Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia announced Tuesday that she intends to vote against the proposed fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, saying the legislation spends too much taxpayer money on foreign priorities. 

Greene said in a post on X that the NDAA is ‘filled with American’s hard earned tax dollars used to fund foreign aid and foreign country’s wars.’

Greene pointed to the rising national debt, which, according to fiscaldata.treasury.gov, is more than $38.39 trillion.

‘These American People are $38 Trillion in debt, suffering from an affordability crisis, on the verge of a healthcare crisis, and credit card debt is at an all time high. Funding foreign aid and foreign wars is America Last and is beyond excuse anymore. I would love to fund our military but refuse to support foreign aid and foreign militaries and foreign wars. I am here and will be voting NO,’ Greene declared in her post.

But House Speaker Mike Johnson has praised the proposed NDAA.

‘This year’s National Defense Authorization Act helps advance President Trump and Republicans’ Peace Through Strength Agenda by codifying 15 of President Trump’s executive orders, ending woke ideology at the Pentagon, securing the border, revitalizing the defense industrial base, and restoring the warrior ethos,’ Johnson said in part of a lengthy statement.

Greene plans to leave office early next month, in the middle of her two-year term.

Senate Republicans appear to be closing in on a plan to counter Senate Democrats’ proposal to extend expiring Obamacare subsidies as a vote on credits at the end of the week draws closer.

Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, unveiled their proposal to tackle the Obamacare issue that would abandon the subsidies for Healthcare Savings Accounts (HSAs).

The lawmakers have been leading Senate Republicans’ planning for a counter-proposal to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Democrats’ legislation, which would extend the Biden-era subsidies for three years.

Cassidy and Crapo pitched the legislation as ‘an alternative to Democrats’ temporary COVID bonuses, which send billions of tax dollars to giant insurance companies without lowering insurance premiums.’

The long-awaited proposal would funnel the subsidy money directly to HSAs rather than to insurance companies, an idea that has the backing of President Donald Trump and is largely popular among Senate Republicans.

‘Instead of 100% of this money going to insurance companies, let’s give it to patients. By giving them an account that they control, we give them the power,’ Cassidy said in a statement. ‘We make health care affordable again.’

Crapo contended that the legislation would build off of Trump’s marquee legislative package, the ‘big beautiful bill,’ from earlier this year and would ‘help Americans manage the rising cost of health care without driving costs even higher.’

‘Giving billions of taxpayer dollars to insurers is not working to reduce health insurance premiums for patients,’ he said in a statement.

Whether the bill gets a vote in the upper chamber this week remains in the air, given the growing number of Obamacare subsidy plans floated by Senate Republicans. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., signaled that he thought their plan could work.

‘It represents an approach that actually does something on affordability and lowers costs,’ Thune said.

‘But there are other ideas out there, as you know, but I think if there is going to be some meeting of minds on this, it is going to require that Democrats sort of come off a position they know is an untenable one, and sit down in a serious way,’ he continued.

Cassidy and Crapo’s plan would seed HSAs with $1,000 for people ages 18 to 49 and $1,500 for those 50 to 65 for people earning up to 700% of the poverty level. In order to get the pre-funded HSA, people would have to buy a bronze or catastrophic plan on an Obamacare exchange.

The legislation also ticks off several demands from Senate Republicans in their back and forth with Senate Democrats over the subsidies that are unlikely to gain any favor from Schumer and his caucus.

Shortly after the legislation was unveiled, Schumer charged in a post on X that ‘Republicans are nowhere on healthcare, and the clock is ticking.’

Included in Cassidy and Crapo’s bill are provisions reducing federal Medicaid funding to states that cover undocumented immigrants, Requirements that states verify citizenship or eligible immigration status before someone can get Medicaid, a ban on federal Medicaid funding for gender transition services and nixing those services from ‘essential health benefits’ for ACA exchange plans, and inclusion Hyde Amendment provisions to prevent taxpayer dollars from funding abortions through the new HSAs.

Senate Republicans are expected to discuss the several options on the table, including newly-released plans from Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, and Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., respectively, during their closed-door conference meeting Tuesday afternoon.

When asked if there could be a compromise solution found among the proposals, Cassidy said, ‘That’s going to be the will of the conference, if you will.’

‘The U.S. struggle with China is the single greatest competition the United States has ever faced,’ defense analyst Seth Jones writes in his new book The American Edge.

And in an interview with Fox News Digital, Jones warned that if war broke out over Taiwan, the United States could burn through key long-range missiles ‘after roughly a week or so of conflict’ — a shortfall he says exposes how far behind the U.S. industrial base remains as Beijing moves onto what he calls a wartime footing.

Jones is a former Pentagon official and president of the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He argues the United States isn’t dealing with a superpower like the Soviet Union, whose system was brittle and economically isolated. China’s economy, he noted, is roughly the size of the U.S. and deeply tied into global production. That economic weight is fueling a military buildup across every major domain, from fifth- and sixth-generation aircraft to an enormous shipbuilding sector he describes as ‘upwards of 230 times the size of the United States.’ The effect, he said, is unmistakable. ‘The gap is shrinking.’

In ‘The American Edge,’ Jones lays out how great powers historically win long wars through production, not just innovation — and that’s where he believes the U.S. has the most to worry about. China’s missile forces now field a wide range of weapons designed to hold U.S. ships and aircraft at risk far from Taiwan. That makes stockpiles and throughput central to any American strategy in the Indo-Pacific.

‘When you look at the numbers right now of those long-range munitions, we still right now would run out after roughly a week or so of conflict over Taiwan,’ he said. ‘That’s just not enough to sustain a protracted war.’

Jones stressed that China’s strengths often overshadow a major vulnerability: its limited ability to hunt submarines. He said Beijing ‘still can’t see that well undersea,’ a gap the U.S. could exploit in any fight over Taiwan. If China tried to ferry troops across the Strait or impose a blockade, American attack submarines — along with a larger fleet of unmanned underwater vehicles — would pose a serious threat. He called the undersea environment one of the few places where the U.S. retains a decisive advantage, and one where production should accelerate quickly.

China has other problems as well. Jones pointed to corruption inside the PLA, inefficiency across its state-owned defense firms, ongoing struggles with joint operations and command-and-control and the fact the Chinese military hasn’t fought a war since the late 1970s. Its ability to project power beyond the first island chain also remains limited. But none of those challenges, he said, change the broader trajectory: China is building weapons in mass and at high speed — and the U.S. is still trying to catch up.

That theme sits at the center of his book. Jones describes a U.S. defense industrial base constrained by long acquisition timelines, aging shipyards, complicated contracting rules and production lines that aren’t built for a modern great-power conflict. In his view, the United States must rediscover the industrial urgency that once allowed it to surge output in wartime.

That responsibility is now falling to the Trump administration, which has pushed the Pentagon and the services to move faster on drones, munitions and new maritime capabilities. Over the past year, the Army, Air Force and Navy have launched new rapid-acquisition offices and programs aimed at fielding systems more quickly and helping smaller companies survive the long, expensive path to production. Senior defense officials have started using the phrase ‘wartime footing’ to describe the moment — language Jones said is overdue.

‘That is exactly the right wording,’ he said. ‘The Chinese and the Russian industrial bases right now … are both on a wartime footing.’

He said identifying a set of priority munitions for multiyear procurement is a meaningful step, and early moves to streamline contracting are encouraging. But he cautioned that the scale of the problem is much larger than the reforms announced so far. ‘The Pentagon writ large is a massive bureaucracy,’ he said. ‘It’s going to take a lot to break that bureaucracy. There’s been some progress, but it’s trench warfare right now.’

Jones said parts of the new National Defense Authorization Act move the needle in the right direction — especially support for expanding shipbuilding and efforts to strengthen the defense workforce. He also pointed to growing interest in leveraging allied shipyards in Japan and South Korea to relieve America’s overburdened maritime industry. But he argued that Washington is still not investing at a level that matches the threat.

‘As a percentage of gross domestic product, [defense spending] is about three percent,’ he said. ‘It’s lower than at any time during the Cold War. I think we need to start getting closer to those numbers and increase the amount of that budget that goes into procurement and acquisition.’

Artificial intelligence is another area Jones believes will reshape the battlefield faster than Washington anticipates. He noted that missile and drone threats now move at a volume and speed no human operator can manually track. ‘You can’t do things like air defense now without an increasing role of artificial intelligence,’ he said. The same applies to intelligence and surveillance, where AI-driven systems are already sorting vast amounts of satellite and sensor data.

But Jones said the United States will fall behind unless the Pentagon brings commercial AI leaders — companies like Nvidia and Google — more directly into national security programs. He argued that the United States needs the opposite of the consolidation that collapsed the defense industry in the 1990s. ‘We’ve got to get to a first breakfast,’ he said, meaning more tech firms competing in the defense space, not fewer.

Despite his warnings, Jones said the United States still has time to rebuild its industrial advantage. But it must act quickly. The Trump administration is talking about a wartime footing. China, he warned, is already living it.

George Washington Plunkitt was born into poverty in 1842 but rose through the ranks of the Democratic Party machine of New York, the famed ‘Tammany Hall,’ to become a state representative and a state senator. He also became quite wealthy along the way.

Plunkitt always defended his machine and its methods — and the money they made him. Plunkitt would gladly defend the practices of Tammany, rebutting charges of corruption with the standard reply that ‘nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft. There’s all the difference in the world between the two.’

Plunkitt’s brazenness lives on in the modern-day machines of the left, found in the deep-blue jurisdictions of the country. With the focus on the bilking of Minnesota taxpayers by the Somali community of the Twin Cities (many citizens, many not), voters across the country are still in shock as the story has unfolded since 2022. The lights shone on the Gopher State should get much brighter now, and after that, I have a follow-up that will make the swamp of the Twin Cities seem like a puddle.

The Minnesota story has been hiding in plain sight, with superb reporters from one of the original blogs of more than 20 years ago, Powerline, poring over the scandal for years.

Powerline’s founders John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, and more recently their colleague Bill Glahn, have continued to dig and report, dig and report, dig and report on the ‘Somali connection.’

In recent weeks, the story caught fire with the help of reporting by Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and by Fox News. That ‘Minnesota is drowning in fraud,’ as Thorpe and Rufo put it, has now become a national story. Pray that it is the first of many.

‘There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works,’ Boss Plunkitt would say. ‘I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.’

Turns out the defendants, the indicted and the convicted in the Gopher State saw their opportunities as well, and they put Tammany to shame when it came to scale and speed.

The conmen of Minnesota bilked the state out of vast piles of cash through a variety of plays, the most infamous of which is, for the moment, ‘Feeding Our Future.’ It took truly extraordinary efforts by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, to turn their eyes the other way to allow that scam and soon others to flourish. The possessed girl in ‘The Exorcist’ had nothing on Walz and Ellison when it came to turning their heads.

We have former Attorney General Eric Holder and former White House Counsel Dana Remus to thank for elevating the massive fraud ring run primarily out of the Somali American and Somali community in the Twin Cities to the nation’s attention.

Why? Because that pair made Walz much more than an obscure governor of a deep-blue state. That duo was primarily responsible for ‘vetting’ the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president as one of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ potential running mates. The dynamic duo of Holder and Remus either wholly missed the massive cons run on Walz’s watch or judged them not significant enough to derail his candidacy.

During ‘Brat Summer,’ the legacy media abandoned its past practices and joined in the effort to push the worst pair of candidates to the finish since Alf Landon and Frank Knox got blown out by FDR in the 1936 referendum on Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Holder blessed Walz, and Holder’s fans in the Manhattan–Beltway corridor followed suit. Media elites blessed Holder’s judgment in turn.

Big mistake.

Now Walz is part of the national Democratic Party’s brand and refuses to go away, choosing to concentrate his efforts on running for a third term as governor next year — and apparently hoping he might be the party’s standard-bearer in 2028. Instead, ‘Feeding Our Future’ broke out of the Minnesota news ghetto and onto the national stage.

‘Run Tim Run’ should be the GOP’s chant, alongside ‘Run Gavin Run,’ because just like Walz, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has some industrial-level explaining to do.

No, I’m not referring to the California governor’s French Laundry debacle. And no, not the devastating fires that tore through L.A. in January. Not even his indicted former chief of staff. No, the exact parallel to Walz’s woe is the Newsom administration’s handling of COVID-era relief for the unemployed — a statewide con run by political cons.

The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program (PUA), like the Lost Wages Assistance plan, was devised and funded by Congress to keep alive Americans left unemployed or with their businesses shuttered by COVID lockdowns. Like standard unemployment programs, these COVID-era programs were primarily run through state unemployment insurance offices and other state agencies.

The COVID lockdowns were unprecedented, and the public health ‘authorities’ responsible for advising and administering them should never be taken seriously again.

Many of those bureaucrats, drunk on new authority, stepped forward when elected officials sought guidance on what to do about the mysterious and deadly disease imported from China. (Their dismissal of the lab-leak theory speaks to their actual, as opposed to presumed, expertise.)

When lockdowns became the solution du jour, Congress rightly understood that they were shutting down the livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans and flooded the country with life-saving money — three times.

It was not just the Minnesota Somali community that had ‘seen their opportunities and took ‘em.’ So, too, did the cons of California: the real, honest-to-goodness cons of the California penal system — inmates for whom available time to scheme and scam is abundant.

Ask your favorite AI engine, ‘How much fraud was perpetrated against the California Employment Development Department during COVID?’ The answers will vary, but the floor on the cost of the fraud is $20 billion. The ceiling is more than $30 billion.

The Golden State’s EDD is ‘run’ by a director, and Gov. Newsom, who took office in 2018, has appointed two: Rita Saenz and Nancy Farias. COVID arrived on Newsom’s watch, and he and his appointees should own the fraud that followed. They make the Walz–Ellison team look like pikers when it comes to ignoring fraud.

In his first term, President Trump stood up Operation Warp Speed, and Congress rightly decided to (1) spend federal dollars to lessen the lockdown pain and (2) leave the payment of most public benefits to state agencies, while COVID business loans were handled by private-sector banks as the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department innovated in a variety of ways to prevent an economic crash.

The years following the mishap at the Wuhan lab demonstrated the vast incompetence of the American administrative state but also the necessity of a federal government to pick up the tab when ‘scientists’ lose their collective minds and, for example, counsel the closure of schools.

The official timeline has COVID appearing in Wuhan in December 2019 and reaching U.S. shores a month later. We may never know when the first cases were diagnosed by the Chinese Communist Party, and we are not in a position to investigate the horrific fraud and consequent disaster for which General Secretary Xi Jinping is responsible.

But President Trump could order a six-month deep dive into the financial fraud that followed in the U.S., not just in Minnesota and California — though those are the ‘patient zeroes’ for never allowing a crisis to pass without enriching the state’s worst actors.

Could President Trump stand up a time-limited panel to investigate fraud perpetrated on state agencies during COVID? Yes. Might that panel torch a few GOP reputations along the way? Inevitably.

But the interest in the Minnesota Somali shakedown should be a demand signal for accountability across the country.

President Trump often acts in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, who, like 45–47, was never afraid of a headline — provided he provoked it.

Now is the time for the president to ask a handful of the smartest, most respected people in the country to sort through the wreckage of the COVID era’s many state governments’ responsibilities and ‘initiatives’ and report in rapid fashion — and in clear English — the scale of fraud perpetrated upon state agencies.

Make your search-and-publicize team smart and fast. Putting Johnson and Hinderaker as co-chairs of a strike team devoted to compiling the facts as we know them today would ensure accuracy and fine writing.

And give them a deadline: Aug. 31, 2026. Voters deserve to know how their state governments worked during COVID — or didn’t — before they vote again.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov’s threats against Ukraine following a drone strike echo a 2022 plot to infiltrate Kyiv and target President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a former Ukrainian government official has said.

The leader’s latest threat came after a Ukrainian drone reportedly struck a high-rise building near Kadyrov’s home in Grozny on Nov. 5.

The strike prompted the Chechen strongman to vow retaliation in an online video post, according to Reuters.

‘This new threat would just be another assassination threat for Zelenskyy. The Chechens are really serious about revenge,’ a former government official told Fox News Digital.

‘But in Kyiv they are not panicking about this like they were in 2022,’ the former official said under condition of anonymity.

‘Zelenskyy is now better protected, feels more powerful and is less fragile,’ they said.

The recent Ukrainian strike, reported by Reuters, hit the 28-story Grozny-City tower that sits roughly 830 meters from Kadyrov’s home.

Kadyrov, who is loyal to Russia, later allegedly confirmed the attack in a Telegram post, stating there were no casualties, but he condemned the strike as making ‘no tactical sense.’ 

He also warned that retaliation was imminent.

‘Starting tomorrow and in the course of the week, the Ukrainian fascists will be feeling a stern response,’ he threatened.

Unlike Ukraine’s strike, he added, ‘we will not be making a cowardly strike on peaceful targets,’ per Reuters.

Ukrainian attacks have hit sites in Chechnya before now, including a police barracks and a training academy. Chechen units were also deployed during Russia’s 2022 invasion and were among the Kremlin’s most loyal forces.

At the time of the 2022 invasion, the official said there was intense anxiety in Kyiv.

‘At the beginning of the large-scale invasion in 2022, Chechens were sent to Kyiv to murder top politicians,’ the former official said.

‘This included Volodymyr Zelenskyy and top politicians from the government and security services and Parliament, and many other agencies.

‘Zelenskyy and Yermak were very scared,’ they claimed. ‘They were calling from the office, asking some people in the military and security service to secure the metro station in Kyiv.’

The source said one metro station in Kyiv was a potential infiltration route for the Chechens into Zelenskyy’s presidential bunker.

At the time, the station in Kyiv that was deep underground and near the presidential bunker, was viewed as the most vulnerable entry route, the source said.

‘They were afraid that Chechens would get to the bunker through this metro station, but in the end the Chechens were killed before they reached Kyiv.

‘They tried to reach Kyiv, somehow downtown, somehow via the river, but it’s quite a complicated way to get there,’ the former official said.

Meanwhile, with the Nov. 5. Grozny strike landing so close to his home, Kadyrov, already one of Putin’s most aggressive enforcers, is signaling a harsher stance as attacks reach inside Russian territory.

The Moscow Times reported that the drone struck a building that houses regional government offices, including the Chechen Security Council and agencies connected to tourism and religious affairs.

Despite the rhetoric, the former Ukrainian official claimed Zelenskyy is unfazed this time around.

‘These days, Zelenskyy isn’t afraid of Kadyrov’s actions against him or the Ukrainian people. Zelenskyy is feeling very powerful right now,’ they added.

Fox News Digital has reached out to Zelenskyy’s office for comment.

Congress released a $900 billion defense bill that reshapes U.S. economic and military competition with China by imposing new investment restrictions, banning a range of Chinese-made technologies from Pentagon supply chains, and expanding diplomatic and intelligence efforts to track Beijing’s global footprint. 

The legislation, which authorizes War Department spending at $8 billion above the White House’s request, includes a 4% pay raise for enlisted service members, expands counter-drone authorities, and directs new investments in the Golden Dome missile defense shield and nuclear modernization programs. 

It also extends Pentagon support to law enforcement operations at the southwest border and strengthens U.S. posture in the Indo-Pacific, including funding for Taiwan’s security cooperation program.

In a victory for conservative privacy hawks like House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the legislation includes a non-defense provision that would mandate FBI disclosure when the bureau was investigating presidential candidates and other candidates for federal office.

That measure was the subject of party in-fighting last week when Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., whom Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., had appointed chairwoman of House GOP leadership, publicly accused the speaker of kowtowing to Democrats and allowing that provision to be removed.

Johnson said he was blindsided by Stefanik’s anger and was unaware of her concerns when she had made them public.

Stefanik later claimed victory on X, stating the provision had been reinstated after a conversation between herself, Johnson and President Donald Trump. 

Coverage of in vitro fertilization (IVF) for military families, which became a flashpoint in recent days, is not included in the final NDAA. Neither are provisions preempting states from regulating AI or banning a U.S. central bank digital currency (CBDC). 

Republicans have pushed the CBDC prohibition as a privacy and civil-liberties measure, arguing that a government-issued digital dollar could give federal agencies the ability to monitor or restrict individual transactions. 

House aides said the anti-CBDC language became tied to a separate housing-policy package known as ‘Road to Housing,’ and the concessions required to keep both items together were unacceptable.

The bill also establishes a new ‘Artificial Intelligence Futures Steering Committee’ charged with producing long-range forecasts and policy recommendations for advanced AI systems, including artificial general intelligence.

The legislation takes aim at long-standing bottlenecks in the defense industrial base by authorizing new investment tools, expanding multi-year procurement for high-demand munitions and platforms, and overhauling portions of the acquisition system to speed the fielding of commercial and emerging technologies. 

Alongside those reforms, lawmakers approved new ‘right-to-repair’ style requirements that force contractors to provide the technical data the Pentagon needs to maintain and sustain major weapons systems—a change intended to reduce vendor lock-in and ease chronic maintenance delays across the fleet.

One major section of the bill establishes a far-reaching outbound investment screening system, requiring U.S. companies and investors to alert the Treasury Department when they back certain high-risk technologies in China or other ‘countries of concern.’ The measure gives Treasury the ability to block deals outright, forces detailed annual reporting to Congress, and grants new authorities to sanction foreign firms tied to China’s military or surveillance networks. Lawmakers cast the effort as a long-overdue step to keep U.S. capital from fueling Beijing’s development of dual-use technologies.

The bill also includes a procurement ban targeting biotechnology providers that would bar the Pentagon from contracting with Chinese genetic sequencing and biotech firms linked to the People’s Liberation Army or China’s security services. 

Additional sourcing prohibitions restrict the War Department from purchasing items such as advanced batteries, photovoltaic components, computer displays, and critical minerals originating from foreign entities of concern, further tightening U.S. supply chains away from China. They also require the department to phase out the use of Chinese-made computers, printers and other tech equipment.

Beyond economic measures, the NDAA directs the State Department to deploy a new cadre of Regional China Officers at U.S. diplomatic posts around the world, responsible for monitoring Chinese commercial, technological, and infrastructure activities across every major geographic region, including Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The NDAA contains several Israel-related provisions, including a directive for the Pentagon to avoid participating in international defense exhibitions that bar Israeli involvement. It authorizes funding for  Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow – the missile defense programs the U.S. operates with Isra

The bill also requires biennial reports comparing China’s global diplomatic presence to that of the United States. The Pentagon is separately directed to strengthen U.S. posture in the Indo-Pacific by extending the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and expanding cooperative training and industrial-base initiatives with regional allies, including Taiwan and the Philippines.

The legislation reauthorizes the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative at $400 million per year for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. Congress will also require more frequent reporting on allied contributions to Ukraine to track how European partners support Kyiv.

The bill repeals two long-dormant war authorizations tied to earlier phases of U.S. military involvement in Iraq, while leaving the primary post-9/11 counterterrorism authority untouched. Lawmakers said the final text includes repeals of the 1991 Gulf War AUMF and the 2002 Iraq War AUMF, both of which successive administrations have said are no longer operationally necessary. The 1991 authorization approved the U.S.-led effort to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and the 2002 authority permitted the invasion of Iraq under President George W. Bush.

Both parties have debated winding down these authorizations for years, arguing they no longer reflect current U.S. missions in the Middle East. Presidents from both parties, including Trump, have maintained that modern military operations in the region do not rely on either statute and that the commander in chief already holds sufficient Article II authority to defend U.S. personnel when required. Repeal also answers long-running concerns in Congress about outdated war authorities being used as secondary legal justifications for actions far from their original intent, such as the 2020 strike on Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

The NDAA does not touch the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which remains the central legal basis for U.S. counter-terror operations against al-Qaeda, ISIS, and associated groups. That post-9/11 statute continues to underpin nearly all active U.S. counter-terror missions worldwide.

House aides said leaders in their chamber hoped to consider the bill as soon as this week. It will first need to go through the House Rules Committee, the final gatekeepers before legislation gets a chamber-wide vote. It could hit that panel as early as Tuesday afternoon.

Then it will head for a vote in the Senate before reaching Trump’s desk for his signature.

For Social Security it has been a miserable year. 

After President Donald Trump unleashed Elon Musk and DOGE on the Social Security Administration, the agency lost more staff in a shorter period of time than ever before in its 90-year history. Fortunately, public outcry and pushback from congressional Democrats saved Social Security from a 50% cut to staffing and the closure of scores of field offices as Trump and his administration had announced back in March. So, somehow, those dedicated workers remaining at the Social Security Administration have still managed to keep the agency running — without missing a single monthly benefit payment. 

There are not many public or private insurers in the world who can claim to never have missed a monthly benefit payment in 90 years. 

This is good news for 71 million Americans — many of whom depend on their earned benefit every month as a lifeline. But we are not out of the woods yet. The agency has been gutted. Enormous damage has been done to customer service and to the agency’s ability to process claims.

Just as many are demanding that Trump’s deep cuts to healthcare be restored, so too must Trump’s deep cuts to Social Security be restored, as the two are inextricably linked. Sixty-four million Medicare recipients will see a reduction in their Social Security benefits in 2026 due to Trump’s Medicare price hikes that will cut into their Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), making life more expensive for seniors. This is the greatest erosion of the Social Security COLA in nearly a decade, and the first time that Medicare premiums exceeded $200 per month. 

With the Social Security Administration’s staffing now reduced to a 60-year low and baby boomers swelling the number of active beneficiaries to an all-time high, the agency is struggling badly, and the American people are paying the price. Wait times to get to a person in a field office or to talk to a person on the 1-800 line have become longer and longer.  

As the Trump administration claims that things have never been better, millions of Americans are having a very different experience. In fact, more people today now die waiting in line for their initial disability determination than at any time since President Dwight Eisenhower signed the disability portion of the act into law in 1956. Even just recently, Trump and DOGE risked 300 million Americans’ personal data from the Social Security Administration. They have robbed Americans of customer service and peace of mind.

Conditions have grown so bad – Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works, has called for Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano’s resignation. It proves to be a telling illustration of the deep concern experts have for the damage done to the agency. 

None of this had to happen. It was made to happen. As a candidate, Trump vowed all through the campaign that he would protect Social Security. Instead, he wrecked the program’s customer service, took a chainsaw to its functions and maligned its reputation with false claims of waste, fraud and abuse.

In a time of great political division, Social Security remains the most strongly supported program in America. In fact, 80% of Americans are concerned whether Social Security will be available when they retire and want it to be strengthened, made better — not hacked to pieces, privatized or liquidated. 

This is a democracy moment. Social Security should be a bipartisan issue. All lawmakers — Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike — need to come together to deliver on its promise of a secure retirement after a lifetime of hard work. 

House Republicans are expected to reveal a roadmap sometime this month that they say will lower sky-high healthcare costs.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., have both said they are speaking to various GOP factions to build consensus on what that plan should look like.

In the meantime, Fox News Digital spoke with several GOP lawmakers about what they believe should be in such a package and found several commonalities on what they expect.

‘Health savings accounts (HSAs) need to be expanded to as many individual healthcare recipients or premium payers in our country. Like right now, it’s the people that can access a health savings account, usually high-deductible, catastrophic coverage, those types of plans,’ said House GOP Conference Vice Chair Blake Moore, R-Utah. ‘They’re really well-used, but they need to be extended so basically all Americans on some type of health insurance policy can use health savings accounts.’

HSAs are accounts that allow people to set aside money pre-tax to pay for certain health expenses, but they are currently only available to people with high-deductible health insurance plans.

Expanding HSA use proved a common theme among House Republicans who spoke with Fox News Digital about what they want to see in their party’s health plan.

Another topic that came up frequently was reforming the pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) system, an issue that’s gotten bipartisan support in the past.

PBMs are third parties that act as intermediaries between pharmaceutical companies and those responsible for insurance coverage, often responsible for administrative tasks and negotiating drug prices.

PBMs have also been the subject of bipartisan ire in Congress, with both Republicans and Democrats accusing them of being part of a broken system to inflate health costs.

‘I had my own pharmacies for over 32 years, and I can tell you, bringing prescription drug prices down is as simple as is addressing the middleman, the PBMs that are causing increases and causing prices to stay high for drugs,’ Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., said. ‘That is one of the quickest and the easiest ways to bring prescription drug prices down, by reeling them in.’

Republican lawmakers also more broadly called for a competitive marketplace of health insurance plans.

While few said they had any appetite for actually repealing and replacing the Obamacare system, most said they wanted Americans to have more options than just the federal program when choosing their own healthcare.

‘We see that Obamacare has now been around for almost 14 years, and it’s more expensive, and we have less choices than ever before. So Obamacare is not working, and I think that’s what we need to focus on,’ said Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind. ‘There’s plans already being put in place by the administration, by groups in the Republican Party, that want to focus on making sure healthcare is affordable, and it’s available and that people can make choices rather than being told who which doctor they have to go to.’

Democrats have warned that healthcare costs are set to spike for millions of Americans if the subsidies are not extended. But House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., said costs are poised to rise either way if Congress does not act soon.

‘All Americans are getting a health insurance premium increase this coming year of 20 to 30%. Even if we did what they wanted us to do — and I’m not saying that we won’t, because the White House might have a plan to continue it, the Senate might have a plan. Mike Johnson might do something, but even if we do that, you realize that it’s only gonna cover about 4% of that 20 to 30% increase. It’s not solving the problem,’ Emmer said.

Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., told Fox News Digital he wanted to see a healthcare package that focuses on doctors in rural areas, as well as reforms for hospital care.

‘I’ve got to make sure that what we do is right for that independent practicing physician, that small-town pharmacist. And so we have to make sure we’re taking care of rural America with what we do, as well as the hospitals that we would all go to if we had, you know, cancer treatment or something like that,’ he said.

None of the conservatives who spoke with Fox News Digital expressed support for extending Obamacare tax credits that were enhanced during the COVID-19 pandemic, but which are set to expire at the end of this year.

It’s a push led by Democrats and some Republicans, however, who have introduced a range of options, from a one-year extension with certain reforms to House Democratic leaders’ push for a clean, three-year extension.

But whatever lawmakers come up with will likely have to get 60 votes to advance in the Senate, meaning some support from the left will be needed.

‘There’s a lot of good bipartisan healthcare policy legislation that can pass imminently and very soon, unless Democrats play the game of, ‘Oh, I don’t want it to look like the Republicans are being productive on healthcare, so we’re gonna stymie this, even though I agree with the policy,’’ Moore said.

President Donald Trump has seen recent setbacks in his polling numbers on many issues, but one bright spot in surveys has been his aggressive approach to Venezuela, including taking out drug cartel boats. But there is another purpose at work here, one that may help to end the war in Ukraine.

What is important to understand is that Venezuela is a client state of Russia, as is Iran, and as was Syria until the recent overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. One by one, Trump has been proving that against American might, Putin cannot keep his sketchy global friends safe.

‘Russia’s track record with allies like Iran, Syria, and now Venezuela reveals a familiar pattern,’ Peter Duran, adjunct senior fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me. ‘The Kremlin will make lavish statements of support, but provide minimal backing when real threats emerge to its clients.’

Noting how thin PUtin is stretched by the war in Ukraine and U.S. sanctions, Duran said ‘keeping Maduro in power is a bridge too far for Moscow if President Trump presses the issue.’

One can almost see Trump’s main Ukraine negotiator, Steve Witkoff, saying to a Russian counterpart, ‘How’s your boy Maduro, doing? Seems to be having a tough time. I wish we could help …’

While Putin has been murdering Ukrainians and maintaining the largest European land war in generations, Trump has been weakening Russian global power. Syria is making nice with America, Iran has been de-nuclearized and now that leaves Venezuela.

In recent weeks, Russian cargo planes have been seen flying into Venezuela. Nobody is ever quite sure if they are there to bring supplies, or perhaps at some point, to airlift Maduro to an early retirement in Moscow, where al-Assad now resides.

It is a very telling situation, because the entire reason that Putin invaded Ukraine was that he believes it falls under Russia’s sphere of influence. Yet, without putting a single soldier in combat, the United States has marshalled support for Ukraine that has stymied the Russian dictator.

For almost four years now, Putin has sent his own armies into a meat grinder, employed North Korean mercenaries and expended more treasure than seen in all the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies combined. It’s been little avail in terms of breaking the stalemate.

Compare that with America’s situation regarding Venezuela. We could take out Maduro tomorrow and there’s not a damn thing Putin could do about it.

In fact, this week’s new National Security Strategy statement from the Trump administration doubles down on a Monroe Doctrine-like policy of putting the Western Hemisphere first and foremost in our security goals.

But rightfully putting our own backyard first does not mean that Trump or America are exiting from the global stage. In fact, much the opposite is true.

Trump understands the global chess board. He knows that, while direct conflict with Russia could lead to global war, picking off the Kremlin’s rogue client states around the edges is fair game, and puts pressure on the center of that board.

‘President Trump’s big stick approach to Venezuela recalls Theodore Roosevelt’s approach to the region. Instead of gunboat diplomacy, Trump is deploying supercarrier diplomacy,’ Duran told me. ‘A quiet retirement abroad is the best option for Maduro before options narrow further. Putin won’t be able to save him.’

Trump has put Putin in an incredibly tough position here. If the dictator remains dedicated to his fantasy of reclaiming all of Ukraine to restore the USSR, he risks the United States undermining his allies and clients across the globe.

Russia may be faced with the choice of regaining what it believes is its territorial integrity at the price of no longer being a global superpower.

Trump is proving again, as he once told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that he holds all the cards. At the moment, he is playing them masterfully, tightening the noose around Russia as its geopolitical allies are knocked off one by one.

At last week’s cabinet meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Trump’s foreign policy as transformational, ‘because for the first time in a long time we have a president who basically puts America at the forefront of every decision we make in our in relations with the world.’

In Venezuela, the Department of War is indeed playing offense, as Trump promised, but the opponent isn’t really Maduro, it’s Putin, who may soon find out that another of his pariah allies is off the board forever.

Rosie O’Donnell is sounding the alarm about her ongoing fixation with President Donald Trump.

The 63-year-old, along with some of her friends and family, spoke to The Washington Post about her move to Ireland after Trump’s re-election last November, and one thing was made clear from the article. 

She ‘can’t resist’ speaking about Trump.

O’Donnell told the outlet she promised her therapist the Wednesday before Thanksgiving she would refrain from posting about Trump for two days.

It fell apart within hours.

A longtime friend, Jennifer Kopetic, was described as ‘annoyed’ when she told O’Donnell during a recent visit, ‘Roseann, you’ve got to detach. You’ve got to disconnect.’

She made another vow — three days this time — telling her 1.2 million Instagram followers she was ‘gonna try again to not give him a minute of me.’ However, she failed that attempt, too.

O’Donnell has said her emotional spiral began the moment Trump was elected.

‘I felt on the verge of crying … when he got elected,’ she previously told an Irish TV audience in March, explaining she feared a second term. 

The former talk show host said her concerns were personal. A lesbian mother of five — with her youngest, 12-year-old Clay, identifying as nonbinary and diagnosed with autism — O’Donnell feared what she saw as Trump-era hostility toward LGBTQ Americans and the potential gutting of federal support for special education programs.

The Washington Post reported that, during Trump’s first term, she channeled her anxiety into more than 200 angry digital portraits of the former president on her iPad, labeling him ‘Moron,’ ‘Loser’ and ‘Liar.’

That kind of ‘obsessed’ focus on Trump is exactly what convinced O’Donnell she had no choice but to leave the U.S.

Her brother Eddie, who is helping with her Irish citizenship application, called her move abroad ‘the best decision she’s made … honestly.’ 

O’Donnell made her recent remarks after she said the political stress she carries is spilling into her family — especially her daughter, who she said blames Trump for uprooting their lives.

‘My daughter is now saying, ‘Damn him. Damn Trump,’’ O’Donnell said during an appearance on ‘The Jim Acosta Show.’

According to O’Donnell, her daughter hit their table in frustration, shouting, ‘He made us move for our own safety … and now he’s destroying the country.’ 

O’Donnell acknowledged the difficulty of trying to keep her daughter shielded from the chaos while still being honest about why they left. 

‘She hears everything. She recognizes what’s going on,’ she said.

The comedian added she’s ready to step back from political combat.

‘Somebody can tap me out. … I did 22 years. I don’t need to do anymore.’

The White House wasted no time responding to O’Donnell’s renewed attacks.

‘Rosie O’Donnell clearly suffers from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and it’s better for the entire country that she decided to move away,’ White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Fox News Digital earlier this week.

O’Donnell moved to Ireland after claiming Trump threatened to strip her of U.S. citizenship. 

In October, she announced she was pursuing Irish citizenship, citing her grandparents’ roots and her desire for distance from American politics.