White House says some employees were fired by mistake

Delivering remarks before the NATO Ukrainian Defense Contact Group in Belgium, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the goal of "returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective."

He added that "chasing this illusory goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering."

On Tuesday evening after touching down in Europe, Hegseth signaled the Trump administration wants European nations to take on more responsibility for their own defense and said "we are not sending U.S. troops to Ukraine."

"The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland, we must and we are focusing on security of our own borders." Hegseth also said Wednesday morning.

Read more about Hegseth's remarks here.

-- ABC News' Joseph Simonetti

A group of 191 House and Senate Democrats sent a letter to Russell Vought, the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, calling on them to reverse course on actions targeting the nation's consumer financial watchdog agency.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was created by Congress in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to safeguard Americans against unfair business practices. It has been brought to a virtual standstill after Vought, who last week was named the agency's acting director, and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency took control of the agency. Vought has since issued a stop-work order to nearly all CFPB staff.

Democrats, in their letter, are calling for Musk's DOGE employees, some of whom physically accessed the agency's federal office and requested access to its industry and consumer data, to be pulled out of the CFPB.

Read more about the letter here.

-- ABC News' Allie Pecorin and Elizabeth Schulze

A 25-year-old associate of Elon Musk and former Treasury Department employee was "mistakenly" given the ability to make changes to a sensitive federal payment system, officials with the Bureau of the Fiscal Service disclosed in a series of court filings late Tuesday.

Treasury Department officials said the "error" was quickly corrected, and a forensic investigation into the actions of Marko Elez – who resigned from his position last week after reporting unearthed a series of allegedly racist social media posts – remains ongoing.

"To the best of our knowledge, Mr. Elez never knew of the fact that he briefly had read/write permissions for the [Secure Payment System] database, and never took any action to exercise the 'write' privileges in order to modify anything within the SPS database—indeed, he never logged in during the time that he had read/write privileges, other than during the virtual walk-through – and forensic analysis is currently underway to confirm this," wrote Joseph Gioeli III, a deputy commissioner at Bureau of the Fiscal Service.

Lawyers with the Department of Justice initially insisted that Elez was strictly given "read-only" access to sensitive records, but the affidavits submitted by BFS employees on Tuesday noted that the 25-year-old was inadvertently given the ability to "read/write" the sensitive system that agencies use to send " large dollar amount transactions" to the Treasury Department.

-- ABC News' Peter Charalambous

In a new Truth Social post Wednesday, President Donald Trump is defending DOGE, claiming the new agency has "found massive amounts of FRAUD, WASTE, INCOMPETENCE, AND ABUSE" while also saying that a "highly political, activist Judge wants us to immediately make payment, anyway."

"In other words pay, even though you know the payment was fraudulently requested to be made. DOGE caught them - The Judge just doesn't care," Trump added.

The post comes as DOGE's actions face lawsuits for their activity at the Treasury, the Department of Education and efforts to dismantle USAID.

-- ABC News' Michelle Stoddart