March 17 2025

Trump Proposes Federal Land Use to Tackle U.S. Housing Shortage

AI Boom Threatens Programming Jobs Nationwide

Judge Blocks Trump’s Use of Wartime Act for Deportations

Senate Passes Stopgap Bill With Dems Help, Averts Government Shutdown

Trump and Putin to Discuss Ukraine War Ceasefire Tuesday

Auburn Named Overall No. 1 Seed in NCAA Tournament Bracket

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1. Trump Proposes Federal Land Use to Tackle U.S. Housing Shortage

The U.S. is facing a housing shortage. That scarcity is most acutely felt in the country’s more densely populated metropolitan areas. President Trump has proposed using some of the650 million acresof federal land to develop new housing. Only some of thatfederal landfalls in U.S.metro areassurveyed by the National Association of Realtors for housing shortages. Trump’s proposal could make a real impact in states such as Nevada, Utah, California and Arizona, where federal land is more abundant. About7.3%of all federal land falls within metro areas that need more homes. The success of this policy then hinges on releasing federal land in the right places. The Trump administration is creating a task force to identify federal land that would be suitable for building affordable housing. The initiative marks the administration’s first step toward a pledge to unlock vast swaths of federal land to address America’s housing shortage by transferring or leasing the land to local governments. Developing even 512,000 acres of the Bureau of Land Management’s lots could yield between three million and four million new homes across western states such as Nevada, Utah, California and Arizona, according to a preliminary analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., center-right think tank. An increase of that magnitude would represent one of the most ambitious housing proposals in U.S. history. It would go a long way to addressing the U.S. housing shortage, which depending on the estimate runs to more than seven million units.
Source: WSJ

2. AI Boom Threatens Programming Jobs Nationwide

More than a quarter of all computer programming jobs have vanished in the past two years, the worst downturn that industry has ever seen. Things are sufficiently abysmal that computer programming ranks among 10 hardest-hit occupations of 420-plus jobs for which we have data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Learning to code was supposed to save millions of would-have-been liberal arts majors. But today there are fewer programmers in the United States than at any point since 1980. That’s a 45-year period in which America’s total workforce has grown by about 75 percent! It’s so long ago that millennials hadn’t been invented, the oldest Gen Xers were barely in high school, and even many boomers were too young for their first real coding jobs.
Source: Washington Post

3. Judge Blocks Trump’s Use of Wartime Act for Deportations

A federal judge barred President Donald Trump on Saturday from using a wartime powers act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members without a hearing, ordering the administration to turn around any planes that had already taken off after the Alien Enemies Act quietly went into effect. Trump signed a proclamation Friday to deploy the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for the first time since World War II to swiftly remove Venezuelans allegedly involved in the transnational gang known as Tren de Aragua. The act has been used only three times before to bar citizens of hostile enemy governments from the United States, and only during a declared war. The White House kept the proclamation under wraps until after advocates for immigrants sued Saturday, fearing he was already sweeping immigrants out of the country. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed immigration officials had “arrested nearly 300 Tren de Aragua terrorists” over the weekend and sent them to El Salvador. The country’s president, Nayib Bukele, said that 238 members of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang had already arrived in El Salvador and were in his custody, with a social media post responding to the judge’s ruling that said “Oopsie, too late,” followed by a laughing emoji.
Source: Washington Post

4. Senate Passes Stopgap Bill With Dems Help, Averts Government Shutdown

The Senate on Friday narrowly averted a government shutdown at midnight, passing a G.O.P.-written stopgap spending measure after Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, and a small group of Democrats joined Republicans in allowing it to advance. The final vote to pass the spending measure, which would fund the government through Sept. 30, and send it to President Trump was 54 to 46, nearly along party lines. But the key vote came earlier, when after days of Democratic agonizing, Mr. Schumer and nine other members of his caucus supplied the votes needed to allow it to move ahead, effectively thwarting a filibuster by their own party in a bid to prevent a shutdown.
Source: NYT

5. Trump and Putin to Discuss Ukraine War Ceasefire Tuesday

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are set to hold a call about the Russia-Ukraine war on Tuesday, the US president said, as Washington seeks to broker a ceasefire deal. “I’ll be speaking to President Putin Tuesday. A lot of work’s been done over the weekend,” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One late on Sunday night. “We’re doing pretty well, I think, with Russia. We’ll see if we have something to announce by Tuesday.” When asked what concessions he would be seeking from Putin, Trump said “I think we’ll be talking about land” and “power plants”. “I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides,” Trump said. “We’re already talking about that [with Ukraine and Russia] dividing up certain assets.”

Editors note: The prospects for a long-term peace deal between Ukraine and Russia face significant structural challenges, not to mention the hurdles to achieving even a short-term ceasefire. Russia is winning the war, and there is little incentive for Moscow to offer any concessions. Nothing Ukraine and its Western allies can do will alter that military reality. Ultimately, much will depend on how determined former President Trump is to make a deal, even if it means making large concessions. Meanwhile, it is not out of the question that regime change in Kyiv could occur before peace is reached, whether through constitutional means or a more disorderly process.
Source: FT

6. Auburn Named Overall No. 1 Seed in NCAA Tournament Bracket

The Auburn Tigers, led by SEC Player of the Year Johni Broome, were chosen as the No. 1 overall seed for the NCAA tournament on Sunday, with conference champions Duke (ACC), Houston (Big 12) and Florida (SEC) also tabbed as 1-seeds by the selection committee. The selection committee favored Auburn, which won the SEC regular-season title despite three losses in its last four games, as well as a loss to Duke in the lone meeting between the teams. Duke (+320), however, was listed as the favorite at ESPN BET to win the men's NCAA tournament shortly after the bracket was released, while Florida (+450) had the second-shortest odds. The SEC, which last won a men's basketball national championship in 2012, made NCAA tournament history with 14 representatives among the 68 teams to make the field. The highest prior mark was the Big East's 11 bids in 2011. In something of a surprise, both North Carolina (22-13) and Texas (19-15) slid in off the bubble, while Indiana, West Virginia and Boise State did not.

Bracket
Source: ESPN

March 17, 1992: Apartheid comes to an end in South Africa

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Sources

1. https://www.wsj.com/economy/housing/trump-wants-to-build-homes-on-federal-land-heres-what-that-would-look-like-6b8fb82e?mod=hp_lead_pos8
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/14/programming-jobs-lost-artificial-intelligence/
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/03/15/trump-alien-enemies-venezuela-migrants-deportations/
4. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/14/us/trump-government-shutdown-news/senate-vote-shutdown?smid=url-share
5. https://www.ft.com/content/20b7bfd2-8d88-4d43-b724-33db5425918e

Auburn, Duke top men’s NCAA field; SEC gets 14

Overall top seed Auburn was joined by Duke, Houston and Florida as 1-seeds, and a record 14 teams from the SEC were selected to participate in the NCAA tournament.

ESPNPete Thamel