WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar: 03.06.25

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about the Supreme Court's decision to allow President Trump to withhold foreign aid, an Executive Order aimed at enforcing healthcare transparency, a bill that would put President Trump on our currency, and more. I’m your host, Luke Miller, and on this show we’ll cover the news you didn’t catch this week from the mainstream media. While they’re covering the President’s latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to “Under the Radar.”

This is Under the Radar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Now, here's your host, Luke Miller. This week on Under the Radar, hear about the Supreme Court's decision to allow President Trump to withhold foreign aid, an executive order aimed at enforcing health care transparency, a bill that would put President Trump on our currency, and more. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and on this show, we'll cover the news you didn't catch this week from the mainstream media.

While they're covering the president's latest tweets, here you can hear about the new legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court decisions that affect you. Welcome to Under the Radar. The first piece of news I have for you this week is a Supreme Court decision that overturns the ruling by a district court judge to stop the Trump administration from pausing foreign aid.

That's just a long way to say that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, essentially upheld a Trump executive order to reevaluate foreign aid spending done by the executive department of the federal government. Now, we've got to trace this back a couple of states. steps, first of all, to the original executive order. The original executive order said that the administration was going to immediately pause new obligations and disbursements of development

assistance funds to foreign countries. And most of that funding that was paused, was funding through the state department to different NGOs, to different non-governmental organizations, which are non-profits not necessarily affiliated with the government, but given their funding primarily through the federal government. So the executive order paused that spending temporarily by the State Department and by other executive agencies to those NGOs who were giving that money out in foreign aid to other countries. Some of those groups that are involved in this lawsuit include the Global Health Council and the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. There are plenty more. These are different non-governmental organizations that are given money by the federal

government to spend on foreign aid. So that's what the executive order did. Now, the original court ruling was done by a U.S. district court judge named Amir Ali, who is from Canada, interestingly enough. He was born in Canada. He went to college in Canada. He is now a district court judge ruling on how the federal government can spend money, foreign aid money to other countries, which I find interesting. He froze the executive order requiring the Trump administration to pay out about $2 billion in foreign aid reimbursement to those NGOs who had essentially gotten grants from the federal government and said, here's what we're going to do with your money. The ruling by Judge Ali said that the government had to come through with those grants. Those grants were not

authorized under the Trump administration. They were authorized before that under the Biden administration. The Biden administration is also the one that appointed Judge Ali in this case as well. The Trump administration cited through the solicitor general Sarah Harris, who was the one who argued this case in the Supreme Court, she essentially said that the order given by Judge Ali to pause the pause, essentially, to make them pay the money. She said that the order given by the district court judge effectively allows a single federal district court to supervise the federal government's contracting decisions regarding foreign aid. So all that comes back around to Chief Justice John Roberts. This past Wednesday night on February 26th, he froze that order by Judge Ali,

hours before the federal government was going to be required to pay that $2 billion, a lot of money to these non-governmental organizations. Chief Justice John Roberts froze that order on Wednesday night. So there's essentially two ways of reacting to this particular decision by Justice Roberts. Firstly, you can argue, well, these NGOs were promised to this grant money. The Biden administration gave them the grants. They permitted the grants to these different NGOs. And so you could look at it and say, well, the Trump administration should be required to pay out because the NGOs were promised by the federal government to get that money.

The other way that you could look at it is to say, well, the Trump administration did not give them those grants. The Trump administration did not authorize that spending. Spending being done by organizations that are not part of the government that don't necessarily have that level of accountability to the Trump administration's foreign aid goals. And you could look at it and say, well, Chief Justice Roberts is allowing the executive branch to supervise how their foreign aid money is spent. And I think that that's the important thing about this decision. The Supreme Court here is acknowledging that the executive branch of government, the president and his, his department of state, have the authority to decide where their money is spent when it comes to four and eight.

They, as the elected representatives of the people, do not have to follow the dictates of non-governmental organizations and particular district court judges who were appointed by the previous administration and hold the values of the previous administration, clearly. They don't have to follow that. They're allowed to spend the money the way that the people elected them to. spend the money. And that's what Justice Roberts essentially argued in this decision. He said that the people elected the Trump administration, the people elected the Trump cabinet. Marco Rubio has had a huge part in the funding pause here in deciding which of these NGOs doesn't really align with the president's goals

and the administration's goals here, which matters because most of the foreign aid spending is done through the state department, is done through that executive agency. That's the one who controls USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and others. The people voted for this kind of pause in foreign aid. The executive branch, as the elected representatives of the people, will have the discretion to determine where that foreign aid money goes. This matters in the sense that it's a good first step towards giving the elected part of the executive branch, power to rein in the unelected part of the executive branch. The bureaucratic system that is not elected, which is supposed to serve the elected parts of the executive branch, the president, namely, the ones who

are elected have the power to determine the actions of the unelected part, of the bureaucracy. And the bureaucracy was trying to uphold this particular spending, this particular foreign aid spending, which makes sense if you understand that executive agencies like the State Department and like USAID get their funding on the basis of their spending. They get their funding because they spent this amount the previous year because they say that they propose that they're going to spend this amount on this certain project the next year. That's how they get their particular funding. So that's why they want to uphold this funding. That's how they get put into the congressional budget is to

say, whoa, we must be doing so much good because we spent X and Y amount of money last year doing this and this and this. This Supreme Court decision says that they are actually accountable to the elected part of the executive branch in how they spend their money. The next piece of news I have for you this week is an executive. order signed by the president on February 25th. It is called Making America Healthy Again by Empowering Patients with Clear, Accurate, and Actionable Healthcare Pricing Information. This executive order is reinstituting a different executive order signed by Trump in his first administration in 2019, which he then called the Improving Price and Quality Transparency in

American Healthcare to put patients first. According to the executive order, what this one will do is to require hospitals to maintain a consumer-friendly display of pricing information for up to 300 shoppable services and a machine-readable file with negotiated rates for every single service the hospital provides. Health plans to – it requires health plans to post their negotiated rates with providers, as well as their out-of-network payments to providers, and the actual prices they or their pharmacy benefit manager pay for prescription drugs. The Executive Order cites an economic analysis from 2023.

I went and checked out that economic analysis myself. It's from the National Library of Medicine. And this was also done by the National Library of Medicine, which is a governmental research institution under the Biden administration. So it was not done by the Trump administration. It was done by the Biden administration in 2023. And what they found was that with these kind of transparency regulations imposed on hospitals and health care providers, et cetera,

that they could reduce the cost paid by American. for health care by up to 40%, the upper bound estimate being about $80.7 billion. They say on the lower end, they would save $17.6 billion. This would specifically affect the Midwest, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, saying that they will receive up to an estimated $20 billion in potential savings and about an 8% reduction in medical expenditure. So all that is from the study that was, cited in the executive order saying how this transparency is going to actually lower health care

prices for everyday people. Here's what President Trump had to say about it. It's one of the biggest things that can happen to reducing cost in health care. It takes a little while to kick in, but Biden ended it immediately upon coming in, and we're going to start it up, and we've actually made it even stronger. It allows people to go out and negotiate and price, and you're not allowed to even talk about it when you go into a hospital or see a doctor, and this allows you to go out and talk about it. It's great for the patient. It's great for the people in our country. It's not so good for pharmaceuticals. It's not so good for the companies that make the drugs, but they say that if you have a great hospital that really knows what they're doing, it's actually great for a hospital

because everybody wants to go there. That last thing that he said there is really the key component of this. If healthcare transparency really does take away that much money from the hospitals and from the health care providers, then there's going to need to be some way that these hospitals and health care providers can still make more money. And that's what President Trump said there at the end of that was, well, if the hospitals provide a good service, if they're transparent, then people will want to come. People will want to use them because they're offering lower prices, because they're being transparent about their prices, and people like that. People have really been frustrated with the healthcare industry overall, with the transparency and the cost

aspect of that in particular. And so I think that the president is offering a very good incentive for hospitals to be transparent, to give the people what they want there, while also addressing the real problems that people are facing with the healthcare industry when it comes to price transparency and when it comes to ridiculous costs within that industry. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a bill that I just couldn't pass up talking about. The bill is HR 1761 to amend the federal Reserve Act to require the Secretary of the Treasury to print $250 Federal Reserve notes featuring a portrait of Donald J. Trump. The legislation directs the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to design and print a $250 bill of legal U.S. tender that bears the image of President Trump.

The other noteworthy thing about this bill is that there is a law in place in the United States right now which bars printing living people on currency. You can't put a living figure on the currency. It's a measure that the United States has taken to prevent a dictatorial style rule where a president wants to be memorialized in his life by putting his likeness on the currency. It would just be a bad move, a bad power move if we were to allow that. There was a law created in the 1800s that banned living figures on currency. This legislation also creates an exemption to that rule. To allow President Trump to be on the $250 bill, it's supposed to be a thing that's part of the $250 bill. It's supposed to be a thing that's part of the 250th anniversary of the United States.

It was introduced by South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson. He was quoted as saying, Biden inflation has destroyed the economy, forcing American families to carry more cash. President Trump is working tirelessly to fight inflation and help American families. This achievement is deserving of currency recognition, which is why I'm grateful to introduce this legislation. The Most Valuable Bill for the Most Valuable President. said Congressman Wilson. So first of all, I think it's pretty funny that Representative Wilson brings up inflation here. If you print a bill that's worth $250, especially if you print a lot of them,

that is going to inflate the currency. So in the mere printing of the bill, it would cause inflation, which is the first problem with this. The second problem with this is it violates the whole principle of not putting living figures on our currency, which we do for the sake of not recognizing figures as anything more than what they are, which is a peace in the great American system. President Trump is a peace in the American government. He is a peace in the system. He's not a king. And so we have recognized historic American figures on our currency posthumously, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, people who we've recognized after their lifetime carry a great historical significance for the United States.

We wish to remember them and honor them. And we do so. I put it. them on their currency. We don't put living figures on our currency because they haven't really earned it yet. They're part of the system. They aren't themselves the system. They haven't shown themselves to have been a lasting figure throughout history yet because we're living it. And so it violates that principle to put President Trump on the bill. I suppose hypothetically that you could just create a few of these $250 bills as like a collector's item or as something that you could sell for the 250th anniversary as like a campaign stunt kind of thing. But this is actually requiring the Federal Reserve to do this, which is crazy. You could do this with fake money very easily. Get your same

gift shop item out of it and let it go. There's no need to introduce this as actual legislation. It's pretty ridiculous. The press release that Representative Wilson issued about this whole thing has an AI artwork of what the bill would look like if you want to go look it up on his website. He used GROC AI on X to make that. But just had to point out that bill that was introduced in the House of Representatives this week, it's highly unlikely that the bill will pass. The next piece of news I have for you this week is an executive order signed by the president on February 25th called addressing the threat to national security from imports of copper.

It says that, quote, copper products play a vital role in defense applications, infrastructure, and emerging technologies, including clean energy, electric vehicles, and events electronics. The United States faces significant vulnerabilities in the copper supply chain, with increasing reliance on foreign sources from mined, smelted, and refined copper. The U.S. produces over one and a quarter million metric tons of copper each year. That yearly production is worth over $8 billion, and we're about the fourth largest copper producer in the world after Chile, China, and Peru. Reliance on China for copper products is the primary concern here. Because there's so much military technology, defense technology that uses copper and energy technology that uses copper,

the fact that so much of the world is reliant on China for refined copper is why this executive order was passed. Now, even though the United States produces a lot of copper, we really don't refine it or smelt it, according to this executive order, it makes it seem like the United States has a lot of copper. It says that we have ample copper reserves, yet our smelting and refining capacity lags significantly behind global competitors. A single foreign producer, namely China, dominates global copper smelting and refining, controlling over 50% of global smelting capacity and holding four of the top five largest refining facilities. The executive order says that this dominance coupled with global overcapacity and a single producer's control of world supply chains

poses a direct threat to the United States national security and economic stability. All of that makes sense. All of that's well and good. It's understandable that with military technology, energy technology, all that kind of stuff, relying on copper, we would want to have an advantage in the world when it comes to that

and particularly not be reliant on other countries for it. We also don't want Asian countries around China, South American countries around Chile, and Peru, to also be reliant. on those other countries for copper instead of the United States producing it and supplying it. Now, the actual mandate of the order is that the Secretary of Commerce is supposed to recommend potential tariffs, export controls, or incentives to increase domestic production of copper to essentially put the United States back on the world forefront when it comes to copper.

China is by far dominating the copper industry, and the executive order essentially is noting how important that is when it comes to production of energy, which is a massive source of global power, and defense and military equipment and technology, which is also a massive source of international power. So what will probably happen here is that the Secretary of Commerce will recommend that we put copper import tariffs on China and that we give government subsidy, government tax break incentive, whatever it might be in an effort to increase domestic production of refined copper. Hopefully that will decrease our reliance

on other countries for it. Hopefully that will decrease world reliance on China for it. And hopefully it will help us to maintain the edge we have when it comes to energy production and military superiority. The last piece of news I have for you this week is another

executive order signed by the president on February 26th entitled Implementing the President's Department of Government Efficiency Cost Efficiency Initiative. This executive order does lot of things. The primary thing that it does is it requires every piece of spending done by a federal agency to be documented and justified. The executive order reads, quote, each agency head shall build a centralized technological system within the agency to record every payment issued by

the agency, along with a brief written justification for each payment submitted by the agency employee who approved the payment. The system shall include a mechanism for the agency head to pause and rapidly review the payment for which the employee has not submitted a brief written justification within the technological system. Now, there's a lot more things that this executive order also does. It provides a new process for grant review by the Department of Government Efficiency. It requires some level of Doge agency grant approval and contract approval. It requires justification for non-essential travel and for property leases and property leases and property purchases by these government agencies, it essentially requires every government agency

to justify every purchase that they make with taxpayer dollars. And it's really hard to argue with this. There's a lot of executive orders that just say that this department recommends steps that the government should take about solving X or Y issue. This executive order gives black and white instructions to every governmental department for how they must justify their spending of taxpayer dollars. If you want to rein in government spending, there's got to be something like this, first of all. And second of all, there's got to be expanding upon this. There's got to be some criterion for what qualifies as a justified expenditure. If they just leave it at, you have to justify the expenditure, but as long as you give us a good reason, you can do it. If you leave it at

that, there's going to be not much change that happens from this, except that we're going to know why they spend the money. Part of this executive order requires transparency with this. So, So the justification letters that are written by employees in the federal departments are to be made public as much as possible. That does not include law enforcement, uniformed officers, the Department of Defense, the CIA, FBI, etc., those departments who need to keep some of what they're doing a secret for national security reasons. And that's perfectly justified. Other than that, every government expenditure done within the federal bureaucracy is going to have to be justified and it's going to have to be made public. The next step that needs to be taken on top of this executive order is to say this is the criterion for such an expenditure. If there's not a criterion for what qualifies as a justified expenditure, then this isn't going to actually do anything.

So that's something that needs to be added on to this. However, as a transparency move, it's hard to object to it. So to summarize this week, we had three executive orders, one that enforces price transparency in health care, one that requires transparency in bureaucratic spending, and one that addresses. This is global reliance on China for copper. We also had a Supreme Court decision backing Trump's freeze on foreign aid, and finally, a bill that would put President Trump on our currency. Tune in next week for more.

Well, that's all I have for you today on Under the Radar. I'm your host, Luke Miller, and I want to thank you for listening and encourage you to tune back in next time for more coverage of the news that fell under the radar. You're listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Thanks for listening to Under the Radar with Luke Miller, here on Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. Thank you.