While next year’s midterms will determine whether Republicans can keep control of Congress after winning big in 2024, there are also a slate of gubernatorial elections, several that are toss-ups, which could have equally wide-ranging impacts.

Three states with Democratic Party governors, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, are currently listed as ‘toss up’ races across multiple high-profile election polling groups, such as The Cook Political Report and Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Meanwhile, Republicans will have to defend the governorship in Georgia and Nevada, two other races considered a ‘toss up’ by some, while others are giving Republicans a slight advantage. For example, Nevada and Georgia are considered a ‘toss up’ in The Cook Political Report’s latest polling that came out Dec. 20, but they are listed as ‘lean Republican’ by Sabato’s Crystal Ball. 

‘Whether it’s Aaron Ford vacationing instead of doing his job in Nevada, Katie Hobbs tanking Arizona’s economy, or Jocelyn Benson letting non-residents vote in Michigan, Democrats are not sending their best to gubernatorial races next year,’ Regional Communications Director Delanie Bomar told Fox News Digital. ‘Republicans have a track record of winning these states and we will do so again next year.’

In Arizona, Democrat Governor Katie Hobbs will have to maintain her seat against long-time House Reps. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., and David Schweikert, R-Ariz., as well as attorney Karrin Taylor Robson, who lost to Kari Lake in the GOP primary for governor in 2022.

In 2024, Hobbs was investigated for involvement in an alleged ‘pay-for-play’ scheme after a report revealed a group home business that looks after vulnerable children was approved for a rate hike after it donated big to her inauguration and the Arizona Democratic Party. However, Hobbs has pushed back against the allegations, arguing she was not personally involved in the rate decision. The controversy is still under criminal investigation by both the Arizona attorney general and the Maricopa County attorney, and the Arizona House also launched its own inquiry last month into the matter. Hobbs, who has had a lengthy political career dating back to 2010, has been criticized for how she treats her staff and who she hires, but also has a history of being able to rake in campaign funds and run successful elections. 

In Michigan, Democratic Party Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will be term-limited out. Her secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson, is among the front-runners to take over Whitmer’s seat. Earlier this year, Fox News Digital reported about Benson’s attendance at a ‘unity’ dinner that featured decor threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump and equating his supporters with Nazis. Republican Michigan lawmakers have called on the Trump Justice Department to monitor Michigan’s 2026 elections, arguing there is an ‘inherent’ conflict associated with Benson, who is Michigan’s top election official, running while overseeing the state’s elections.  

Wisconsin’s Democratic Party Gov. Tony Evers announced his retirement in July, indicating he will not seek a third term under the state’s unlimited term limit rules. As a result, the seat is up for grabs, with House Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wisc., and Wisconsin County Executive Josh Schoemann among the GOP front-runners. On the Democrat side, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, current Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and Wisconsin County Executive David Crowley find themselves at the top of the heap.

Courtney Alexander, a spokesperson for the Republican Governor’s Association, pointed out how voters view governors’ races ‘through a unique prism’ following Trump’s first year of his second term. ‘They see that Republican-led states are more affordable and safer, while Democrat-led states are among the most expensive and have allowed their cities to become hellscapes of crime and homelessness,’ Alexander told Fox News Digital. ‘Americans have already voted with their feet, and that tells us everything we need to know about what to expect in 2026 — Democrats running at the gubernatorial level have records they cannot defend.’

Georgia and Nevada will have to be defended by Republicans if they hope to add to their GOP gubernatorial headcount. Georgia, which historically has been a Republican stronghold, has seen Democratic Party wins in the last several years, making it a place for hard-fought elections. Current Republican Gov. Brian Kemp is being term-limited. It was being mulled he might go to the U.S. Senate, but Kemp later waved off the rumors.

In 2026, there will be a total of 36 gubernatorial elections held on Nov. 3, 2026. The primaries for these races will be held at various times ahead of the scheduled general election date.  

While not seen as a tough race for Republicans, Florida’s primary race has the ingredients for something interesting. The Sunshine State’s current GOP governor, Ron DeSantis, will be term-limited, and it is unclear who DeSantis desires to be his replacement after President Donald Trump endorsed GOP Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla. Thus far, DeSantis has not embraced Donalds as the best person to take over his office, like Trump. Rather, DeSantis has publicly hinted his wife, Casey DeSantis, could be a formidable contender. ‘She would do better than me,’ DeSantis told reporters earlier this year while discussing speculation about Florida’s first lady succeeding him. ‘There’s no question about that.’

Fox News Digital’s Michael Dorgan contributed to this report.

If the Department of Justice (DOJ) wanted to release every Jeffrey Epstein-related document they had on file, they had the firepower to do so, a former assistant U.S. attorney argued.

The DOJ has faced bipartisan criticism over its initial release of heavily redacted Epstein files, which lawmakers argue fell short of the requirements of a recently passed transparency law.

‘The Department of Justice has all the resources in the world, right? I mean if they wanted to put 1,000 lawyers on this to review the documents and get them ready for the production, they could have,’ Sarah Krissoff said.

‘And they don’t appear to have done that,’ she added.

The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Krissoff, who worked as a prosecutor for almost 14 years in the Southern District of New York, described key differences between the Epstein Files and the normal redaction process that attorneys grapple with. Those distinctions make it unclear who would have had final say about the information the DOJ released on Friday as the agency attempted to follow through on the requirements laid out by the Epstein Files Transparency Act. 

That law, passed by Congress last month and signed by President Donald Trump on Nov. 19, gave the DOJ just 30 days to make its documentation of Epstein public. It included some exceptions for protecting the identity of victims.

Despite the thousands of files that became publicly available at the end of last week, the DOJ’s first trove sparked criticism from some lawmakers and viewers online outraged that the department hadn’t released them all at once.

‘They are hiding a lot of documents. That would be very helpful in our investigation,’ Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., a member of the House Oversight Committee, told CNN on Monday morning. 

Although she remains skeptical of the department’s effort, Krissoff noted that what the DOJ’s been asked to do goes far outside the norm for disclosures.

‘There is no real mechanism in the law that the public can just access documents because they’re interested in them, right? In this case, this law is requiring the DOJ to make these things public because so many members of Congress are interested in this issue,’ Krissoff said.

In the cases she’s been a part of, Krissoff said redactions usually came down to meticulous negotiations between the prosecution and the defense. Sometimes deliberations drilled into individual sentences or words.

‘This situation is a little different because it’s unclear, you know, who is still working on this from the original case team. And so, the question is: who at the Department of Justice reviewed these in connection with the redactions here?’ Krissoff said.

She said whole case files rarely get released to the public beyond what shows up in court filings — and what’s there usually serves the narrow purposes of the prosecution. In Epstein’s case, the public’s interests extend beyond any potential conviction of Epstein himself. Epstein died in 2019 while incarcerated on suspicion of sex-trafficking minors. His death, ruled a suicide, cut short his prosecution and left behind questions about whether he facilitated illegal sexual encounters for his vast social network. 

Photos released by the DOJ last week lack context and do not, on their own, implicate anyone depicted in them of wrongdoing. 

‘The case file often implicates many other people that are not charged in the crimes. So, there may be 15 people charged in a drug ring. You’ve only charged one or two people; you don’t want to impugn those other people who have not been charged by releasing information showing their involvement in this drug ring,’ Krissoff said.

‘The last thing you want to do is put that neighbor’s information or his name or even his statement out there,’ Krissoff said.

She believes that there’s a danger in forcing disclosure of an ongoing case simply because of great public interest and setting a precedent for that to become a regular occurrence. In her view, it could disrupt ongoing investigations of the future that draw intense public interest.

The DOJ said it will continue to release its documents on Epstein on a rolling basis. It has not announced when they expect to continue their release of the Epstein files.

A Republican lawmaker has reacted to the massive unfolding fraud scandal in Minnesota with legislation aimed at preventing more taxpayer dollars from being wasted at the United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks has introduced the Welfare Abuse and Laundering Zillions Act, or the ‘WALZ Act,’ which would require HHS’ Office of Inspector General to open investigations into any program that sees a 10% or greater increase in total payments over any six-month period within a fiscal year.

Under the bill, HHS would no longer have discretion to ignore sudden billing increases that critics say often signal fraud schemes, particularly in large entitlement programs.

The bill comes amid revelations in recent months that Minnesota’s federally funded health and nutrition programs were rife with fraud to the tune of potentially up to $9 billion, federal prosecutors said last week. 

Critics have made Walz the face of the scandal, given the fact that concerns over the fraud date back to 2019, when he took office and the inability of the state, which he serves as the top executive, to tackle the problem over the last five years.

‘This is on my watch,’ Walz told reporters on Friday. ‘I am accountable for this. And more importantly, I am the one that will fix it.’

Miller-Meeks told Fox News Digital the situation in Minnesota represents a ‘jaw-dropping failure of leadership.’

‘This is what happens when soft-on-crime Democrats run the show: zero accountability, zero oversight and taxpayers left holding the bag,’ the Iowa Republican continued. ‘The WALZ Act is named for a reason, to ensure this level of negligence can never be repeated anywhere else in America. This bill puts hard safeguards in place to protect taxpayer dollars, shut the door on scam artists and bring real accountability back to government programs.’

On Monday, a group of 98 Minnesota mayors raised concerns with state leaders and Walz in a letter about their state’s fiscal policies, saying they have impacted their cities and residents, noting a disappearing $18 billion surplus and a projected $2.9 billion to $3 billion deficit for the 2028-29 biennium.

Former federal prosecutor Joe Teirab, who briefly worked on the Feeding Our Future aspect of the fraud investigation, recently told Fox News Digital the fraud scheme was notable not only for its size, but for how easy it was to carry out.

‘Honestly how easy this fraud was to do,’ Teirab said. ‘These fraudsters were just saying that they were spending all this money on feeding kids… and they were just making up these PDFs, putting false names into Excel sheets.’

Teirab said oversight failures within the Minnesota Department of Education and other agencies played a significant role. He argued that officials had incentives to avoid scrutiny, citing political sensitivities surrounding Minnesota’s Somali community.

‘There were huge incentives to just turn the other way,’ Teirab said. ‘There’s a sense of, ‘If we say something, are they going to call us racist?’ And that’s exactly what happened.’

Fox News Digital’s Nikolas Lanum and Louis Casiano contributed to this report

Federal Small Business (SBA) Administrator Kelly Loeffler sent a letter Tuesday to Minnesota Gov. Tim 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.’

The move comes as Walz and his administration grapple with billions of dollars in social services fraud diverted to everything from sham nonprofits to the Somali terror group Al-Shabaab. U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said Thursday a ‘significant amount’ of $18 billion worth of programmatic Medicaid funding was likely lost to fraud.

‘I am notifying you that effective immediately and until further notice, the SBA is halting the disbursement of federal funds to SBA resource partners operating in the state of Minnesota, totaling over $5.5 million in annual support,’ Loeffler wrote Walz on Tuesday.

‘This action is the result of a fundamental breakdown in the public trust. Under your leadership, Minnesota failed to safeguard taxpayer dollars, and SBA will not continue to place federal resources at risk in a state where oversight measures are ignored and accountability is abandoned.’

Loeffler blamed Walz for making the Land of 10,000 Lakes the ‘epicenter’ of the largest fraud scandal of the COVID-19 pandemic era, and that recent criminal convictions of Somalis and other figures prove such fraud is ‘endemic’ to St. Paul’s vast welfare curriculum.

She cited Thompson’s calculations, saying that the Somali fraud network netted $1 billion in its Minneapolis-centered fraud scheme and that at least half of certain Medicaid funding programs subsidized by Minnesota taxpayers have been ‘pocketed by criminals’ – assessing the final figure at at least $9 billion.

She noted the USDA – which facilitates SNAP and other programs – as well as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have launched probes into the scandals.

At least $2.5 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) funds issued during the pandemic were tied to the Somali fraud scheme, the SBA said.

Another $430 million in PPP subsidies – totaling 13,000 individual loans – had been flagged as fraudulent but funded anyway, including some that were among those loans altogether forgiven during the Biden administration, Loeffler wrote.

‘The volume and concentration of potential fraud is staggering, matched in its egregiousness only by your response to those who attempted to stop it,’ she told Walz.

‘When legislators and whistleblowers raised concerns about potential abuse during the pandemic, your Administration resisted oversight, refused accountability, and allowed the misconduct to metastasize.’

Loeffler faulted Walz for dismissing some criticisms of his administration’s ‘generosity’ as ‘racism.’

Walz previously said that fraudsters in Minnesota will go to prison, and that ‘I don’t care what color you are [or] religion you are,’ but followed up by saying that critics ‘demonizing an entire population’ is ‘beneath that,’ according to PBS.

SBA will immediately halt $2.22 million in Small Business Development Center awards, $450,000 in women’s business center awards, $2.6 million in ‘microloan’ awards – the entire 2025 disbursement – and about $550,000 in other disbursements.

Loeffler called Minnesota’s fraud scandals the consequence of ‘socialist policies deliberately designed to pump out welfare funding without oversight or accountability.’

‘SBA’s responsibility is to taxpayers and small business owners, not to criminals or the politicians who enable them — We will continue to do what you did not: protect federal dollars on behalf of the American people,’ she said.

Fox News Digital reached out to Walz for any comment on general sentiments expressed in the letter about the fraud scandal and his handling of it.

Tensions are once again boiling in the House GOP after four moderate Republicans joined Democrats in a bid to force a vote on extending Obamacare subsidies that were enhanced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

‘It’s a betrayal to the Republican Party,’ House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said. ‘It basically turned the agenda over to the Democrats.’

‘This is not what people voted for when they voted for a Republican majority,’ he said.

A Democrat-led Congress voted to broaden who can get federally subsidized healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, later voting to extend those subsidies through 2025 the following year.

Congress has now left D.C. until the new year with no plan in place to extend or replace those subsidies, and millions of Americans are now facing heightened healthcare costs in a matter of days.

The majority of Republican lawmakers are opposed to extending those subsidies, calling them a pandemic-era initiative that’s part of an overall broken system.

But several GOP lawmakers have warned that a failure to extend the subsidies, preferably with reforms, would negatively impact people across the country — as well as Republicans headed into a tough re-election year.

Several GOP plans have emerged for another short-term extension to give Congress an off-ramp while they work on a new healthcare plan, but leaders in the House and Senate showed no appetite for taking them up.

The four House Republicans who joined Democrats’ push for a three-year extension — Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., Robert Bresnahan, R-Pa., and Ryan Mackenzie, R-Pa. — have argued that their own leaders left them with no choice but to tack onto a pathway they did not want to support to extend the subsidies.

‘Ultimately, the failure to bring a vote left us with little choice,’ Lawler told reporters last week.

But it’s inflamed tensions with conservatives, threatening an already-unsteady peace in the House GOP’s razor-thin majority.

‘For any Republican to be supportive of Obamacare is really gross and a betrayal to everything that we’ve ever promised voters,’ Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., said. ‘I mean, this is the Democrats’ fault. They are the ones who made insurance, health insurance, unaffordable and unreliable.’

She noted that House Republicans did pass a bill with some modest healthcare reforms before they left Washington, but conceded ‘we need to do a lot more.’

Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital, ‘I think it’s disappointing — why people would want to bail out Obamacare, I don’t understand.’

‘That discharge petition forces our children to go into greater debt,’ Fine said. ‘We should be focused on destroying Obamacare, not bailing it out.’

A discharge petition is a mechanism for forcing a vote on legislation over the wishes of House leaders, provided it gets support from more than half of the lawmakers in the chamber.

In this case, the four moderates helped House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., clinch a majority of signatures on his petition, setting up a vote early next month.

Lawler criticized Jeffries as ‘not interested in actually solving the problem’ in his comments to reporters last week, however.

‘He wants it to fail so he can use the issue. Otherwise, you would get the bipartisan discharge to move. And that’s the unfortunate thing,’ Lawler said. ‘But my view is, doing nothing is the worst thing. And that’s why Brian Fitzpatrick, myself, Robert Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie signed the discharge.’

Meanwhile, Mackenzie said he spoke directly with one of his fellow House Republicans who was critical of their move.

‘I went to him directly and said, ‘I would like to talk to you about your comments.’ I said, ‘I need to explain to you why I voted this way.’ Here’s an anecdote from my district about an individual, a small business owner, a restaurateur. For him and his family, without the premium tax credits, he goes from $3.99 a month up to $9.31 a month, and what that meant for him was that he was going to de-enroll and hope that nothing happened to his family,’ Mackenzie told reporters last week.

‘I said, that is not a great outcome for that individual, so we’re looking for some kind of relief or reform. And when ultimately we had that long conversation with the individual … we came to a much better resolution. We both were more understanding of each other.’

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., did not appear as frustrated as some of his colleagues but predicted ‘it will die in the Senate.’

The House GOP’s healthcare plan, which did not include an extension of the subsidies, passed last week with support from all Republicans, save for Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky. It got no Democratic ‘yes’ votes.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that enacting the bill would reduce the federal deficit by $35.6 billion for a 10-year period through 2035.

If the bill became law, it would also decrease the number of people with health insurance by an average of 100,000 per year between 2027–2035 and lower gross benchmark premium costs by an average 11% through 2035, CBO said.

However, it’s not immediately clear whether it will be taken up by the Senate.