Up First from NPR
Trump and Zelenskyy Feud, DOGE Savings Claims, Hamas Releases Four Hostage Bodies
Thu, 20 Feb 2025
A look at the roots of the difficult relationship between President Trump and President Zelenskyy. DOGE says its saved taxpayers billions of dollars. How do these claims stack up against the evidence? And Hamas returns the bodies of four Israeli hostages held in Gaza since the October 7, 2023 attack.Want more comprehensive analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.Today's episode of Up First was edited by Dana Farrington, Padmananda Rama, Didi Schanche, Reena Advani and Janaya Williams. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott and our technical director is Carleigh Strange. Our Executive Producer is Kelley Dickens.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: How did the Trump-Zelenskyy feud begin?
Works every time. Well. I get that. Not quite every time. President Trump is pressuring Ukraine's president with personal attacks.
Trump called Zelensky a dictator. Zelensky accused Trump of spreading misinformation. They both agree the war in Ukraine should end, so why are they so far apart on how to get there?
I'm Steve Inskeep with Michelle Martin, and this is Up First from NPR News. Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency claims to have trimmed billions of dollars from the federal budget.
What? Musk and Doge are doing is more cosmetic symbolic changes that won't save money, but might sound good.
Our correspondent added up the receipts and found a different number. What's the real bottom line?
And Hamas released the bodies of four Israeli hostages today. What's known about them and the circumstances in which they died? Stay with us. We'll give you the news you need to start your day.
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President Trump is escalating his personal attacks on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, calling him a dictator.
Trump is pressuring the Ukrainian to submit to peace talks that so far have not included Ukraine. The U.S. also pressed Zelensky to sign an agreement that would share Ukraine's mineral rights with the United States. Zelensky has said Ukraine needs to be included in any negotiations, and it's in this context that the American president made a stream of remarks about the Ukrainian leader.
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Chapter 2: What are DOGE's claims about saving taxpayer money?
Franco, thank you.
Thank you, Michelle.
The Trump administration has posted a new online tracker that lists what it describes as the dollars saved by the Department of Government Efficiency.
That is the cost cutting effort championed by Elon Musk and President Trump. Musk made a stream of claims on social media in recent weeks about big savings. A Doge website kept promising receipts. And this week, the website published some, but those receipts add up to far less in savings than claimed.
NPR's Stephen Fowler did the math. He is here with us now to tell us what he found. Good morning, Stephen. Good morning. Okay, so what does this online Doge document claim to track?
So Monday, a savings page on doge.gov went live. It says there's been savings so far of $55 billion. What's included in that? Doge says things like, quote, fraud detection, deletion, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings. Exactly how those changes fit into the overall savings estimate is still TBD. They promise to keep adding more information.
What we do have shared for now is a list of some of the government contracts Doge says were canceled in recent days, what they call a wall of receipts that adds up to about $16 billion in alleged savings.
Important to note here that Elon Musk, the tech mogul, and also I want to point out a government contractor who heads up this group, insists that the work is transparent. So two questions here. Is it transparent? And now that you've been reviewing these contracts, how do their numbers stack up with what you have found?
The Doge website, Michelle, is actually less transparent about these contracts than other public government data sources. So I had to search through 130,000 plus contracts that have been changed from January 20th to Monday to see if I could match them up with what Doge shared. But the claims weren't off by just a little bit, but rather overstated by billions.
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