Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who criss-crossed the country last year on a ‘Fight Oligarchy’ tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., spent over $550,000 in 2025 on private jet travel for himself using campaign funds, a Fox News Digital review of Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings found.

The majority of the spending came in the first two quarters, which cover up until July. That is also when Sanders and AOC had the majority of their tour stops across the country. 

In April, between stops on the tour, Fox News Digital exclusively obtained a photo of Sanders boarding a luxury Bombardier Challenger private jet at the Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California. The source also indicated that they had spotted the New York congresswoman boarding the private jet as well. 

The pair were subsequently also seen in footage obtained by Fox News Digital exiting the plane in Sacramento later that evening, near where the self-identified Democratic socialists hosted a second rally in one day.  

The Bombardier Challenger private jet the pair flew on was operated by Ventura Air Services, which touts ‘one of the widest cabins of any business jet available today’ and provides ‘superior cabin comfort for its passengers.’ According to their website, the private jet can cost up to $15,000 an hour.

In 2025, according to Sanders’ FEC filings, he spent at least $354,000 in campaign funds to pay for private jet services through Ventura Jets. The other private jet companies Sanders spent campaign funds on included N-Jet and Cirrus Aviation Services. 

According to N-Jet’s website, the company pieds itself on their ‘personal touch,’ adding that customers will ‘arrive in style with your luxury, comfort, and safety always top of mind.’

Sanders, who has been a vocal supporter of the Green New Deal, the aggressive climate change policy targeting carbon emissions and fossil fuel production, and has called climate change an ‘existential threat’ to the world, was pressed about his private jet use last year, prompting him to tell Fox News’ ‘Special Report’ host Bret Baier that ‘that’s the only way to get around.’

‘You run a campaign, and you do three or four or five rallies in a week. [It is] the only way you can get around to talk to 30,000 people. You think I’m gonna be sitting on a waiting line at United…while 30, 000 people are waiting?’ Sanders said.

‘That’s the only way to get around. No apologies for that. That’s what campaign travel is about. We’ve done it in the past. We’re gonna do it in future.’

Sanders has a long history of using private jets on the campaign trail. During his failed 2020 presidential campaign, the Sanders campaign spent over $1.9 million on private jets, including Apollo Jets and the Advanced Aviation Team, a Virginia-based private jet company.

Private jets have faced the ire of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow climate activists. According to the 2021 Transport and Environment report, private jets are up to 14 times more polluting than commercial planes.

‘For real, how many private jets do these CEOs need? It is insatiable. It is unacceptable,’ Ocasio-Cortez said in 2023, in one example of the New York congresswoman herself railing against private jets. 

Fox News Digital reached out to Sanders’ office and his campaign for comment on the spending but did not receive a response in time for publication.

‘You don’t expect a socialist to fly commercial do you?’ quipped conservative political communications consultant Matt Gorman. ‘There’s no bigger hypocrite than the liberal who chastises us for eating meat and using gas stoves, yet flies in private jets.’ 

In addition to Sanders’ hefty private jet spending that came during his tour with AOC, the New York Democratic socialist also spent big sums of campaign dollars at luxury and ’boutique’ hotels in states where the pair held their ‘Fight Oligarchy’ Tour. 

For example, AOC’s campaign paidThe Leo Kent Hotel, a boutique high-rise in Tucson, $3,165.76, around the time of a ‘Fight Oligarchy’ rally that was held there, according to an FEC filing from April 25. In 2025, AOC also spent thousands at luxury hotels like the Asher Adams Hotel in Salt Lake City, the Hotel Vermont in Burlington, The Langham-Huntington hotel in Pasadena, Calif., Hotel El Convento in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the Lansdowne Resort & Spa in rural Virginia, and more. 

Fox News Digital asked representatives for AOC if the congresswoman felt like she needed to explain her more than $53,000 in campaign spending on upscale hotels across the country in 2025, but did not receive a response.

Fox News Digital’s Cameron Cawthorne, Andrew Mark Miller and Deirdre Heavey (formerly) contributed to this report.

Alleged fraud schemes plaguing Minnesota’s social services systems have elevated scrutiny surrounding childcare centers. 

But fraud can be challenging to identify for states – especially when agencies are using outdated systems that make it difficult to spot trends and red flags that could point to potential fraud, according to Chris Bennett, the CEO and founder of a Wonderschool, a platform that provides technology support to child care providers and states. 

‘When you have all this data living in different place, it’s really difficult for a state to identify where there is risk and where there is fraud,’ Bennett recently told Fox News Digital during an interview. ‘Additionally, a lot of states are using pen and paper still to collect information. So it makes it really difficult for an administrator and the administrator’s team to go through all of that and make sure that they’re keeping up with things on a regular basis.’

Streamlining systems is key to identifying any atypical trends in billing behavior and attendance data that could point to fraud, Bennett said.

‘The best practice is moving to a modern system, moving to a system where all of the data is in one place and it’s all connected,’ Bennett said. ‘So you can use that to identify risk, flag unusual patterns early, and then have humans go and investigate. Oversight should support child care providers, not punish them.’ 

To help do this, Bennett spearheaded Wonderschool Oversight in January – building upon Wonderschool’s existing partnerships with states including Florida, Michigan and Illinois – that aims to centralize state agencies’ program data to evaluate enrollment, attendance, billing and licensing information in the same place. 

Having this information in one spot allows for Wonderschool Oversight to flag unusual patterns that could require human review, Bennett said.

‘For example, we can analyze daily attendance data to flag cases where billed attendance exceeds recorded attendance,’ Bennett said. ‘We review billing behavior for anomalies — such as sudden spikes in billing corrections — which can indicate potential issues. Or, in another example, we compare reported attendance against licensed capacity, age-band limits, and required staffing ratios to surface possible regulatory or safety violations.’ 

Childcare fraud has come under a microscope after right-wing influencer Nick Shirley shared a video in December detailing alleged fraud involving Minnesota childcare and learning centers. 

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced in January that it would put a hold on access to some federal childcare and family assistance funding for five states – including Minnesota – due to ‘serious concerns about widespread fraud and misuse of taxpayer dollars in state-administered programs.’ 

Days later, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from halting the funding freeze for at least two weeks. Fox News Digital reached out to HHS for comment. 

That’s not the only alleged fraud scheme the state is facing. Lawmakers have spearheaded investigations into Minnesota’s alleged ‘Feeding Our Future’ $250 million fraud scheme that allegedly targeted a children’s nutrition program the Department of Agriculture funded and that Minnesota oversaw during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At least 77 people have been charged in that scheme, which took advantage of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s decision to waive certain Federal Child Nutrition Program requirements.

Likewise, another alleged fraud scheme in the state stems from the Housing Stability Services Program, which allegedly offered Medicaid coverage for housing stabilization services in an attempt to help those with disabilities, mental illnesses and substance-use disorders receive housing.

A historic nuclear arms reduction treaty is set to expire Thursday, which will thrust the world into a nuclear situation it has not faced in more than five decades, one in which there are no longer any binding limits on the size of Russia’s or America’s nuclear arsenals and no inspection regime to verify what Moscow does next.

Matt Korda, associate director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said the expiration of the New START treaty forces both countries to rethink assumptions that have guided nuclear planning for more than a decade. 

‘Up until now, both countries have planned their respective nuclear modernization programs based on the assumption that the other country is not going to exceed those central limits,’ Korda said. ‘Without those central limits … both countries are going to be reassessing their programs to accommodate a more uncertain nuclear future.’

Russia had already suspended its participation in New START in 2023, freezing inspections and data exchanges, but the treaty’s expiration eliminates the last legal framework governing the size of the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.

With no follow-up agreement in place, the administration has insisted it cannot agree to arms control without the cooperation of China. 

‘The president has been clear in the past that in order to have true arms control in the 21st century, it’s impossible to do something that doesn’t include China because of their vast and rapidly growing stockpile,’ Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday.

A White House official told Fox News President Donald Trump will decide the path forward on arms control ‘on his own timeline.’ ‘President Trump has spoken repeatedly of addressing the threat nuclear weapons pose to the world and indicated that he would like to keep limits on nuclear weapons and involve China in arms control talks.’

Experts are skeptical that China would ever agree to limit its nuclear stockpile until it’s reached parity with the U.S., and Russia has said it would not pressure China to come to the table. 

China aims to have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030, but even that figure pales in comparison to the aging giants of the Cold War. As of early 2026, the global nuclear hierarchy remains top-heavy, with the U.S. and Russia holding roughly 86% of the world’s total inventory. Both the U.S. and Russia hold around 4,000 total warheads, with close to 1,700 deployed by each. Global nuclear stockpiles declined to about 12,000 in 2025, down from more than 70,000 in 1986.

In February 2023, Russia announced it was suspending its participation in the New START treaty, halting inspections and data-sharing under the pact while saying it would continue to respect the numerical limits. But, more recently, it floated the idea of extending the treaty by another year.

Korda said that proposal reflected shared constraints rather than a sudden change in Russian intentions. 

‘It’s not in Russia’s interest to dramatically accelerate an arms race while its current modernization programs are going so poorly and while its industrial capacity is tied up in Ukraine,’ he said.

Korda said that without inspections and data exchanges, countries are forced to rely on their own intelligence, increasing uncertainty and encouraging worst-case planning. 

‘Without those onsite inspections, without data exchanges, without anything like that, all countries are really left with national technical means of being able to monitor each other’s nuclear forces,’ Korda said.

With New START’s limits gone, experts said the immediate concern is not the construction of new nuclear weapons but how quickly existing warheads could be deployed. Ankit Panda, a Stanton senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Russia could move faster than the United States in the near term by ‘uploading’ additional warheads onto missiles already in service. 

‘Uploading would be a process of adding additional warheads to our ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles,’ Panda said. ‘The Russians could be much faster than the United States.’

Korda said a large-scale upload would not happen overnight but could still alter force levels within a relatively short window. 

‘We’re looking at maybe a timeline of about two years and pretty significant sums of money for each country to execute a complete upload across the entire force,’ he said, adding that, in a worst-case scenario, it could ‘roughly result in doubling the sizes of their deployed nuclear arsenals.’

That advantage, however, is constrained by longer-term industrial realities. Panda noted that the U.S. nuclear weapons complex lacks the production capacity it once had, limiting how quickly Washington could sustain a larger arsenal over time. 

‘The United States is currently unable to produce what is going to be a target for 30 plutonium pits,’ a fraction of Cold War output, he said.

Nicole Grajewski, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Russia’s ability to produce nuclear weapons may be faster than the U.S. in some, but not all, parts of the development chain. 

‘Russia is very good at warhead production,’ she told Fox News Digital. ‘What Russia is really fundamentally constrained on is the delivery vehicle side of it.’

Grajewski added that this is particularly true as the war in Ukraine continues. Russia’s production of missiles and other delivery systems relies on facilities that also support conventional weapons used in the war, limiting how quickly Moscow could expand the intercontinental missiles, submarine-launched weapons and bombers that made up the core of New START.

As a result, Grajewski said she is less concerned about a rapid buildup of those treaty-covered forces than about Moscow’s continued investment in nuclear systems that fall outside traditional arms control frameworks. 

‘What is more concerning is Russia’s advances in asymmetric domains,’ she said, pointing to systems such as the Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo and nuclear-powered cruise missiles, which are not covered by existing treaties.

President Donald Trump has previously said he wants to pursue arms control with both Russia and China before suggesting the U.S. should resume nuclear testing.

‘If there’s ever a time when we need nuclear weapons like the kind of weapons that we’re building and that Russia has — and that China has, to a lesser extent, but will have — that’s going to be a very sad day,’ Trump said in February 2025. ‘That’s going to be probably oblivion.’

But, in October, he declared, ‘Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.’

Congressional Republicans, President Donald Trump and their shared base of support want to see voter ID legislation become law, but the last barrier is the Senate, where political reality has turned the notion into a pipe dream. 

The GOP’s legislative push to codify more requirements and restrictions surrounding voter registration nearly derailed Congress’ attempt to end the latest partial government shutdown on Tuesday. 

In an unlikely turn of events, like Senate Democrats’ push to save expiring Obamacare subsidies’ during the last funding battle and House Republicans’ desire to attach election integrity legislation, dubbed the SAVE America Act, to the Trump-backed package this week brought the issue back into focus. 

Trump, who encouraged House Republicans to stand down from their do-or-die demands, renewed his call to pass voter ID legislation while signing the funding package into law Tuesday.

‘We should have voter ID, by the way,’ Trump said. ‘We should have a lot of the things that I think everybody wants to see. Who would not want voter ID? Only somebody that wants to cheat.’ 

While several Senate Republicans support what the bill could accomplish, they acknowledge the legislation would die on the floor without a handful of Senate Democrats, who nearly unanimously despise the move.  

‘Democrats want to make it easy to cheat,’ Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Fox News Digital. ‘They don’t want to do anything to secure elections.’

The issue at hand, as has often been the case during Trump’s second term, is the 60-vote filibuster. The president has called on Senate Republicans to eviscerate it several times throughout the last year as the precarious threshold has time and again impeded his agenda. 

Some Senate Republicans, including Johnson, are mulling turning to the precursor to the modern filibuster — the talking, or standing, filibuster.

The modern filibuster is less strenuous, literally, than the standing filibuster. While today’s standard requires that senators hit at least 60 votes, the standing filibuster demanded that lawmakers debate on the floor, consuming one of the Senate’s most valuable commodities — time.

‘The only way that’s going to get passed is if we do a talking filibuster or we end the filibuster,’ Johnson said.

There’s little appetite among Senate Republicans to nuke the filibuster given that it could play right into the desires of Senate Democrats, who tried and failed to modify the procedure when they controlled the upper chamber under former President Joe Biden. 

And many acknowledge that the votes simply aren’t there to do so. 

One Senate Republican told Fox News Digital that the ‘filibuster is not on the table’ as pressure mounts to move on the SAVE America Act, but that the legislation would likely get a shot in the upper chamber and earn 51 Republican votes. But, the lawmaker contended, the question was what happened next in the likely event the bill fails.

The notion of turning to the standing filibuster, the physical and original version of the filibuster, was also swiftly sidelined by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who said while there was interest among Republicans to discuss the option, ‘there weren’t any commitments made.’

Forcing the standing filibuster would come with its own ramifications in the Senate, given that the most valuable commodity in the upper chamber is floor time.

That’s because of rules that guarantee any senator gets up to two speeches on a bill. That, coupled with the clock being reset by amendments to the bill, means that the Senate could effectively be paralyzed for months as Republicans chip away at Democratic opposition.

‘There’s always an opportunity cost,’ Thune said.

‘At any time there’s an amendment offered, and that amendment is tabled, it resets the clock,’ he continued. ‘The two-speech rule kicks in again. So let’s say, you know, every Democrat senator talks for two hours. That’s 940 hours on the floor.’

Still, some Republicans hope that the bill gets its moment in the Senate.

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who was an original co-sponsor of the bill, told Fox News Digital he hoped it got a chance on the floor and contended that it was a ‘very important thing to do.’

‘I don’t know,’ Schmitt said. ‘I mean, we’ll never know unless it happens.’