Ben Weingarten returns to the show to talk about the 8A program and what it means for the economy, and to honor the memory of Charlie Kirk, who was tragically killed in a helicopter crash on January 20th, 2019.
00:00:56.000The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold, the leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers.
00:01:17.000Lots and lots of good news coming through.
00:01:19.000And something we want to make sure that is not being overlooked is some of the behind-the-scenes work that's being done to clear out a gut of terrible precedents that have been living just sort of behind the surface for the federal government for decades.
00:01:36.000And you brought it up when we had Kelly Loeffler.
00:01:39.000And we're actually going to bring her back on because a lot of news has happened at the Small Business Administration on something called 8A, which if you had to summarize quickly, Blake, before we bring Ben on, what is 8A?
00:01:51.0008A is this giant morass federal program to basically orders, it's a program created by Congress, orders the government to give a certain percentage of its contracts to businesses that are certified as owned by disadvantaged people.
00:02:06.000Small businesses owned by disadvantaged people.
00:02:08.000And this being America, who counts as disadvantaged has grown to the point where you are disadvantaged if you're anything other than a white man.
00:02:15.000So if you're a woman, if you are basically, anyways, if you are from a national group that makes more money on average than white Americans, like I believe Indian Americans are disadvantaged.
00:02:54.000And it is the first time since being back.
00:03:00.000What a loss it has been for the country.
00:03:04.000You guys have done an exceptional job picking up the mantle to the extent anyone can.
00:03:10.000And I think the way to honor his legacy is to fight with just as much vigor, just as much intellectual honesty and heft, and with as impassioned a sort of drive as we can possibly have to overcome these forces of evil and darkness that conspire to take him down.
00:03:35.000So, you know, as a Jew, we say may his memory be a blessing.
00:03:39.000And I would also say may his memory and his works inspire us to go forth and conquer in this war of ideas and for civilization on his behalf.
00:04:06.000Charlie was all over Disparate Impact.
00:04:08.000He was all over CRT, he was all over DEI.
00:04:11.000Something we never talked about until just recently.
00:04:14.000And Christopher Rufo has been talking about it as well.
00:04:17.000And we're going to have Kelly Loffler, actually Loeffler on the show tomorrow.
00:04:21.000She wants to come back on and give updates on what's going on over at SBA.
00:04:24.000But how big of a problem is this insidious little thing called 8A and what's being done to solve it?
00:04:32.000Yeah, well, thanks so much for those kind words.
00:04:34.000And 8A really looks like the small business administration manifestation of DEI on steroids.
00:04:45.000And even if you think that that's a political characterization, we need to look no further than the fact and the fact that intense focus by the Biden administration under its effort to infuse every single aspect of the federal government with quote-unquote equity.
00:05:04.000And what they wanted to do was raise the percentage of SBA contracts to 8A firms, 8A eligible firms, qualified firms, from 5% of contracts to small businesses to 15%.
00:05:21.000That's really all you need to know about how significant of a thrust this was.
00:05:25.000We're talking percentages, but these are tens of billions of dollars in contracts every year that are steered towards purported socially and economically disadvantaged, individually owned small businesses or majority, minority-owned small businesses.
00:05:45.000And so that's massive, obviously, when we're talking about no-bid contracts or limited competition.
00:05:53.000They have focus from federal authorities, and this is really dating back years, if not decades, is on the fact that the program is open to massive amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse.
00:06:07.000There's been a recent prosecution over, in this case, of course, a USAID administrator who was doling out contracts to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and receiving kickbacks with these 8A firms.
00:06:23.000But beyond that, the main allegations are that you have these pass-through entities where a firm puts itself out there as being owned by a minority business owner and then subcontracts out the work to massive defense contractors, for example.
00:06:40.000So essentially, the idea is that you have a front company that looks like a minority company and they don't really do any of the work, but they collect the fees and then they shift a percentage of those fees onto a major company that actually does most of the work.
00:06:56.000And then, of course, there's the idea that there are companies who claim to be socially and economically disadvantaged and in reality should not be based upon the criteria set up by SBA.
00:07:09.000And there have been studies done by inspectors general to show that.
00:07:13.000So one thing is waste fraud abuse and that this looks like a racial preference program that is potentially rife with fraud and that's led to all sorts of scrutiny by the SBA, by the Treasury Department, now by the Department of War, according to a recent announcement by Secretary Hegseth and beyond.
00:07:35.000The other aspect is: is this thing legal in the first place?
00:07:40.000And there are regulations underpinning how this program is actually executed that suggest that there is a rebuttable presumption that you are a socially and then economically disadvantaged business if you are a member of a minority group.
00:08:02.000So basically, if you are not a minority, you have to prove that you're socially and economically disadvantaged.
00:08:07.000But if you are, you're assumed to qualify for the program unless there's evidence showing to the contrary.
00:08:13.000And that evidence is basically never shown historically.
00:08:16.000That regulation was challenged, and at least one federal court found that it didn't pass legal muster.
00:08:24.000So to get around that ruling, the Biden administration said, okay, we're not going to use a rebuttable presumption, but under this program, you're going to have to draft a socially disadvantaged narrative essay to show ways in which you've been disadvantaged.
00:08:39.000And so this is basically like a proxy for what the Supreme Court assumed that a lot of universities might try to do to get around affirmative action being prohibited, which is just write an essay as a proxy for it.
00:08:52.000So we've seen that similar regulations have gone from the SBA and been applied by a slew of other agencies now in other programs.
00:09:04.000So while you had a court say this rebuttable presumption for the SBA doesn't pass legal muster and the Biden administration tried to find a workaround, the underlying regulation has been adopted by a ton of other agencies in doling out awards under programs to advance quote-unquote socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.
00:09:25.000So this looks like racial preferences that continue to exist.
00:09:30.000And so I wrote in this recent story about Real Career Investigations about a lawsuit that seeks to wash away this regulation and invalidate it, not just at the SBA, but everywhere it's been adopted across the federal government.
00:09:44.000Yeah, just to put this in perspective here, because you didn't brush over it, but I just want to draw our attention to it again.
00:09:50.000In 2024, the SBA awarded some $78 billion or 12% of all contract dollars.
00:09:59.000So they didn't even hit their 15% mark to so-called small disadvantaged businesses, often under no bid or limited competition arrangement.
00:10:12.000And to assume that there is some fraud, waste, and abuse in there, I think would be a safe assumption.
00:10:17.000The waste is baked in because you're just allowed to pay more for something you could get cheaper.
00:10:22.000That's already wasteful on top of the literal fraud that they do on top of that.
00:10:26.000And it's just interesting as the demographics of the country shift, Ben, it's like, how long are we going to keep up this ruse anyways?
00:10:35.000President Trump walked into a catch-22 when taking office.
00:10:38.000Do nothing, and America would be staring at a ticking debt bomb, the kind of crisis that could cripple our future.
00:10:43.000Instead, he's taken action with strong policies to slow the train and buy us some time.
00:10:48.000But the effects of past administration spending are still working through the system and experts predict dramatic price increases and market uncertainty.
00:10:56.000Trump is doing all he can, but no matter who's in office, protecting your retirement savings is ultimately up to you.
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00:11:38.000All right, Ben, there is news also on the 8A front that you mentioned this briefly, but it's kind of a program that's morphed and it's evolved and it's kind of spread to other parts of the government.
00:11:51.000And so Pete Hegset came out and said that he's getting rid of 8A.
00:11:56.000How big of a chunk of money are we talking over at DOW?
00:12:00.000We're definitely talking about billions of dollars annually.
00:12:04.000And the Department of Defense is among the biggest dollars out of contracts to 8A eligible firms.
00:12:13.000So it's like DOD, HHS are some of the main agencies that contract through the SBA with these 8A firms.
00:12:23.000And so there's been allegations of defense contractors oftentimes effectively winning business using 8A firms as fronts essentially to get business they couldn't otherwise get.
00:12:36.000And something that was mentioned that's really kind of perverse in this is shouldn't all companies be competing according to their merits on their own qualifications.
00:12:47.000And it's the same thing with affirmative action in schools.
00:12:51.000Courts have said that these affirmative action type programs, it was always assumed that they would lapse.
00:12:58.000They would go away when we reached a place where discrimination wasn't rooted in all of these different institutions.
00:13:05.000And if it's been found in the schools, certainly wouldn't we have found it in the private sector as well at this time?
00:13:13.000And it's also worth noting, by the way, we're talking about 8A in the federal government, and there's questions about whether or not that can even comport with the Trump administration's own executive orders against DEI in federal contracting and in a federal government.
00:13:28.000But you also have these disadvantaged business enterprises, so-called, that get carved out contracts at the state and local levels.
00:13:37.000So it's billions upon the federal billions of dollars that are involved here.
00:13:42.000And there's a whole racket arguably associated with it in the law firms that represent these companies, in the advisors, consultants, the people who write the studies justifying the continued use of racial preferences.
00:13:59.000And in terms of dollar value, you could argue that it goes way beyond what it would mean to abolish affirmative action in colleges.
00:14:06.000This is tens of billions of dollars, at least just on the federal side, every single year, taxpayer dollars.
00:14:13.000Yeah, well, and I think that's really smart.
00:14:15.000And this is, you know, some of this is wonky.
00:14:17.000I'm sure the audience is kind of, you know, it's a little bit in the weeds, but it's so critically important because when we have senators like Ron Johnson here saying we got to get back to pre-COVID level spending, okay, which is what, four, four and a half trillion dollars now we're at like seven, okay, six and a half, seven.
00:14:32.000This is why it's so important because when you increase the federal budget like this and you got these 8A and this DEI and this disparate impact embedded within the federal code and all these statutes, you got to just assume all your tax dollars just going away and getting flushed down the toilet for stuff that really is illegal.
00:14:52.000I mean, I remember Stephen Miller was on a crusade before he got back into the administration suing a bunch of this anti-white discrimination.
00:15:00.000And especially as the demographics of the country change, when you got 50% white country and you got 50% minority country, a lot of this doesn't make any difference.
00:15:10.000It's sort of like in Los Angeles, their school district has a special category.
00:15:17.000You'll create special categories where it's supposed to be, they'll have schools where they're marked as special because they're majority non-white and they get special privileges because the idea is smaller class sizes, more money, all these things.
00:15:31.000And it's 80% of the schools qualify for this.
00:15:33.000Well, because it's only 10% of the students in LA are now white.
00:15:37.000You're literally at the point where, okay, this is not a leg up for this disadvantaged small group.
00:15:41.000It's we just want to punish white people.
00:16:17.000Second, we're doing away with these pass-through schemes.
00:16:20.000We'll make sure that every small business getting a contract is the one actually doing the work and not just some shell company funneling your money to a giant consulting firm.
00:16:34.000You have basically government programs with limited safeguards, and of course they're going to get abused.
00:16:38.000And I think the really important thing is this: the Trump administration is trying to do everything it can using executive power to get out of the DEI business.
00:16:46.000It can all turn right back on in a future administration.
00:18:20.000So there's been a third arrest, William Kelly, who was this crazed lunatic, this guy who's always wearing a beanie, barking at all these people, poor people in this church.
00:18:30.000He's been indicted, or he's been charged, and actually is in FBI custody.
00:18:35.000So yesterday he was, yep, there's a picture of him, real lunatic.
00:18:39.000And we have a video of him yesterday basically challenging Pam Bondi to come arrest him.
00:19:40.000This is pro my guess here is that this is some sort of activist judge who didn't want to, you know, he just is treating Don Lemon as a, as an independent journalist.
00:19:50.000Don Lemon was not an independent journalist.
00:20:30.000So you had this interesting take here.
00:20:32.000And I think we've got the graphic and we throw it up.
00:20:35.000But you basically break down the states that are losing population.
00:20:41.000And this is something that we've been on really for a long time, Ryan, where you say green states that saw net positive migration from other Americans, purple states are states that saw net negative migration.
00:20:55.000And you say this, immigration is the only thing keeping certain blue states like New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and California from losing 10 plus congressional districts.
00:21:04.000Take us back in time because this was a fight in Trump 1.0 where they tried to make it so that in the census, we would not have illegals counted in the census.
00:21:18.000Well, I mean, listen, when I say immigration, it is both legal and illegal.
00:21:22.000I think that has to be set there and stated.
00:21:24.000From my recollection from the census thing, they brought up to the Supreme Court.
00:21:28.000The Supreme Court said no, that they have to be counted.
00:21:31.000Now, before that, there was also a court case that said that only people of voting age and legality should be counted.
00:21:38.000In other words, children shouldn't be counted and people who can't be voted either.
00:21:42.000They're residents or they're visitors or they're legal visitors or they are illegal aliens should not be counted because that would at least make every congressional district of equal voting population.
00:21:51.000There are some congressional districts that have 100 or 150,000 more voters than other districts.
00:21:55.000Makes them much more expensive, harder to win.
00:21:58.000So that was interesting, but all the court has been very pretty consistent sitting there and saying, no, it's every person in the building gets counted.
00:22:05.000So with that happening, especially because of COVID, there was a mass change in movement as far as people goes.
00:22:11.000California essentially has the same amount of people today as it did in 2020, right?
00:22:18.000American citizens are leaving that state.
00:22:22.000They're not willing to deal with the nonsense of failed government Democratic governance.
00:22:28.000What is happening is that the 300,000 plus people who have moved to California from other countries have made up from the loss of population of Americans.
00:22:40.000So in the 2030 census, when California should be like, okay, let's say, how are the states doing?
00:22:49.000They really probably should lose five seats.
00:22:51.000They wouldn't have gained so many had it not been for illegal aliens over time, but they should lose five seats.
00:22:55.000It is only for legal and illegal immigration that they don't lose more.
00:22:59.000So it is very important in these four years where President Trump's really cracking on illegal immigration.
00:23:05.000He is putting up barriers for illegal immigration that we sit there and we really reduce these numbers because in the 2030 decade, right, as it stands now, Texas, Florida, Utah, Arizona are all set to gain Idaho set to gain correctial seats.
00:23:20.000California, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Illinois will all lose or Washington or Oregon is supposed to lose one as well.
00:23:45.000As long as they win Ohio plus those other states, they win the presidency.
00:23:49.000There's no more conversation of how Wisconsin's going.
00:23:52.000I mean, it will be important to win those states and to sit there and campaign there, but it's not necessary anymore.
00:23:58.000The entire climate changes, and it becomes very difficult for Democrats to really climb out of that as Florida is not a swing state anymore, as Texas has not become a swing state like they hoped it would be.
00:24:09.000Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia is really, you know, they have work to do there to sit there and try to win, yet and still they cannot count on these big blue states to deliver them because Americans don't want to live there.
00:24:22.000It's such a big topic, Ryan, because you know, you have native-born Americans that are abandoning American states.
00:24:34.000And it just, it seems like such a travesty that we have whole tracts of this country that Americans find so detestable that they refuse to live there.
00:24:43.000It doesn't matter that they have family linkage to America.
00:24:45.000California was, let's be frank, it was paradise for decades.
00:25:02.000And think of it, I mean, but think of like public schools, right?
00:25:05.000Public schools are literally free for people to attend, and yet they still won't.
00:25:08.000Democrats will make something unlikable, even if you give it away for free.
00:25:14.000That is how bad some policies have been.
00:25:16.000And think of all the millions who are literally trapped there who vote against its policies year in and year out.
00:25:21.000And they sit there and they try to work their way to make sure supermajorities maintain and the insanity continues.
00:25:26.000So I think it's very, very important, though, that the whole country doesn't go down that route and we are no longer held hostage to these big blue states anymore because Americans don't want to live there.
00:25:35.000And if we can cut off illegal immigration, start deporting people, I mean, we are, but ramp it up.
00:25:40.000And if we can sit there and reduce legal immigration on top of that, we saw we will see massive change to the tune of 10, 12 seats out of blue states into red, 10, 12 electoral colleges.
00:26:00.000Listen, if we look at what the Democrats are doing in Virginia, they're going full Marxist in a D plus six state, and we can't get Indiana to redistrict.
00:26:11.000We are taking a knife to a gunfight, if you will.
00:26:13.000And it's, I mean, we're just, we're still playing under an old playbook.
00:28:10.000They don't like what happened in Minneapolis.
00:28:12.000However, they still support doing mass deportations.
00:28:16.000If blue states would get on board with actually allowing prisons to oblige by ICE detainers and we could deport them straight from prisons, which blue states are stopping right now, it would be a much easier and pragmatic approach.
00:28:36.000But the good thing is that the Brookings Institute and AEI looked at this.
00:28:40.000We're having a net loss about 100,000 illegal foreign-born citizens this year, and not citizens, but foreign-born residents this year, and about half a million next year.
00:30:19.000The far left has decided that the United States of America shouldn't have a border anymore, and they are willing to fight and penalize and dox and even insult our law enforcement officers in order to fight for the basic principle that anybody ought to be able to come into the United States of America.
00:30:35.000Well, I'll tell you right now, the Trump administration, we reject that.
00:30:39.000We are going to get illegal criminals out of our country, and we're not going to let a few left-wing radicals stop us.
00:30:45.000So it seems like the administration is getting a memo here, Ryan James Gerdesky, 1776 PAC.
00:30:51.000Blake, read some of these numbers, though, on this New York Times poll.
00:31:29.0003754 on the Israel-Palestine conflict, where it's imperfect, but they actually did get a ceasefire in that one, which is one of the things he promised he would get.
00:31:39.000He's seen as too close to BB, probably.
00:31:40.000Yeah, negative 24, 34 to 58 on Russia-Ukraine.
00:31:45.000I guess it hasn't ended the war yet, but nothing catastrophic has happened either.
00:31:50.000But if you look at the, because, because if you look at the numbers, right, it's, it comes down to this essential thing of inflation and cost of living, right?
00:31:57.000The only thing that he does worse than the cost of living on is the Epstein files.
00:32:01.000And it's kind of like something, one thing is polluted and therefore everything is polluted.
00:32:12.000Like, so there's the negativity towards the issue of cost of living and the feeling that he is not organized on the issue of cost of living and that's not a priority pollutes everything.
00:32:23.000The one caveat I will say about the times, and I'm not a poll truther, but the one caveat I will provide for the Times issue is when they ask independents, do you lean Republican or Democrats overwhelmingly Democrats?
00:32:34.000So there could be some, maybe a little, maybe a margin of error in one way or the other.
00:32:39.000But I think that the idea that the priorities are not there, we want to really focus a lot on American American stuff and making sure American jobs are coming back.
00:32:47.000And I think that that is just creates negativity across the board on everything.
00:32:51.000What is driving the so people say cost of living affordability?
00:34:50.000I think they need to do it more on legal immigration because legal immigration is actually structurally, I think, one of the biggest problems facing the country.
00:35:29.000Democrats are saying, What are we going to do about AI in a real way where we redistribute wealth?
00:35:34.000They're speaking about it as a solution towards socialism as AI is the gateway to actually get real socialism in America in a way that we have never felt it.
00:35:55.000I think that that's something that they should be sitting there and trying to calculate and say, okay, what are you know, what are we doing?
00:36:01.000You know, I saw David Sachs was flagging this over at Davos and he was talking about how China has, you know, the Chinese population has like an 80% positive rate, you know, when polled about AI.
00:36:14.000And in the United States, it's like 40, 41, 43.
00:36:17.000I think the president is right to go for AI because it's not even whether AI will create jobs or not.
00:37:10.000Yeah, I mean, I listen, and I know there was a bunch of back and forth on the One Big Beautiful bill, and there was that one clause, which was going to, you know, put off any regulation at the state level for 10 years or whatever.
00:37:21.000It made sense because California was and New York are so large, their economies are so large, that they could basically dictate a patchwork of woke regulation at the state level on AI, and it would screw everybody else.
00:37:33.000So I understood it got demonized and villainized.
00:37:47.000It is not just the thing is, yeah, we're going to end up with patchwork because there's no federal response.
00:37:53.000Either make a federal response and give up something instead of asking Silicon Valley for advice, give up something that the taxpayer, the voters want, or you're going to see just states continue to do it.