A top Pentagon official told Congress on Tuesday that Iran could make enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb in just 12 days, a much shorter time frame than was possible for the regime five years ago. 

The revelation came as Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., pressed Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl on why the Biden administration spent months trying to reenter the Iran nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). 

"Because Iran's nuclear progress since we left the JCPOA has been remarkable. Back in 2018, when the previous administration decided to leave the JCPOA, it would have taken Iran about 12 months to produce one bomb's worth of fissile material. Now it would take about 12 days," Kahl told the House Armed Services Committee. 

The original 2015 nuclear deal with Iran curtailed their nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. 

Former President Trump pulled out of the deal in 2018, calling it "one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into." 

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The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told United Nations member states on Tuesday that uranium particles have been detected at Iranian plants enriched up to 83.7% purity, which is very close to weapons grade, according to a copy of the confidential report viewed by Reuters. 

The Biden administration negotiated with Iran for months about potentially reentering the JCPOA, but those talks fell apart last year. 

"I think there is still the view that if you could resolve this issue diplomatically and put constraints back on their nuclear program, it is better than the other options," Kahl told Congress on Tuesday. 

"But right now, the JCPOA is on ice because there was an arrangement on the table last summer that the Iranians were not willing to take. And of course, Iran's behavior has changed since then, not the least of which their support for Russia and Ukraine." 

Tensions between Iran and Israel have spiked in recent weeks. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held multiple meetings with his intelligence and defense chiefs to discuss a potential attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities, local news outlet Channel 12 reported.

Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, argued that reentering the JCPOA would do little to deter Iran from operationalizing its nuclear program. 

"At this point, when Iran is this close to achieving an interim milestone in its nuclear program, the capability to produce fissile material for a bomb 12 days or so, it would take a much more drastic step to halt Iran’s progress," Koffler told Fox News Digital. 

"Such a step would involve another non-kinetic strike or possibly even a kinetic option."

The Republican-led House panel investigating the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off its first public event Tuesday, with multiple GOP lawmakers laying blame for Americans losing trust in health officials directly at the feet of those who promoted lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a roundtable on "Preparing for the Future by Learning From the Past," grilling medical experts on what broad public health restrictions during the pandemic did to Americans of all ages.

Several lawmakers directed their frustrations at Democrats’ invited witness, American Public Health Association Executive Director Georges Benjamin.

"What we have now is a complete lack of trust and confidence in the public health sector…and that's due to a coordinated spread of misinformation and disinformation that was for political gain, for the most part — in a lot of part — by public health officials like yourself," Texas GOP Rep. Ronny Jackson said during one of the tenser moments in the hours-long event.

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Jackson told Benjamin that he was a "strange witness" for Democrats to call upon considering the growing doubt Americans feel about the advice of public health experts.

Critics of COVID-19 health measures recently seized on a new report published in The Lancet medical journal this month that indicates immunity from a coronavirus infection could be just as strong as getting a double-vaccination – which had been required across most facets of public life for much of the pandemic since the vaccines’ production. 

Georgia Republican Rep. Rich McCormick compared COVID vaccine aversion during the height of the pandemic to doctors in the 19th century largely doubting the fact that washing their hands held health benefits for themselves and their patients.

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"We do more harm than good by — to treat people with booster shots right now, if you have immunity," McCormick said.

On Benjamin’s admission that he himself had not treated a patient since the 1990s, the Georgia Republican fumed, "One of the things that disturbed me greatly about this pandemic is that people who are ‘experts’ who have never seen a patient for COVID, were telling physicians like myself — who saw thousands of patients — that I could not speak, and that I should be censored."

Firebrand Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene expressed outrage at her own censorship on Twitter over accusations of spreading COVID misinformation and claimed that widespread school shutdowns to slow the virus only served to harm children.

Greene said "children truly suffered en masse" during the closures and "natural immunity is something that should have been trusted, but for some reason, all common sense, and all knowledge went out the window."

Three of the event’s witnesses — doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorf, and Marty Makary — are part of a small group of medical experts known as the Norfolk Group. The collective released a blueprint last week with recommendations for a bipartisan panel to investigate the "collateral damage" done by the government’s response to COVID-19.

The blueprint said that school closures "generated enormous societal damage without significantly lowering COVID-19 mortality, while failing to protect high-risk Americans."

Rep. Raul Ruiz, himself a medical doctor and the top Democrat on the subcommittee, tore into the witnesses’ legitimacy in his opening statement. 

"I am troubled that… participants on today’s panel have a well-documented history of downplaying the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic and defying the overwhelming consensus of America’s scientific, research, and public health communities — including by advocating for a reckless herd immunity strategy for a deadly novel virus we knew little about and drawing into question vaccine policies that contributed to the prevention of more than three million fatalities," Ruiz said.

"To successfully carry out the charge of this Select Subcommittee, our work must lead with facts and follow the science. Anything less would be a misguided use of our time and taxpayer dollars and a betrayal of the interests of the American people."

Multiple studies have been done on the effectiveness of lockdowns since the pandemic's peak.