The Treasury Department announced this week that it had recouped more than $31 million in fraud and improper payments to dead people during just five short months of having access to the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) federal death database. 

The Treasury Department issues billions of payments every year, including benefit payments, federally funded state-administered payments and other miscellaneous payments. Sending those funds and others by accident to people who are dead has been a long-standing problem within the federal government, according to fiscal watchdog group OpenTheBooks

In 2020, the Government Accountability Office estimated that during the first round of COVID-19 stimulus checks, $1.4 billion was sent to dead people. Across all three rounds of stimulus checks during the pandemic, nearly $3.6 billion went to dead people, according to OpenTheBooks.

The SSA is the only government agency with a database that records the deaths of U.S. citizens. In 2023, as part of an omnibus appropriations bill, Congress granted access for the Treasury Department, on a temporary basis, to have access to the database to help prevent improper payments to dead people. The temporary basis is set to expire in 2026.

‘While this should have been a no-brainer for a long time, it’s promising to see some taxpayer funds being recouped with basic communication among executive agencies,’ said John Hart, executive director of OpenTheBooks. ‘Too often the left hand just doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and it’s resulted in trillions of dollars in improper payments.’

Hart blamed the nearly $4 billion in COVID-19 stimulus payments sent to dead people on the Internal Revenue Service’s failure to check the SSA’s death database. 

He also pointed out how, in addition to improper payments through the stimulus check program, the Small Business Administration also sent more than $3 billion more to dead people in the form of forgivable loans ‘to entities on the Treasury Department’s ‘Do Not Pay’ list.’

‘Today’s news is a step in the right direction, but there are miles to go before we break even,’ Hart said.

After news of the recovered payments was announced, Fiscal Assistant Secretary David Lebryk noted that the results were ‘just the tip of the iceberg.’

‘Congress granting permanent access to the Full Death Master File will significantly reduce fraud, improve program integrity, and better safeguard taxpayer dollars,’ he said. 

Former President Obama wished his wife Michelle Obama a happy birthday on Friday, calling her ‘the love of my life.’ 

The former first lady, who turned 61, has largely avoided being out in public in recent weeks. She will not attend President-elect Trump’s inauguration on Monday, and was not seen at former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral last week. 

To commemorate her birthday, the former president shared a tribute to his wife on Instagram, writing, ‘You fill every room with warmth, wisdom, humor, and grace – and you look good doing it. I’m so lucky to be able to take on life’s adventures with you. Love you!’

Michelle later shared the post on X and captioned it, ‘Love you, honey!’ followed with a heart emoji and an emoji of a face blowing a kiss. 

Sources reportedly close to Michelle told People that the former first lady intends to skip Trump’s inauguration because she cannot contain her disdain for the Republican president-elect.

The former first lady repeatedly took jabs at Trump while on the campaign trail for Vice President Kamala Harris and during her speeches at the Democratic National Convention in August. In one speech at the DNC, she accused Trump of spreading ‘racist lies’ and opposing her husband’s political career because of his race.

Though she is often floated as a choice of Democratic candidate for president, the source emphasized that the former first lady also has no interest in being a public figure now that her public service has ended.

While Michelle will not be in attendance at Trump’s inauguration, former President Obama is scheduled to attend Monday’s inauguration along with former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and their spouses.

Unconfirmed rumors swirled late last year that the Obamas’ marriage was on the rocks and that former President Obama had been involved in a romantic affair with actress Jennifer Aniston.

Aniston emphatically denied the rumors, telling late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, ‘That is absolutely untrue. … I know Michelle more than him.’ 

When reached for comment at the time, an Obama representative told Fox News Digital, ‘Stop.’ 

Fox News Digital’s Kristine Parks and Caroline Thayer contributed to this report.

The members of the Republican National Committee, in a vote that was never in doubt, on Friday re-elected chair Michael Whatley to continue steering the national party committee. 

‘This organization has got to be the tip of the spear. And as your chairman, I promise this organization will be the tip of the spear to protect Donald Trump,’ Whatley said, as he spoke after the unanimous voice vote at the RNC’s annual meeting, which was held this year in the nation’s capital ahead of Monday’s inauguration of President-elect Trump. 

Whatley, a longtime Trump ally and a major supporter of Trump’s election integrity efforts, who was serving as RNC general counsel and chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, was named by Trump last March as chair as the former president clinched the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Whatley succeeded longtime RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, whom Trump no longer supported.

In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital on the sidelines of the RNC’s winter meeting, Whatley says his job going forward in the 2025 elections and 2026 midterms is straight forward.

‘It’s really critical for us to make sure that the Trump voters become Republican voters,’ Whatley told Fox News Digital on the sidelines of the RNC’s winter meeting, which is being held in the nation’s capital.

Republicans enjoyed major victories in November’s elections, with Trump defeating Vice President Kamala Harris to win back the White House, the GOP flipping control of the Senate from the Democrats, and holding on to their razor-thin majority in the House.

Whatley, who was interviewed on Thursday on the eve of the formal RNC chair vote, said the GOP needs ‘to cement those gains’ made in the 2024 elections.

‘We’re going to go right back to the building blocks that we had during this election cycle, which is to get out the vote and protect the ballot,’ Whatley emphasized. 

The RNC chair pointed to ‘the lessons that we learned’ in the 2024 cycle ‘about going after low propensity voters, about making sure that we’re reaching out to every voter and bringing in new communities,’ which he said helped Republicans make ‘historic gains among African American voters, among Asian American voters, among Hispanic voters, young voters and women voters.’

Speaking a couple of days before the president-elect’s inauguration, Whatley emphasized that once Trump’s in the White House, ‘we’re going to go right back to the RNC. We’re going to roll up our sleeves and get to work. We’ve got a couple of governor’s races…that we’re going to be working on in ‘25.’

But Whatley said ‘everything is focused on ‘26,’ when the party will be defending its majorities in the House and Senate, ‘because that is going to determine, from an agenda perspective, whether we have two years to work with or four. And America needs us to have a four-year agenda.’

‘What we’re going to be doing is making sure that we are registering voters,’ he said. ‘We’re going to be…communicating with the folks that we need to turn out.’

Pointing to the 2024 presidential election, Whatley said ‘it’s the same fundamentals.’

But he noted that ‘it’s not just seven battleground states’ and that the 2026 contests are ‘definitely going to be a very intense midterm election cycle.’

While Democrats would disagree, Whatley described today’s GOP as ‘a common sense party… this is a party that’s going to fight for every American family and for every American community.’

Referring to former Democrats Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump has nominated to serve in his second administration’s cabinet, Whatley touted ‘the fact that we have two former Democratic presidential candidates who are going to be serving in the president’s cabinet. That shows you that this is a commonsense agenda, a commonsense team, that we’re going to be moving forward with.’

In December, Trump asked Whatley to continue during the 2026 cycle as RNC chair.

‘I think we will be able to talk when we need to talk,’ Whatley said when asked if his lines of communication with Trump will be limited now that the president-elect is returning to the White House. ‘We’re going to support the president and his agenda. That does not change. What changes is his ability from the White House to actually implement the agenda that he’s been campaigning on.’

The winter meeting included the last appearance at the RNC by co-chair Lara Trump. The president-elect’s daughter-in-law is stepping down from her post.

She stressed that it’s crucial the RNC takes ‘the opportunity the voters have given us’ to ‘continue to expand the Republican brand.’

The elder Trump is term-limited and won’t be able to seek election again in 2028. Vice President-elect JD Vance will likely be considered the front-runner for the 2028 GOP nomination.

Whatley reiterated what he told Fox News Digital in December — that the RNC will stay neutral in the next race for the GOP nomination and that the party’s ‘got an amazing bench.’

‘You think about the talent on the Republican side of the aisle right now, our governors, our senators, our members of Congress, people that are going to be serving in this administration. I love the fact that the Republican Party is going to be set up to have a fantastic candidate going into ’28,’ he highlighted.

Unlike the DNC, which in the 2024 cycle upended the traditional presidential nominating calendar, the RNC made no major changes to their primary lineup, and kept the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary as their first two contests.

Asked about the 2028 calendar, Whatley reiterated to Fox News that ‘I have not had any conversations with anybody who wants to change the calendar, so we will wait and see what that looks like as we’re going forward. We’re at the RNC meetings this week and having a number of conversations with folks, but that is not a huge push.’

‘I don’t think that changing the calendar really helped the Democrats at all,’ Whatley argued. ‘And I think that us, making sure that we are working our system the way that we always have, is going to be critical.’

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is leading 22 other attorneys general in suing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over a new rule that would fine the oil and natural gas sector for methane emissions that exceed a certain level. 

The GOP states are alleging the new rule, which was established in President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, is ‘arbitrary, capricious, [and] an abuse of discretion.’ The complaint against the EPA is scant on details, other than asserting the new rule is ‘unlawful’ because ‘the final rule exceeds the agency’s statutory authority.’ 

While the Supreme Court has articulated a very narrow authority on how Congress can delegate its legislative power, Steve Milloy, former Trump administration EPA transition adviser and senior fellow at the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute, said it is unclear to him how the EPA’s rule circumvents Congress. 

‘The IRA clearly says EPA is to levy a tax and prescribes the tax rate,’ Milloy told Fox News Digital, pointing to the section of the IRA’s ‘Waste Emissions Charge’ that sets a threshold for methane emissions at 25,000 metric tons. ‘I will be interested to see how the states support their claims.’ 

Nonetheless, Milloy is against the new fee on the oil and gas sector, noting methane is an ‘irrelevant greenhouse gas.’

‘The tax is pointless and will accomplish nothing except to make oil and natural gas more expensive,’ he said.

Milloy suggested the move to sue in the final days of the Biden administration is to start the process for the plaintiffs to settle with the Trump administration. According to him, this is a tactic that has been used by both sides of the green energy debate. He added that in the past, the Trump administration has sought to get rid of ‘sue and settle’ tactics.

‘Congress needs to change the law,’ Milloy said. ‘Because, let’s say that they sue and settle, well, the next administration can come back and undo it.’

Meanwhile, another forthcoming lawsuit from the Michigan Oil and Gas Association (MOGA) and the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce (AMFree) has also asserted that the new rule circumvents Congress, but provided details explaining why.

‘Under Subpart W, facilities in the natural gas and petroleum supply chains must report greenhouse gas emissions if they emit 25,000 metric tons or more of carbon-dioxide-equivalent emissions each year,’ the second lawsuit explains. ‘For gases other than carbon dioxide, ‘equivalent’ emissions are determined by multiplying emissions by the gas’s ‘global warming potential’ (‘GWP’).’ 

Michael Buschbacher, a partner at Boyden Gray PLLC, which is representing MOGA and AmFree in their lawsuit, agreed with Milloy that it will take legislation to reverse the new methane rule, but said the purpose of their legal filings is ‘to get the most onerous mandates off the books, so the American energy industry can begin its march back to dominance under the new administration.’

‘The Biden-era environmental regulations aren’t going to magically vanish at 12:01 on Monday. It’s going to take time and legislation to unwind the mess that he has left behind,’ Buschbacher said.

The EPA declined to comment on the matter, citing the pending nature of the litigation.

President-elect Donald Trump is planning to immediately shake up the State Department by moving new officials into top roles. 

A source familiar with the situation tells Fox News that the new Trump administration will immediately move new officials into key operational roles at the State Department to ensure the department is carrying out the Trump foreign policy agenda from day one. 

Normally, career State Department officials will oversee these key positions while political appointees await Senate confirmation. The Trump team is bringing in dozens of ‘senior bureau officials’ to ensure the career employees have Trump-aligned officials over them. The source says the transition has already identified the senior bureau officials who will be taking over.   

The source also says this move affects more than 20 additional key roles at State. Reuters reported last week that Trump officials have already asked others to step aside, bringing a total of about 30 senior positions affected by this initiative. They include all of those working as undersecretaries and overseeing key regional, policy and communications bureaus.

Asked to comment, a spokesperson for the transition team told Fox, ‘It is entirely appropriate for the transition to seek officials who share President Trump’s vision for putting our nation and America’s working men and women first. We have a lot of failures to fix, and that requires a committed team focused on the same goals.’

Trump’s transition team recently asked three senior career diplomats to step down from their roles, according to a Reuters report. 

Dereck Hogan, Marcia Bernicat and Alaina Teplitz, the career diplomats who were allegedly asked to leave their roles, oversee the State Department’s workforce and internal coordination.

All three of the career diplomats named in the report have worked under Democratic and Republican administrations, Reuters noted. Unlike political appointees, diplomats do not typically resign when a president leaves office.

Throughout his political career, Trump has gone after the ‘deep state,’ and this move could be seen as part of his efforts to fundamentally change the government on a bureaucratic level.

Trump has never hid his disdain for the government agency responsible for foreign relations, dubbing it the ‘Deep State Department’ during his first term, reflecting his belief that career diplomats were working to subvert his agenda.

Trump is likely to work in tandem with his Secretary of State nominee, Marco Rubio, who, during his confirmation hearing, said that State employees would need to work towards Trump’s ‘America first’ agenda and pledged to make the agency ‘relevant again.’

‘What has happened over the last 20 years under multiple administrations is the influence of the State Department has declined at the expense of other agencies, and also at the expense of National Security Councils, because it takes so long for the State Department to take action,’ said Rubio. 

‘And so, increasingly, you stop getting invited to the meetings, and they stop putting you in charge of things, because it takes too long to get a result.’

He said that ‘the core mission of the department has not been well-defined’ in the modern federal bureaucracy, and ‘it’s our obligation to define that.’

‘We want the State Department to be relevant again, and it should be because the State Department has a plethora of talented people who are subject-matter experts and who have skills in diplomacy. And it’s not being fully utilized, because, increasingly, on issue after issue, we’ve seen the State Department marginalized because of internal inertia, because of the way the structure works. We have to be at that table when decisions are being made, and the State Department has to be a source of creative ideas and effective implementation,’ he added.

Rep. Brian Mast, R–Fla., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters that he was looking to root out those at State who had directed the so-called ‘woke’ funding programs at the department. 

‘If you have people that are writing grants nefariously supporting a radical agenda, like doing drag shows abroad and trying to find this vague tie and not tying things to U.S. national security interests, then they should be aware that we’ll be looking for them, and we will be looking for creating authorities to make sure that their existence doesn’t continue in the State Department.’

President-elect Trump’s inauguration will now take place inside the U.S. Capitol due to cold weather forecast for Monday, the first indoor inauguration since President Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in January 1985. 

On that frigid January 20th 40 years ago, the air temperature was 7 degrees, with a windchill of -40. 

Monday’s forecast is a high of 23 degrees and a low of 10, but brutal winds are expected to whip across the city, making the temperature feel more like single-digits. 

President Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated inside the Capitol in 1801, as was custom in the nation’s early history. Organizers moved President James Monroe’s inauguration outside, because the Capitol was so badly damaged after the War of 1812 when the British burned it, which kicked off the custom of swearing in a president outside in front of the National Mall. 

President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 had similar temperatures — a high of 26 and a low of 19. It was held outside, even after a storm dumped 8 inches of snow the previous day. 

‘The weather forecast for Washington, D.C., with the windchill factor, could take temperatures into severe record lows,’ Trump posted on Truth Social, addressing the expected cold. 

‘There is an Arctic blast sweeping the Country. I don’t want to see people hurt, or injured, in any way. It is dangerous conditions for the tens of thousands of Law Enforcement, First Responders, Police K9s and even horses, and hundreds of thousands of supporters that will be outside for many hours on the 20th (In any event, if you decide to come, dress warmly!).’

Trump said D.C.’s Capital One Arena will be open Monday for live viewing of his inauguration ‘and to host the Presidential Parade.’ 

‘I will join the crowd at Capital One, after my Swearing in,’ he wrote.