WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Under the Radar: Episode 7

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

This week on “Under the Radar,” hear about the new expansion on federal spending, a Supreme Court case about drawing voting lines based on race, an executive order eliminating information silos, 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 new expansion on federal spending, a Supreme Court case about drawing voting lines based on race, an executive order eliminating information silos, 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 the new budget bill that was just signed by the president. It was introduced last week in the House, passed through the House and the Senate, and was just signed by the President. It's worth noting that both the House and the Senate are controlled by the Republicans, and the President is obviously Republican as well.

But this spending bill, it entails quite a lot. So this is called the full year continuing appropriations and extensions act in 2025. And what it does is it extends federal spending programs through September 3rd. which is the end of fiscal year 2025. We'll just go through real quick and list some of the things that are funded by this bill for the rest of the fiscal year. So we have almost $2 billion extension this year for Operation of Indian Programs. We have delayed $32 billion in Medicaid cuts that we're supposed to start this year. We've delayed that until 2027. We have almost $2 billion in the next six months essentially in salaries for the House of Representatives, meaning each office,

Each office in the House of Representatives, with all of their staff, gets $4.3 million just in the next six months for salaries and other expenditures. The attending physician for the House of Representatives is getting paid over $4 million this year. The architect of the Capitol Building and Grounds is getting $405 million over the next four years. We had $3 billion to a safety and security fund for NASA, and NASA just needed a private company to go rescue the astronauts they couldn't get out of the International Space Station. and these are just a few of them. There are hundreds more programs and things being funded in this bill. And the smallest amount of money that I saw for an individual program was eight digits. So the way that most of these programs work is that they require extension. They expire after a period of time and the Congress has to renew their funding in order to renew the program.

If you were to read this bill, if you were to read through all of the different things, it's a lot of pages that require trillions of dollars of funding, hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars of funding. with just these kinds of discretionary programs. If you were to read this bill through and tell me that it was passed by the same party that's supporting Doge and federal spending cuts, I would be shocked. If you took it out of context, you would not be able to say that. This bill extends a ton of federal spending. There's a lot of these federal programs that could be cut by Congress if they were serious about cutting federal spending.

If they were serious about cutting size and scope of federal government, they could very easily cut out a lot of these programs. And the ones that I just listed are just some of them. There's so many. There are hundreds and hundreds of programs that are listed here, and each one of them are tens, hundreds of millions of dollars to tens, hundreds, billions of dollars. This is not small money that we're playing around with, and this is taxpayer money. The few programs that weren't actually extended were mostly in the Department of Defense, in the Army and in the Air Force. That money was about $2 billion of cuts. That $2 billion. was immediately reinvested in shipbuilding for the Navy. It was all put into the Navy,

which, again, like you can argue for that program, but that was really the only cuts that you found in the entire thing. And it really shows a lack of seriousness in cutting federal spending and cutting the appropriations for these federal agencies. So when you look at Doge and what the government is trying to do through Doge, the goal is to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse, right? is to cut spending, it's to get us to a balanced budget. You're just not going to do that when you're nitpicking around different contracts, all of which can be renewed, by the way. So the Doge contracts that are being cut, most of them can be renewed.

Doge says that they've cut about $55 billion. It's not true. A Wall Street General report from a couple of weeks ago said that they've really caught only about $7 billion. And after you see a lot of those federal contracts get renewed in different areas, that's going to go down to about $2 billion of work that Doge has actually done thus far. Doge is not enough. If the Republicans in Congress and in the White House are serious about cutting spending, are serious about getting us to a balanced budget, which is something that President Trump campaigned on, by the way, if they're serious about that, they're going to have to address a lot of these federal programs.

And this bill does not do that. They don't seriously look at cutting spending within the federal government. When you look at budget, there are certain programs that the federal government is locked in on spending, that they can't change, right? So there's some programs that are extended for many years. So there's Social Security, Medicare, Department of Defense, and there's a few other types of spending that are locked in by Congress that the federal government can't change for years unless they were to restructure the programs entirely. There are hundreds of discretionarily funded programs, meaning they have to be renewed by Congress with each budget bill. And those programs take up trillions of dollars of the federal budget every year. If you keep passing bills like this, this bill was addressed to the House by a Republican Tom Cole of Oklahoma. It was passed by a Republican majority House. It was passed by a Republican majority Senate.

It was signed into law by a Republican president who claims he wants a balanced budget. It just shows a lack of seriousness, right? So if they were serious about actually getting us to that balanced budget that they have been running on, that they've been saying that they're doing through Doge, they would have addressed a lot of these programs, and they just didn't in this bill. Now, they are funding some good things. They did introduce some new contracts that will be good things, particularly in the Department of Energy. So they cut some different programs within the Department of Energy and just reallocated that money towards expanding our research into nuclear energy and into nuclear power, which will be more sustainable for the future and into ensuring our spot in the supply chain for different minerals that will help us to produce energy in the future. So there are some good things about this bill.

But the main point that can't be overlooked here is just the hypocrisy of an administration and of a government that says that they want to cut spending and then pass a budget bill like this. The next piece of news I have for you this week is a Supreme Court case that is going to be heard on March 24th called Louisiana v. Calais, which is a case about racial gerrymandering. So to trace this case back, there was originally a case in 2022 when the Louisiana legislative, adopted a congressional map that only had one majority black district in the state, even though one third of Louisiana citizens are black. They get six districts in federal elections, and so saying that only one of them was majority black meant that Louisiana must be racially discriminating against black voters. That map was taken to court. Federal district court in 2022 ruled that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which says that you can, you can't.

can't have election practices that result in, quote, a denial or abridgment of the right to vote based on race. So that map was thrown out in 2022. So the Louisiana legislature had to create a new map, one that had more majority black districts. In 2024, they created a second majority black district that prompted another Supreme Court case by people who opposed it, a group in this current lawsuit that describes themselves as non-African American. They are suing claiming that that new map, the one created in 2024 was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. A federal district court agreed with them and prohibited the state from using it. In May of 2024, it got up to the Supreme Court, where the Supreme Court allowed them to use that map, which had two majority black districts, and just to show

that this makes a difference that it really matters in who gets elected because of racial gerrymandering like this. There was a man, a state senator named Cleo Fields, who had represented a formerly black district in Louisiana for two terms in the 1990. when that district became a majority white district because of Louisiana's state redistricting, he was ousted from his seat. As soon as there was another majority black district in that area, he was reelected again in 2024. So it does show that based off of where you draw the lines, where you draw these voting lines, and the demographics that are contained in that particular voting district, it makes a difference on who gets in office and ultimately which laws are passed.

So this case is going up to the Supreme Court, it's going to be heard on March 24th, the state of Louisiana is arguing that divvying up of Americans by race is a stain on our nation's history that should be disgraced as a relic of the past. However, they were kind of in a situation of having to do that, right? So because of that 2022 case, the state of Louisiana had to divide up their citizens based on race. And this is where you get into a conflict because, as the state of Louisiana described it, they're stuck between a rock and a hard place because they got sued no matter what they did. We can acknowledge that racial gerrymandering is a problem and that based off of how you draw district lines for voting, it makes a difference ultimately in policy because it makes a difference in who gets elected. So the state of Louisiana is saying that they were concerned that they would be found in noncompliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because of that 2022 case. And I think they had legitimate reasons for thinking that.

But they are stuck because either way, it's a problem. And it's really an unavoidable problem because before the Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 1965, you had a lot of the Jim Crow era gerrymandering happening, which was efforts by state legislatures to exclude black citizens from voting and doing so because of how they drew the voting lines. And so that's why the Voting Rights Act was passed. So since 1965, we've had it in law that you can't have voting practices or procedures that discriminate based off of race. But that introduces kind of a new problem. And I think the Voting Rights Act, you couldn't really avoid it because you were able to discriminate based off of race before that. But now you're stuck in a situation where if you don't discriminate based off of race, if you don't determine your voting lines, if you don't district based off of race, then you could be found in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

Just because of how you drew the lines, like in Louisiana, if you only had one majority black district, you could be found in violation of it, even if you weren't trying to suppress that black vote. And that's what happened in 2022. So there was legitimate concern for the state of Louisiana to say, well, we thought we would be in violation of the Voting Rights Act if we didn't create another majority black district. Obviously, I don't think the state of Louisiana was trying to suppress the white vote by adding another district to this. They were trying to comply and not get taken to the Supreme Court like they did in 2022. So this is a really difficult situation for states to manage, which is why I'm glad the case is going to the Supreme Court. That is something that the state of Louisiana said in their arguments. They said that the most important step for this case is that the Supreme Court should, quote, provide clear guidance regarding how states must navigate this notoriously unclear area of the law so that it can put an end to the extraordinary waste of time and resources that plagues the states during every redistricting cycle. And that sums it up very well. We need the Supreme Court to come in and address this. There really is an unavoidable problem and it's going to get states sued no matter how they do it. And that takes up a lot of time and energy that could be put into better things.

So look forward to seeing what the Supreme Court has to say about this and how we draw up our districts for elections in the future. The next piece of news I have for you this week is an executive order signed by the president on March 20th, entitled Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Siloes. So the first thing about this executive order is defining information silos. So essentially what they're claiming about these federal agencies is that they are withholding information from the agency directors that have come in as a part of the new agency. new administration that are Trump's cabinet picks, those people are not having full access to the information within their agencies that will allow them to share their financial records and computer records and all that kind of stuff with Doge. The goal of the executive order is to give Doge access to a lot of that information that will allow them to more fully be effective in auditing

the different federal agencies. So they cite the different waste, incidents of waste, fraud, and abuse over the last 20 years as evidence of these barriers to information that would be useful for Doge to look at. So they claim that over the Biden administration's four years, that they lost over $925 billion because of improper payments and that if they had access to information, that that might not have happened. And they claim that over the last 20 years, the federal government as a whole has made an estimated $2.7 trillion in such improper payments. they attribute that to these information silos that are preventing agency heads from being able to see better where their money is going and things like the recent development that said that

Social Security was paying money to people who had been deceased for years, things like that that they claim went unnoticed because of different barriers to information that would have prevented those improper payments. So the goal of the executive order is to allow agency heads full access to unclassified information within their particular agencies and permit some level of interagency information transfers. Essentially, the goal of that being to allow Doge as a government agency to access information within other agencies. Now, there are two reasons that this matters. The first one is that during the first Trump administration, he had a lot of problems of this sort. He had a lot of

problems with getting the bureaucratic system within different federal agencies to actually cooperate with the people that he put at the head of those agencies. There were people who were leaking information to the press that were just generally impeding the agenda of his first term. And so that's a motivation for this. Trump doesn't want that to happen with Doge. The second is that Doge really doesn't have full access to information yet. And they really haven't been as effective as advertised thus far as I talked about earlier. So if they were to have more complete access to information, the hope there is that they would be able to cut waste fraud and abuse much more effectively than they've done thus far.

The next piece of news I have for you this week is a case that is likely to be brought to the Supreme Court pretty soon, entitled Zinski v. Liberty University. It is a Title VII lawsuit where Jonathan Zinsky, who now identifies as Eleanor Zinsky, applied for a position at Liberty University. He signed Liberty University's doctrinal statement and policies as a condition of employment there, and then later revealed, after his 90-day probation period expired, he revealed that he'd been taking female hormones four months before he was hired. and that he planned to identify as female, which he now does. He claims he is Eleanor Zinsky. Liberty University fired this person, and then Zinsky is suing Liberty under Title VII, claiming that it was employment discrimination based off of sex. So first, I'm going to go to Liberty's doctrinal statement, and this is what Zinsky signed before being employed by Liberty University. The relevant pieces are that the followers of Jesus Christ will uphold chastity among the unmarried

and the sanctity of marriage between one natural born man and one natural born women, be people of integrity, whose word can be fully trusted, condemn participation in devil worship, practice of the occult, astrology, fortune-telling, sorcery of witchcraft, denial of birth, sex by identification with another gender, married person sexually or romantically coupling with a person other than their spouse, sexual relations outside of marriage between one natural born man and one natural born woman and romantic coupling among persons of the same sex. So this is a condition of employment at Liberty University that faculty and staff have to sign to be employed there. Now this person seems to be

setting up Liberty University for this kind of lawsuit because he started taking female hormones before months before he was employed there and then acknowledged and affirmed the doctrinal statement. But after the probation period expired, he's claimed he was transitioning and he was going to identify as female. This also brings us back to the executive order that was signed a month ago or so that I talked about on this show that ruled that among executive agencies that they had to recognize only sex, that gender identity did not factor into that. And I talked about on the show then that that is useful for Title VII cases just like this, where people used to claim that because you can't discriminate in private employment based off of sex or gender or race or nationality, people have been trying to claim that gender identity is a part of that. and the Supreme Court has had to hear a lot of cases like that. So what the executive order that Trump signed a few weeks ago did

was make it to where federal agencies are required to not recognize gender identity as part of sex and gender. And as a federal agency, the EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is the one that enforces these Title VII cases, is not supposed to recognize gender identity under employment discrimination. So I'm interested to see if the courts take on this ruling this early. the lower level courts have sided with Zinsky and not Liberty thus far. Liberty is taking this up to the fourth district court now. It's likely to work its way up to the Supreme Court. So that's why I'm talking about it.

But it is a very interesting case because it does seem as though this man was trying to set up Liberty University for this kind of lawsuit. Are the courts going to allow that kind of thing? Because Liberty is claiming that they have the freedom of association to say that it is a condition of employment that you be of this particular religion. And if you are not of that religion, if you don't agree with the doctrinal statement, then you can't work there. And it's essentially part of the contract that you follow their doctrinal statement. Zinsky is claiming that this is an act of discrimination against his gender identity. Liberty is not, they're not disputing the fact that they fired Zinsky because of their transgender status. That's not something that Liberty is claiming. But they're claiming that they're justified in doing so that it doesn't violate Title VII because they are an openly religious school,

that they made their doctrinal statement very clear, and that Zinsky signed on to it, before becoming employed there, meaning that Zinski agreed to those principles and that violation of that doctrinal statement would result in firing. But the reason I think this matters particularly now is to see if the courts actually enforce the executive order that Trump signed a few weeks ago to say that that's not what Title VII means, that the EEOC can't come after businesses or, in this case, a university for firing people based off of their gender identity. Last piece of news I have for you this week is an executive order signed by the president on March 20th, called immediate measures to increase American mineral production.

So I've talked several times now about minerals and about different actions that the president has taken to increase U.S. access to the supply chain for minerals. And I'm realizing how important the access to minerals is going to be for the future, particularly with energy and with defense, but primarily with energy. So in this executive order, the Trump administration points out that the United States is 100 import reliant on at least 15 critical minerals, 70% of U.S. imports of rare earths come from China, which is also a strategic problem for the United States because rare earths are a huge part of energy production and China is one of our biggest adversaries, meaning that if we were

to get in a war, a trade war, any kind of conflict with China, that they could withhold access to a lot of minerals which we need for energy and the defense mechanisms of keeping up with them militarily. Now, 80 years ago, we used to be one of the world. top producers of minerals. But as we've advanced economically, people just haven't wanted to work in mines, haven't wanted to mine for minerals. And our job market has just kind of moved beyond that to where most people don't need to do that kind of work. A lot more service work becomes more comfortable and desirable jobs for people. And that's very reasonable to expect, especially as access to minerals from abroad has gone up. However, the demand for those kind of critical

minerals is skyrocketing right now on the international stage. So I think there is a need for us to secure minerals within the United States to put ourselves in a better position for dealing with countries like China and Russia that have access to so many minerals where they're at. And we are so reliant on those countries and others for minerals that we will need for energy and for defense as we become a different world. These kind of rare earth minerals are becoming increasingly important to our national security and our energy production, which we need for so many different things. The demand for them is just going up so high. So I think the Trump administration is correctly pointing out that it's becoming a more lucrative business in the United States to produce minerals.

And so the goal of the executive order is to cut different regulations that they claim have stymied mineral production over the last 50 years. So to recap this week, we had an expansive spending bill, two executive orders, one trying to expand Doge's access to information within federal agencies, and another trying to increase American mineral production, and two court cases, one, about racial gerrymandering in Louisiana and another Title VII case at Liberty University. 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.