of privacy breaches, layoffs and possible retaliation from DOGE.

DOGE, the Musk-led agency, was created via executive order earlier this year. Its status as a temporary organization within the White House gives DOGE and its employees just 18 months to carry out its goals of optimizing the federal government, streamlining its operations, and, of course, doing it all at a lower cost.

DOGE’s wide-ranging mission, combined with its lack of specifics, have sparked fresh concerns from outside observers, who have questioned how, exactly, the group plans to deliver on its ambitious optimization goals in such a short amount of time.

But Musk and his allies have wasted little time racing to do just that. They’ve spent the past month racing to deliver on what they see as one of President Donald Trump’s biggest campaign trail pledges: reducing bloated federal budgets, aggressively slashing government waste, and firing or putting on ice large swaths of federal employees. 

The Justice Department, for its part, argued on Monday that the DOGE personnel in question are ‘detailed’ U.S. government employees who are entitled to access the government data under provisions of the Economy Act.

Recent court victories have also buoyed DOGE’s operations – allowing them, at least for now, to continue carrying out their sprawling operation.,

As Chutkan noted Monday, fears and speculation alone are not enough to curtail DOGE access: plaintiffs must prove clearly, and with evidence, that their workings have met the hard-to-satisfy test of permanent or ‘irreparable’ harm.

Late last week, U.S. District Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, also rejected a request to block DOGE from accessing records of three government agencies, writing in his own opinion Friday that plaintiffs ‘have not shown a substantial likelihood that [DOGE] is not an agency.’

For plaintiffs, the TRO defeats have made it increasingly unclear what, if any, hope they might have to secure near-term injunctive relief.

Plaintiffs representing the 14 Democratic states argued Monday that DOGE’s broad agency access violates the appointments clause of the U.S. Constitution. 

That clause requires Cabinet and other high-level leaders in the U.S. government to be nominated by a president and confirmed by a Senate majority vote – a lengthy process designed to help vet an individual’s fitness to perform in the role to which they were appointed.

They argued that the ‘expansive authority’ granted to DOGE is not ‘merely academic.’

Already, plaintiffs said, Musk has ‘cut billions of dollars from agency budgets, fired agency personnel, and that he has moved to, in his words, ‘delete’ entire agencies.’

Trump ‘does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally dismantle the government,’ the attorneys general said. ‘Nor could he delegate such expansive authority to an unelected, unconfirmed individual.’

And while Chutkan appeared to share in plaintiffs’ assertion that at least some of DOGE’s actions appear to be ‘serious and troubling,’ she maintained that a deliberate fear is not enough to grant the request to block their access immediately.

‘You’re talking about a generalized fear,’ she said of their DOGE complaints. ‘I’m not seeing it so far.’

The U.S. and Russia on Tuesday took steps to improve diplomatic ties after Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with top officials from Moscow in a move to find an end to the war in Ukraine. 

Speaking to reporters following the 4.5-hour meeting held in Saudi Arabia between Rubio and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, the secretary of state said the first move would be in reestablishing the ‘functionality of our respective missions in Washington and in Moscow.’

‘For us to be able to continue to move down this road, we need to have diplomatic facilities that are operating and functioning normally,’ Rubio said. 

Rubio said there were three additional steps the U.S. planned to pursue, which included establishing a ‘high-level team’ to help negotiate the end of the war in Ukraine – though he did not mention if this would be headed by the special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, retired Lt. General Keith Kellogg.

The Trump administration will also be looking to expand geopolitical and economic relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. 

Rubio did not go into detail on how or when the U.S. would agree to lift the heavy sanctions put on Russia following its illegal invasion, but said that at some point ‘the European Union (EU) is going to have to be at the table’ because they too have strict sanctions in place.   

Concerns over EU involvement in negotiating a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia have been mounting as the Trump administration increasingly takes on Moscow. 

Reporters questioned Kellogg about EU involvement following the Munich Security Conference that concluded Monday, but he would not confirm whether an EU representative will be officially included at any negotiations, despite direct concerns over European security. 

Rubio responded to questions regarding concerns that the EU and Ukraine are being abandoned by the Trump administration and said, ‘No one is being sidelined here.’

‘But President Trump is in a position – that he campaigned on – to initiate a process that could bring about an end to this conflict, and from that could emerge some very positive things for the United States, for Europe, for Ukraine, for the world,’ the secretary said. 

Rubio confirmed the final agreement to come out of the lengthy meeting on Tuesday was that the five men involved in the meeting – which included Rubio and Lavrov, as well as Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, special Mideast envoy Steven Witkoff and Putin’s foreign affairs advisor, Yuri Ushakov – would remain ‘engaged’ to ensure negotiations continue to progress in a ‘productive way.’

Neither the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy nor the EU immediately responded to Fox News Digital’s questions regarding their reactions to the day’s meeting.

Zelenskyy, who was supposed to arrive in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, canceled his trip on Tuesday, which according to a Reuters report, was a move to counter any ‘legitimacy’ of the U.S.-Russia talks that were held without a Ukrainian delegation. 

Kellogg’s team confirmed for Fox News Digital that he is set to meet with Zelenskyy this week during his trip to Kyiv. 

Zelenskyy, like some EU leaders, has said he will not accept any ceasefire negotiations that are not made through coordinated efforts with Kyiv. 

‘Ukraine and Europe – in the broad sense, including the European Union, Turkey and the United Kingdom – must be involved in discussions and the development of necessary security guarantees together with the United States, as these decisions shape the future of our part of the world,’ he said in an address following a meeting with Turkish President Reccep Erdoğan on Tuesday.

Reports on Tuesday also indicated that European leaders were looking to reconvene at a ‘second emergency Ukraine summit’ to discuss Ukraine and Europe’s security.

The State Department did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s questions. 

Seven House Republicans have been named to a new task force dedicated to weighing the declassification of some of the U.S.’ most infamous ‘secrets.’

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., as expected, will lead the explosive panel – formally known as the Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets. It will operate under the House Oversight Committee and its chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky.

The list, though short, signals House GOP leaders are letting the conference’s conservative wing take the wheel on this investigation.

In addition to Luna, the task force will also include members of the often rebellious House Freedom Caucus such as Reps. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., Eli Crane, R-Ariz., and Eric Burlison, R-Mo.

Also on the panel is Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who has made headlines on several culture war issues over the last year.

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who frequently collaborates with Luna on issues relating to unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) in Congress, is on the panel as well, as is first-term Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas.

‘Bad day to be a classified government secret,’ Mace wrote on X.

Burlison wrote on the site, ‘A Government cloaked in secrecy has been a tool for control.’

Luna pledged to seek ‘truth and transparency’ in a written statement announcing the task force last week. 

She pledged to ‘give Americans the answers they deserve’ on the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jeffrey Epstein’s client list, COVID-19, UAPs, and the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Luna said when announcing the list of members, ‘We have assembled a team of dedicated leaders who have consistently fought for transparency and full disclosure.’

‘Our mission is simple: to ensure these documents are released swiftly and in their entirety, giving the American people the truth they deserve,’ Luna said.

Comer said of the list, ‘Ensuring government transparency for the American people is a core mission of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.’

‘The Republicans on Rep. Luna’s task force are steadfast champions of transparency, and I am confident they will vigorously pursue and deliver the truth on critical issues,’ Comer said.