Federal law enforcement’s hands are tied now that the statute of limitations for prosecuting fraud in COVID-era unemployment programs has expired.

While Congress extended the statute of limitations for pandemic-era business relief fraud in 2022, the window to prosecute fraud in individual relief programs closed Thursday.

‘There’s huge amounts of fraud that law enforcement officials are still trying to track down,’ said Andrew Moylan, a public finance policy expert at the for-profit philanthropy group Arnold Ventures. 

‘Every day that goes by from today, we lose the ability to prosecute fraud day by day. That’s a huge problem, and this should be something that’s an easy fix for Congress.’

Despite opposition from 127 House Democrats, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the House passed a bipartisan bill earlier this month to extend the statute of limitations for pandemic unemployment fraud from five to 10 years. The move mirrored what lawmakers did for the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury and Disaster Loans program in 2022.

However, the Senate has yet to take up a companion bill needed to cement the extension, leading House lawmakers to call on their colleagues on Capitol Hill to make it a priority. 

‘We can’t afford to let these fraudsters get away with the largest heist of tax dollars in American history,’ Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, said Wednesday. ‘Not only do we have an obligation to taxpayers to recover as much of this money as possible — up to $135 billion — we also need to send a message that we will never falter in going after criminals who take advantage of our support for those in need. … There is no time to waste.’

According to estimates from the Government Accountability Office, as much as $135 billion in pandemic unemployment insurance programs was lost to fraud during the pandemic. So far, only $5 billion, or less than 4%, has been recovered. 

Between the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor, there are more than 2,500 uncharged criminal matters or ongoing field investigations related to COVID-era criminal unemployment fraud, according to a fact sheet released by Smith.

Unless the statute of limitations is extended by Congress, federal law enforcement will be unable to prosecute these cases.

Moylan noted the majority of unemployment fraud during COVID stemmed from ‘loopholes’ so big ‘you could drive a truck through’ them in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. 

‘They didn’t have strict enough paperwork requirements, and, so, basically anybody could apply for it and just attest that they were engaged in self-employed activity … and claim significant amounts of unemployment benefits in the process,’ Moylan said. He also pointed out how people were applying for financial assistance under the names of dead people or prison inmates.

‘In California, about a billion dollars worth of fraud was facilitated by making claims on behalf of prisoners in prisons in California,’ he said.

This month, GOP lawmakers, including Smith, called on their Senate colleagues to take up the House’s legislation to extend the statute of limitations related to pandemic unemployment fraud.

When asked why he thought the Senate had not yet taken up a bill to extend the statute of limitations for pandemic unemployment fraud, Moylan posited that it was ‘an attention span thing.’

‘This hasn’t been top of mind the way that nominations have been in the first part of the year for the Senate, or budget resolution, or now tax conversations, or, you know, whatever the scandal of the day may be,’ Moylan said.

‘Those are the things that seem to dominate proceedings in the Senate. We now are in a situation where, if they don’t act soon, we’re going to lose the ability to prosecute more fraud in this program.’

President Donald Trump promised that ‘bad things’ would happen to Iran if the regime does not come to the table for nuclear negotiations. 

‘My big preference is that we work it out with Iran, but if we don’t work it out, bad things are gonna happen to Iran,’ the president said Friday. 

Iran is enriching uranium to 60%, just shy of the 90% weapons-grade. Experts say it could have a nuclear weapon within weeks if it were to take the final steps to building one. 

In response to U.S. sanctions threats, Iran showed off a sprawling underground tunnel system replete with missiles, launchers, engines and other advanced weapons. 

A video released this week by state media shows two Iranian military leaders, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Hossein Bagheri and IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Amir Ali Hajizadeh, riding in a vehicle through long, weapons-packed tunnels that Tehran has dubbed ‘Missile City.’ 

The 85-second clip, which has not been independently verified, is set to menacing music and suggests that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps stands ready to respond to threats of an attack from the U.S. and Israel. 

‘Iran’s ballistic missile force remains the largest in the Middle East,’ said Behnam Taleblu, fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. ‘This is all part of the regime’s deterrent strategy to cement the idea of any conflict with Tehran being a costly and protracted one.’ 

The move comes as U.S. is bolstering its forces in the Middle East. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently sent a second aircraft carrier, the U.S. Navy’s USS Carl Vinson, to join the USS Harry S. Truman‘s carrier strike group, whose deployment was also extended. 

The U.S. also recently deployed two B-2 stealth bombers to the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean, a warning to Iran and Yemen’s Houthi militia. The planes are capable of carrying 30,000-pound ‘bunker buster’ bombs and are now situated within range of Iran. 

Weeks ago, Trump wrote a letter to Iran urging the regime to engage in talks on its nuclear program. 

Kamal Kharazi, the top foreign policy adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Thursday that the regime would engage in ‘indirect’ talks, according to local news reports.

‘The Islamic Republic has not closed all the doors and is willing to begin indirect negotiations with the United States.’ 

‘Our policy is to not negotiate directly while there is maximum pressure policy and threats of military strikes,’ foreign minister Abbas Aragchi explained. ‘But indirect negotiations can take place as they have in the past.’

If talks falter, the U.S. and Israel have floated the possibility of targeted strikes on underground nuclear facilities. 

In recent weeks, the Trump administration launched a series of offensive attacks on the Houthis in Yemen to send a message to Tehran, which supports them. 

‘Let nobody be fooled! The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time. 

‘Iran has played ‘the innocent victim’ of rogue terrorists from which they’ve lost control, but they haven’t lost control,’ he continued. ‘They’re dictating every move, giving them the weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated Military equipment, and even, so-called, ‘Intelligence.” 

A federal appeals court on Friday granted the Trump administration’s motion to extend a stay allowing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to continue operating at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Last week, a federal judge in Maryland ruled efforts to halt USAID functions were likely unconstitutional, ordering its reinstatement.

A federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, on Tuesday issued a stay, temporarily blocking the judge’s order that prohibited DOGE from working with USAID. It also barred biopharmaceutical executive Jeremy Levin from leading the agency.

Friday’s decision extends the stay until the appeal is resolved.

A group of 26 unidentified current and former USAID employees or contractors alleged the Trump administration unlawfully canceled government contracts, placed USAID personnel on administrative leave, reduced the force of employees and contractors, closed the headquarters and took down the website, violating the U.S. Constitution’s appointments clause because Elon Musk acted as DOGE administrator without being properly appointed. 

They also claimed dismantling USAID infringed on Congress’ responsibilities, according to court documents.

The Trump administration fought the claims, alleging Musk acts as a senior advisor to the president, and actions at USAID were carried out by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as USAID’s acting administrator, who then designated Peter Marocco as deputy administrator. 

USAID subsequently, and in accordance with President Donald Trump’s executive order, established an internal DOGE team led by Lewin, according to court documents.

Actions the employees and contractors alleged were unconstitutional were within both agency discretion and the president’s authority to direct foreign policy, the administration argued.

The district court granted the employees and contractors’ requested preliminary injunction, blocking DOGE from operating at USAID, finding the administration ‘likely’ violated the Constitution, and the pause was in the public interest. 

It later clarified Lewin, who led the USAID DOGE team prior to the injunction, could no longer do his job as chief operating officer at USAID and declined to grant any modifications. 

The Trump administration appealed the district court’s preliminary injunction and the denial of its motion for clarification or modification. It also filed an emergency motion to stay the injunction pending the appeal.

U.S. Court of Appeals Circuit judges Arthur Marvin Quattlebaum Jr. and Judge Paul V. Niemeyer found Friday that Musk and DOGE ‘made a strong showing that they are likely to succeed on the merits of the appeal, that they will be irreparably injured absent the stay,’ according to court documents.

Further, Quattlebaum and Niemeyer found the stay ‘favors the public interest.’

The ruling marked the third temporary win Friday for the Trump administration at the federal appeals court level.

President Donald Trump drew laughs from the press when one reporter asked him to define what a woman is. Trump was speaking at a news conference after Alina Habba, a longtime member of his team, was sworn-in as the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. 

The reporter who asked the question first said that Trump had done ‘so much for women’ before listing women who have powerful roles in the Trump administration, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Attorney General Pam Bondi. He then asked, ‘Since Democrats seemed to struggle answering this question, I want to ask you, what is a woman and why is it important that we understand the difference between men and women?’

The room quickly erupted in laughter as Trump said that the question was ‘easy’ to answer.

‘A woman is somebody, they can have a baby under certain circumstances. She has equality. A woman is a person who is much smarter than a man, I’ve always found. A woman is a person that doesn’t give a man even a chance of success,’ Trump said.

While the reporters in the room chuckled, Trump took the opportunity to take the question in a serious direction and addressed the issue of transgender athletes playing in women’s sports.

‘And a woman is a person that in many cases has been treated very badly. Because I think that what happens with this crazy, this crazy issue of men being able to play in women’s sports is just ridiculous and very unfair to women, and very demeaning to women,’ Trump said, shifting the tone of the news conference. 

Trump referenced a Democrat lawmaker, without naming who it was, fighting to keep transgender athletes in women’s sports. The president joked that he hopes Democrats keep arguing for the inclusion of trans athletes in women’s sports ‘because they’ll never win another election.’

The Trump administration has taken swift action in combating gender ideology. Trump signed an order specifically addressing the issue of trans athletes in women’s sports. The order, ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,’ prohibits educational institutions that receive federal funds from allowing trans athletes to compete against women.

Additionally, Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.’ This order made it official policy that the U.S. government only recognizes two genders: male and female.

The U.S. Department of Education recently took action on this issue and launched an investigation of the California Department of Education over alleged violations of the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act (FERPA) after a new California law went into effect that bars schools from disclosing a child’s ‘gender identity’ to their parents. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom spokesperson Elana Ross told Fox News Digital in a statement Thursday, ‘Parents continue to have full, guaranteed access to their student’s education records, as required by federal law.’

As Trump concluded his answer to the question, he said, ‘Women are, basically, incredible people, do so much for our country. And we love our women and we’re going to take care of our women.’

Fox News Digital’s Jamie Joseph contributed to this article.

President Donald Trump has insisted the U.S. needs to ‘get’ Greenland, ‘one way or another.’ But it’s not the first time U.S. leaders have had their eyes on the icy, sprawling island.

Located in the middle of contested waters between the U.S., Russia and Western Europe, Greenland is situated at a point that could protect the North Atlantic passage from Russian ships and submarines. It was a key military vantage point during the Cold War, and President Harry Truman offered to buy Greenland from the Danes in 1946. 

The island is also a transfer point for communication cables that cross the Atlantic. European officials claim Russian ‘ghost ships’ have been destroying such cables by dropping their anchors and dragging them across the ocean floor.

Greater control over the island would not only offer the U.S. the shortest ship route to Europe but also the opportunity to bolster its ballistic missile early warning system and place radar on the ocean floor to track the movements of Russian and Chinese ships.

The island rests on top of lucrative supplies of critical and rare earth minerals, such as cobalt, nickel, uranium and iron — materials that are essential to electric vehicles, medical equipment, electronics, batteries and advanced defense systems. 

The U.S. was once a top producer of rare earth minerals, but has been knocked off by China. China currently dominates the global supply chain with access to 60% of the world’s supply, but Greenland could be a ‘game changer,’ according to national security attorney Irina Tsukerman.

‘Their total resources of these rare earths could be greater than what China has,’ she told Fox News Digital.

Vice President JD Vance, second lady Usha Vance, national security advisor Mike Waltz and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, along with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, visited Greenland on Friday. 

‘Our message to Denmark is very simple: you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,’ the vice president remarked on the trip. 

‘You underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you’ve underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, all-beautiful landmass filled with incredible people. That has to change and because it hasn’t changed, this is why President Trump’s policy in Greenland is what it is.’

Greenland is estimated to have the world’s eighth-largest reserve of rare earths, just behind the U.S. But its minerals have proven difficult to access — 80% of the island’s surface is covered in thick sheets of ice. The island also has lots of red tape: strict environmental and social impact requirements mean the permitting process takes time. 

The nation’s economy is currently built on fishing and welfare: Denmark offers around $700 million each year, nearly half of Greenland’s budget. 

The U.S. has dangled ‘billions’ in investment to mine minerals in Greenland as part of an effort to reduce its reliance on China, though China has already had a limited involvement in mining projects there. 

‘China is more concerned about access to the Arctic than those minerals,’ said Tsukerman. 

‘China has focused its mineral efforts on Africa, where it is indeed far ahead of the U.S. Russia has been focused on the Arctic,’ she continued. ‘There’s been growing talks about increasing NATO presence in the area to deter Russian and Chinese vessels from entering.’

There’s oil and gas, too, but in 2021 Greenland passed a ban on all future oil and gas exploration and extraction. 

As the ice caps continue to melt, the waters around Greenland are becoming more and more navigable — meaning ships traveling from Asia and Europe can sail polar routes and avoid heading south to the Panama and Suez canals. 

U.S. and Danish defenses on the island have become outdated, just as Russia is refurbishing its own Arctic ports. Greenland once hosted dozens of U.S. bases and outposts, but today hosts just one: Pituffik Space Force Base. Once home to around 10,000 U.S. troops, just around 200 are deployed there now. 

‘We need Greenland for international safety and security. We need it. We have to have it,’ Trump said in an interview on Wednesday.

The territory largely opposes the idea of joining the U.S. 

In response to Trump’s threats to take Greenland, Denmark announced a $2 billion investment in defense on the island in January. 

Denmark’s defense intelligence service has determined Greenland to be ‘a priority for Russia, and it will demonstrate its power through aggressive and threatening behavior, which will carry along with it a greater risk of escalation than ever before in the Arctic.’

‘We have not invested enough in the Arctic for many years,’ Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen admitted recently. ‘Now we are planning a stronger presence.’

President Donald Trump’s continued criticism of Germany’s failure to pay its defense bills looks to have pushed one of Europe’s wealthiest nations into action. 

The president’s criticism of Berlin has compelled Germany to increase funding for its military forces and infrastructure, which critics say are in a bad state of affairs.

Richard Grenell, U.S. Ambassador to Germany during the first Trump administration, told Fox News Digital ‘multiple German leaders ignored the warnings from President Trump that Russia was using energy as a weapon against them. 

‘The war in Ukraine and the invasion of Putin showed the new German leadership that Donald Trump was absolutely right about Germany feeding the beast that ultimately turned on them.’

Trump appointed Grenell as presidential envoy for ‘special missions’ in December.

In 2018, Trump rebuked Germany’s addiction to Russian gas, according to observers of German-U.S. relations. He told the U.N. General Assembly that ‘Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.’

During his remarks, the camera panned to Germany’s delegation to the U.N. in 2018, including its then-U.N. Ambassador, Christoph Heusgen, and former Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who all seemingly laughed and smiled at Trump. 

However, those smirks soon turned into raw anxiety, when four years later, in 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and Germany scrambled for a way to wean itself off Russian gas to avoid helping reward Putin.

Matthew Kroenig, director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, told Fox News Digital, ‘Every U.S. presidential administration since Eisenhower has complained about European free riding, but asking ‘pretty please’ has not worked. Trump’s tough rhetoric is achieving results that eluded his predecessors.

‘The Trump effect is in part due to Trump raising NATO burden sharing to the very top of the transatlantic security agenda and in part due to genuine fears that Washington could abandon NATO and Europe would need to fend for itself.’

After Trump and Grenell helped to cajole the Germans out of their security slumber, Berllin reached the NATO goal of spending 2% of gross domestic product spending in 2024. This was the first time Berlin reached 2% since 1991, the end of the Cold War. 

Trump, however, called for Germany to spend 5% on defense because, he argues, the U.S. is contributing significant resources to protect the central European country.

The frustration with Germany and other European allies was captured in text messages reported between Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance. 

‘I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC,’ Hegseth said in response to Vance, who questioned U.S. leadership in advancing security policies in the Red Sea to counter Houthi aggression and reopen shipping lanes. 

Germany’s export trade greatly benefits from free navigation in the Middle East, but it refuses to aid the U.S. in stopping the Iran-backed Houthi terrorist movement via military strikes. Europe and Germany are unwilling to follow Trump’s lead and sanction the Houthis as a terrorist entity.

The so-called Trump Effect has also affected the German parliament’s decision to relax restrictions on debt so it can pump funds into its military superstructure.  

The likely new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party, said he would do ‘whatever it takes’ to rebuild Germany’s frail military. Berlin’s mainstream parties aim to invest hundreds of billions of euros in defense and infrastructure. Germany’s armed forces (Bundeswehr) are, according to reportsin a state of disarray, with a mere 181,174 soldiers at the end of last year. Germany’s Defense Ministry seeks to expand its armed forces to 203,000 by 2031.

Recruitment remains an ongoing challenge within a population raised on pacifism. After Germany started two World Wars in the last century, Germany’s power politics stressed the role of multilateral institutions like the U.N. and diplomacy in remedying conflicts.

The Associated Press recently reported that Germany’s parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces, Eva Högl, said, ‘The biggest problem is boredom. She added ‘If young people have nothing to do, if there isn’t enough equipment and there aren’t enough trainers, if the rooms aren’t reasonably clean and orderly, that deters people, and it makes the Bundeswehr unattractive.’

In an interview earlier this month with German news outlet WELT, the German historian Michael Wolffsohn, who taught atthe Bundeswehr University Munich, said of Germany and Western Europe’s failure over the decades to address its severe defense deficits, ‘Now we get the receipt for everything we neglected.’

Fox News Digital sent a detailed press query to the German Foreign Ministry about Trump’s criticism that Berlin has chronically underinvested in defense and remained wedded to Putin’s gas supply after his warnings.

Fox News’ Caitlin McFall contributed to this report.

As we learn the full melodrama of the so-called Signal ‘scandal’ of inviting left-wing, Trump-despising, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg onto a supposedly secure conference list involving top Trump security officials, lots of questions need asking and answering.

Most importantly, who had Goldberg’s private number and inserted it, ostensibly by mistake, into the cleared list of participants in the discussions? Why would any top Trump officials or their staffers ever even have Goldberg’s contact information, given his quite public record of: a) fabricating stories with unnamed sources, and b) suffering from a decade of chronic Trump derangement syndrome?

Questions for Goldberg: Did he know the mechanisms that had prompted and continued his stealthy presence in the secure discussions? Why did citizen Goldberg not simply come clean as soon as he realized he was mistakenly included in key national security conference communications, to which he did not belong, and thus should be obviously excluded immediately? Why did he instead stealthily listen in for nearly two weeks? Was the idea of informing his hosts of his own improper presence too morally old-fashioned?

Questions for posterity: Did Goldberg’s publicizing these discreet discussions really affect the otherwise completely successful mission to neutralize years of appeased Houthis’ aggression and begin to end their veritable destruction of Red Sea international maritime commerce? How did this blunder rank with prior diplomatic and military screw-ups, like Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s January 1950 Press Club speech de facto excluding South Korea from the American defense umbrella—an omission that may have contributed to the June 1950 North Korean invasion of the South? Was it comparable to Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie’s assurance to Saddam Hussein that, ‘We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait’— which may have prompted his 1990 invasion of Kuwait?

Was it comparable to President Obama’s March 2012 ‘hot mic’ assurance to then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have ‘flexibility’ on American-Eastern European missile defense after his last election? Both kept their promises: Obama foolishly dismantled American-sponsored Eastern European plans for missile defense, and Russia postponed its pre-planned invasion of Ukraine until 2014. 

Did it rank with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley secretly contacting his Chinese communist counterpart, Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng, to tell him he would give the People’s Liberation Army leader a heads-up if he determined President Donald Trump was likely to trigger an existential war?

And just look who is weighing in. There was Hillary Clinton, despite her illegal use of a private server to transmit classified State Department information and her subsequent destruction of subpoenaed communication devices.

There was serial fabulist Susan Rice, who in 2012 flat-out lied to the nation on five Sunday news shows, claiming preposterously that the terrorist attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi were ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations incited by anger over an anti-Muslim video. Ditto Rice’s fallacious Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl ‘honor’ narrative and her lie about the removal of Syrian weapons of mass destruction.

And why would Leon Panetta weigh in, when he was one of the supposed 51 intelligence authorities in 2020 who ridiculously claimed Hunter Biden’s FBI-authenticated laptop had all the hallmarks of a Russian intelligence disinformation effort? That lie was designed to arm Joe Biden before the last 2020 debate, and it may well have affected the election.

In the end, this was a blunder, but also what the Left likes to call a ‘teachable moment. All future similar conferences should be either held in person or participants must be triple-checked on a secure line. And perhaps most importantly, all Trump high appointees and their staffers should know enough to have nothing to do with those who wake up each morning wishing to destroy them—and go to bed each night lamenting that they have not done enough to advance that destruction.

This column was adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s post on X.