The House Small Business Committee sent a letter this week to the Small Business Administration demanding answers on federal pandemic relief funds that flowed from the Biden administration to entities in Minnesota possibly connected to the massive unfolding fraud scandal.

In a letter sent Monday to SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler, the committee said it is conducting oversight into reports of fraud and concealment involving the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, both of which were created to help small businesses survive the COVID-19 pandemic.

The letter cited public reporting and federal prosecutions tying Minnesota-based nonprofits and individuals to massive fraud schemes that drained hundreds of millions of dollars from federal programs under Democratic Gov. Tim Walz’s watch.

The letter also points out that the Minnesota nonprofit Feeding Our Future was at the center of what the Justice Department has called the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme charged in U.S. history, with 78 individuals charged as of late November in a case involving roughly $250 million in fraudulent claims as part of an overall system of fraud that prosecutors said last week could total up to $9 billion or more.

‘The SBA’s COVID lending programs were created to keep small businesses afloat during an unprecedented crisis, not to subsidize fraud,’ Small Business Committee Chairman Roger Williams, R-Texas, told Fox News Digital in a statement. 

‘Under the Biden-Harris administration, weak oversight and reckless decision-making allowed bad actors to exploit these programs and steal hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars. The Feeding Our Future case highlights the severity of these failures, and the Committee on Small Business is determined to hold those responsible accountable.’

The committee’s letter requests detailed records on PPP and EIDL loans issued to dozens of individuals and businesses tied to Minnesota-based fraud investigations, including loan amounts, disbursement dates, forgiveness decisions and internal SBA communications.

Lawmakers are also seeking all documents and communications between the SBA and Walz’s office or Minnesota state agencies during the Biden-Harris administration, arguing such records are necessary to determine whether warning signs were ignored or oversight failed.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Loeffler says she is looking forward to working with Congress to get to the bottom of the situation. 

‘Earlier this month, SBA determined that numerous Somali nonprofits indicted as part of the $1 billion pandemic fraud scandal in Minnesota received PPP and EIDL Loans totaling at least $2.5 million, including Feeding Our Future,’ Loeffler said. 

‘SBA has since broadened its investigation to uncover pandemic-era fraud across the entire state of Minnesota and looks forward to working in partnership with Congressional leaders to uncover the full depth of the abuse and deliver accountability on behalf of American taxpayers.’

The letter asks for the documents to be provided by Jan. 12, 2026.

On Tuesday, Fox News Digital first reported that Loeffler sent a letter to Walz alerting him that her agency will ‘halt’ more than $5.5 million in annual support to resource partners in the state ‘until further notice.’

As President Donald Trump rolls out his TrumpRx proposal to cut prescription drug prices, economists are raising questions about what happens when prices are capped and whether short-term savings for consumers come at the expense of future medical breakthroughs.

On Friday, Trump announced deals with nine pharmaceutical companies to lower prices on certain medications for Americans, along with $150 billion in promised new investments in domestic manufacturing and pharmaceutical research.

The announcement builds on the administration’s Trump Rx initiative, a government-run portal designed to steer consumers toward lower-cost prescription drugs offered directly by manufacturers. The program is central to Trump’s effort to tie U.S. drug prices to those paid in other wealthy countries, a policy known as ‘most favored nation’ pricing.

But economists caution that price-lowering agreements don’t eliminate costs and often shift them elsewhere, particularly into reduced drug development, delayed innovation, or higher prices in other parts of the market.

Michael Baker, director of healthcare policy at the American Action Forum, said government price setting shifts costs rather than eliminating them.

‘At the most basic level, government price setting only limits what patients pay for a drug — usually reflected in an out-of-pocket or co-insurance payment,’ Baker said. ‘This does nothing to address the overall cost of the drug, which someone still has to pay, nor does it lower the cost associated with development.’

As a result, Baker said, patients ultimately bear those costs through tighter coverage rules, fewer treatment options or reduced future innovation.

‘Patients will experience far less of the crown jewel of the U.S. healthcare system that they are currently accustomed to receiving,’ he added.

Economists say the effects of permanent price caps would also be felt upstream, in research and development.

‘We know for sure that if drug prices are capped permanently below the levels the firm would have set, that will lead to lower incentives for R&D to discover new drugs and bring them to market,’ explained Mark V. Pauly, professor of healthcare management at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Pauly added that the impact is expected to be negative, but its scale — including how many drugs might never be developed and their potential value — remains highly uncertain.

‘I do not know the answer, but I know for sure no one else does either,’ he added.

Others argue the administration’s approach avoids the most damaging forms of price control.

Ed Haislmaier, an expert in healthcare policy and markets at The Heritage Foundation, said recent agreements appear to involve companies trading lower prices for benefits such as expanded market access or relief from other costs, including tariffs.

‘In such cases, companies are likely calculating that revenue losses from lower prices will be offset by revenue gains from more sales,’ Haislmaier told Fox News Digital.

‘The kind of government price controls that are most damaging to innovation are ones that limit the initial price a company can charge for a new product. That is the situation in some countries, but fortunately not yet the in the United States,’ he added.

Ryan Long, Paragon’s director of congressional relations and a senior research fellow, suggested that pricing pressure abroad could force foreign governments to shoulder a greater share of drug development costs.

Long said this strategy would lead ‘to lower prices for American consumers without sacrificing U.S. leadership in biopharmaceutical innovation that leads to new treatments and cures.’

As the year closes, Republicans are looking to the past for another dance with a partisan exercise that tested the party’s unity and delivered President Donald Trump his crowning legislative achievement of the year.

Budget reconciliation is how congressional Republicans rammed through Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill,’ earlier this year. But it’s a time-consuming, labor-intensive process that laid bare intra-party divisions and nearly exploded before liftoff.

Still, some Republicans want to take another stab at reconciliation, which allows a party in power to advance legislation with just a simple majority in the Senate as long as it adheres to strict, budgetary parameters.

‘We can do two more reconciliation bills without a single Democratic vote,’ Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told Fox News Digital. ‘Doesn’t mean we wouldn’t welcome Democratic votes, but we can do them without a single Democratic vote.’

Turning once again to reconciliation would help Senate Republicans, in particular, address one of Trump’s desires to kill the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the upper chamber without changing the precedent that Democrats, for years, have threatened to do.

But they need a plan, first.

That would come from Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the de facto maestro of the reconciliation process. His committee was responsible for drafting the budget resolution that unlocked the process in the upper chamber earlier this year, and he is reportedly eying drafting another resolution in the new year.

‘It would be political malpractice not to do another reconciliation,’ Graham told Semafor.

But many Republicans acknowledged just how difficult reconciliation is, especially after the latest exercise that dominated much of Congress’ attention for the first half of the year.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told Fox News Digital that ‘it’s always hard, but it’s an option, and one that we’re not ruling in or ruling out.’

‘I would say you have to have a reason to do it, you know,’ Thune said. ‘I mean, you don’t just do reconciliation for the heck of it. You got to have a, you know, a specific purpose. And so we’ll see. I mean, that purpose may, you know, may start getting some traction.’

Kennedy floated using reconciliation to tackle affordability issues, but some see the painstaking process as an avenue to grapple with another issue that has dominated Congress for several months: healthcare.

Lawmakers left Washington, D.C., without a fix to expiring Obamacare subsidies, effectively setting up a drastic hike in out-of-pocket healthcare costs for millions of Americans. There are bipartisan negotiations in the works to deal with the issue when lawmakers return, but Republicans have a gnawing appetite to drastically change the program.

Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told Fox News Digital that Republicans ‘have to do something’ on healthcare.

‘Reconciliation is one pathway to do something, but it also limits what we can do,’ Banks said. ‘So we need bipartisan support to pass something that will help everybody.’

And Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., who has been critical of Republicans’ inability to get a healthcare solution across the line, told Fox News Digital that reconciliation ‘may be an answer.’

‘The healthcare situation is really, it’s a big deal,’ Justice said. ‘It’s more than difficult, you know? And so we need to, we need to try to fix it. That’s for sure.’

Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest is very much like a circus, and I mean that in the best possible way. A circus can travel anywhere, put up its tents and put on a show.

The scale of last weekend’s event in Phoenix was nothing short of monumental, with 31,000 in attendance. That isn’t so far off of the estimated 50,000 souls who went to the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

To put it bluntly, TPUSA, along with other organizations, are capable of producing a much-needed midterm convention and a city like Phoenix, which hosted the conservative confab admirably, is exactly where it should be held.

As I’ve written in this column before, a midterm GOP conventionmidterm GOP convention, though a tad unconventional as a concept, is exactly what Republicans need to put Trump and his policy wins front and center before the electorate.

John and Lucy, a couple in their 40s who I met at the event, told me it was their first AmFest.

‘The energy is amazing,’ Lucy said. ‘I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect this.’

John concurred, saying, ‘This is like a rock concert, fireworks and loud music, I think it gets everyone pumped up.’

The atmosphere at AmFest was a whizzing and whirring technicolor explosion of light and sound, all resounding toward the goal of forwarding the conservative movement.

There is little doubt that 10 minutes at a pulsating and intense live event like Amfest – or a Trump rally – is worth 10 days of on-screen ads. It hits attendees in each of their five senses, and 50,000 may not sound like much, but that’s a veritable army to send back home in an off-year election.

One eager young conservative I met, Matt, who is studying finance in grad school and sports what might now be called the TPUSA mustache, told me, ‘I’d totally go to a midterm convention. Hell, I’d just go for the parties.’

That may sound a bit shallow to some, but it also sounds like exactly the kind of positive energy that a winning political movement needs.

When it comes to the question of where to hold a midterm convention, Phoenix can teach would-be convention planners a lot about the key question of location, location, location.

In places like New York City or Chicago, AmFest would have brought out hundreds of protesters, including many of the dangerous Antifa variety. Even vastly smaller events like a recent Mom’s For Liberty conference in Philadelphia attracted angry mobs.

In Phoenix, I never saw more than a dozen or so, and they were far more silly than menacing.

It’s worth noting that the local news channels did choose to focus almost as much attention on this bedraggled band of apparently unemployed naysayers as they did the tens of thousands inside the event.

Funny that.

But around the clean and very pretty downtown of soft light and perfect temperatures, one felt little to no resentment or pushback at the sudden flood of red MAGA hats and sparkly Trump outerwear. Everything was cool.

I asked one of my Uber drivers, a longtime Phoenix resident, why he thought the city was so welcoming in this way.

‘Nobody is uptight about politics. Everyone has weird ideas, we have weird politicians,’ he told me, laughing at his own joke for moment before adding, ‘It’s always been like this.’

Phoenix is not the only prime location for a midterm convention. Oklahoma City is another, as is Nashville. These are thriving places with better than average governance that truly do highlight the accomplishments of the Trump administration.

JD VanceJD Vance told the crowd at AmFest, ‘Why do we penalize corporations that ship American jobs overseas? Because we believe in the inherent dignity of human work and every person who works a good job in this country.’

The best place to sell that very popular message is in the smaller American cities where the jobs are being created, not one of the great metropolises still clinging to the dream that one day everyone can just work for the government.

As of now, the GOP has somewhere just north of seven months to put together a midterm convention, but the good news is that it is also flush with campaign cash. And the conservative movement has organizations like TPUSA that are capable of coming together to pull it off.

If Republicans want to hold onto Congress and give Trump a runway for his final two years, then their first priority for the coming fall should be to bring the circus back to town.

The recently launched ‘GenAI’ tool for U.S. service members and Department of War workers is a ‘critical first step’ in the future of warfare, according to a military expert.

This month, the Pentagon announced the launch of GenAI.mil, a military-focused AI platform powered by Google Gemini. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the platform is designed to give U.S. military personnel direct access to AI tools to help ‘revolutioniz[e] the way we win.’

On Monday, the Department of War also announced that the Pentagon is further integrating Elon Musk’s xAI Grok family of models into the GenAI platform, allowing employees to use xAI safely on secure government systems for routine work, including tasks involving sensitive but unclassified information.

In an interview with Fox News Digital, Emelia Probasco, a Navy veteran, former Pentagon official and senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, explained that the tool will help train Department of War service members and civilians on the use of artificial intelligence in their everyday workflow, preparing them for further integration of AI in military matters.

Probasco said the tool will have a ‘big impact’ on the everyday functioning of the Department of War.

‘Prior to the rollout of this new website and having Gemini 3 available to the force, folks were either using sort of a tool that wasn’t as capable … or even worse, they were sort of going to their home computers and trying to do various things on their home computers, which they’re not supposed to do, but it was probably happening,’ Probasco explained. ‘Now they’ve got a more secure environment where they can experiment with these tools and really start to learn what they’re good for and what they’re not good for.’

While Probasco said she does not believe the tools, such as the GenAI platform, ‘fully changes war,’ she thinks ‘it’s the critical first step in training so that we know how to use it well.’

She said that the Department of War has ‘made it very clear in the past year that they want to forge ahead and be innovative and try new things and adopt AI.’

The GenAI tool, Probasco said, gives the department a type of sandbox to experiment with for still bigger innovations to come.

‘There are responsible people in the department who are trying to figure out what is the best use of this tool. Let’s try lots of experiments in sort of sandboxes or in safe places so that when a conflict comes, we are ready and ahead, frankly, of any adversary who has started to play with the tools,’ she explained.

Probasco said the Department of War understands that adversaries such as China are also developing and experimenting with artificial intelligence. Indeed, this month, President Donald Trump announced he would be partially reversing a Biden-era restriction on high-end chip exports, permitting Nvidia to export its artificial-intelligence chips to China and other countries.

The H200 chips are high-performance processors made by Nvidia that help run artificial intelligence programs, like chatbots, machine learning and data-center tasks. 

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill voiced that they are split over the decision, with some seeing the move as a dangerous concession and others as strategic.

Either way, Probasco said ‘we have lots of evidence’ that China ‘is doing rapid experimentation [with AI] across all domains of warfare.’

‘And it’s not, can I use a chatbot, but rather, ‘Can I gather up lots of information to start to target individuals for espionage?’ For example, [and], ‘Can I use data to create more sophisticated cyber-attacks?’’ she explained.

‘There is this sort of dynamic of a race between the two sides trying to figure out how to adopt it,’ she explained.

Though important, Probasco said the GenAI tool is ‘not going to necessarily be the weapon system that gains [the U.S.] an advantage.’

She assured the AI tool that will truly give the U.S. a military advantage ‘is underway,’ but said ‘that’s not the sort of thing you just roll out for every service member to use.’

‘It’s important to remember that using a chatbot to help you think through certain problems or do talking points is not what’s going to win the war. There are much more sophisticated military systems that use generative AI; they use other kinds of what’s called ‘good old-fashioned AI.’ There are lots of other techniques that militaries need to use,’ she said.

‘Those are already in the works, and they’ve been in the works for years,’ Probasco explained, adding, ‘That’s not going to be rolled out in a big public announcement where everybody can play with it.’

President Donald Trump’s newly appointed envoy to Greenland said Tuesday the administration wants to open a dialogue with residents of the territory, stressing the U.S. is not seeking to ‘conquer’ the island.

During an appearance on Fox News’ ‘The Will Cain Show,’ Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, who was tapped as special envoy to Greenland by Trump on Sunday, said discussions must be had with Greenlanders to understand what they want moving forward.

‘What are they looking for? What opportunities have they not gotten? Why haven’t they gotten the protection that they actually deserve?’ Landry said.

Landry added that the U.S. ‘has always been a welcoming party,’ and that the Trump administration is not going to ‘go in there trying to conquer anybody’ or ‘take over anybody’s country.’

Landry’s comments came after Danish leaders sharply criticized Trump after he announced the appointment of the new special envoy to Greenland, a territory controlled by Denmark.

‘We have said it before. Now, we say it again. National borders and the sovereignty of states are rooted in international law,’ Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenlandic Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen said in a joint statement Monday. ‘They are fundamental principles. You cannot annex another country. Not even with an argument about international security.’

Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday that Landry ‘understands how essential Greenland is to our National Security, and will strongly advance our Country’s Interests for the Safety, Security, and Survival of our Allies, and indeed, the World.’

On Tuesday, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called Trump’s comments ‘completely unacceptable,’ adding that he would summon the U.S. ambassador.

The Danish kingdom, he wrote on Facebook, is ‘sovereign and cannot accept that others question it.’

Trump has previously expressed ambitions for the U.S. to acquire Greenland, posting on Truth Social in December 2024 that ‘ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity’ for national security purposes.

In another post from January 2025, Trump said Greenland is an ‘incredible place,’ and its people will ‘benefit tremendously if, and when, it becomes part of our Nation,’ before declaring, ‘MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!’

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House for comment.

Fox News Digital’s Alex Nitzberg and The Associated Press contributed to this report.