Unfunded mandates are directives from a higher level of government requiring a lower level to adopt certain policies or carry out certain goals without providing the money to do so. In the episodes of The Bob Zadek Show surveyed here, the term appears in three settings: federal immigration enforcement, the structural consequences of the 17th Amendment, and state COVID-19 directives imposed on counties. The sources treat unfunded mandates less as a standalone policy problem than as a symptom of a constitutional imbalance that allows higher levels of government to shift costs and obligations downward.
Federal pressure and local law enforcement
In a 2011 episode on immigration reform, Bob Zadek framed federal immigration enforcement as a form of coercion operating through the power of the purse. He described Janet Napolitano, whom he called “the police chief in chief,” telling a governor that the federal government had decided what local police departments must do. Zadek acknowledged that the compulsion is not direct arrest but rather the threat that “we’re going to pull all kinds of grants and other money from you, and we’re going to bleed you to death.” He characterized this as “using the coercive federal power of the purse” to bully governors, police chiefs and mayors into doing federal bidding despite local opposition Immigration Reform Is Broken (2011).
Guest Elise Foley pushed back on the characterization. She said it was “not exactly like that” — that instead of threatening to withhold funding, the federal government tells localities that their partnership is with the FBI and that fingerprints are taken from the FBI. If a locality does not want to share fingerprints with DHS, it must stop sending fingerprints to the FBI altogether, which Foley said would mean not catching fugitives, people running from the law, or people using false names. In her account, the system is not one of explicit opt-out penalties but one in which opting out is effectively impossible Immigration Reform Is Broken (2011).
Zadek described the program as sold to Americans as efficient law enforcement aimed at catching illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes, rather than chasing students who have overstayed visas. Foley said the program does deport people who have committed serious crimes including robberies and murders, but also has deported a large number of people never convicted of a crime at all. She cited a figure of one in four people deported under the program having never been convicted of a crime. Zadek interjected that the figure was 60% in Merced, California, and Foley replied that it is much higher in certain areas Immigration Reform Is Broken (2011).
Zadek argued that the program sweeps up people whose only offense is being in the country illegally — which he noted is not a crime in the United States — contrary to the wishes of local law enforcement. He said local law enforcement relies on cooperation within Latino and other minority communities, and that once people fear contact with police they stop cooperating. Guest Sophia Campos, an undocumented student at UCLA, said Secure Communities and its implementation negatively affect students and undocumented people who do good work and try to promote the economy. She said collaboration between police and ICE makes people less comfortable going to the police when they see a crime, because they fear repercussions or being handed over to ICE Immigration Reform Is Broken (2011).
The 17th Amendment and the structure of mandates
In a 2019 episode with Randall Holcombe, Zadek developed the argument that unfunded mandates are a structural consequence of the 17th Amendment. He described the 17th Amendment as following the 16th Amendment — the income tax — and said the two together changed forever the nature of American government and voters’ relationship to it. He said the 17th Amendment was changed in 1913, during the beginning of the second Progressive Era, and that it followed isolated scandals involving senators elected by statehouses through bribery or other nefarious means. The result, in his view, was that states changed over time from independent co-equal political bodies to merely agencies of Washington — California became, if you will, the California Department of the federal government [[episodes/john_marini_on__unmasking_the_administrative_state|John Marini on Unmasking the Administrative State (2019)]].
Holcombe added that the 17th Amendment made it easier to pass legislation. Before it, the House represented the interests of the people and the Senate represented the interests of the state governments, so any law had to be approved by both. With direct election of senators, senators became representatives of the people too, lowering the bar. He offered Obamacare as a concrete example: when the Affordable Healthcare Act passed, it imposed higher costs on the states because states had to expand their Medicaid programs. Had the Senate represented state governments, Holcombe said, it is pretty likely Obamacare would not have been able to shift some of those costs to the states [[episodes/john_marini_on__unmasking_the_administrative_state|John Marini on Unmasking the Administrative State (2019)]].
Zadek agreed and said he would have picked the same example. He defined unfunded mandates as Washington requiring states to adopt certain policies and carry out certain federal goals but not giving them the money to do so. He argued that there would never be even one unfunded mandate if states, through the Senate, would not enact the legislation. He said the 17th Amendment helped states preserve their independence, and that without it states become far less the “laboratories of democracy” and laboratories of innovation that Chief Justice Brandeis observed at the beginning of the 20th century [[episodes/john_marini_on__unmasking_the_administrative_state|John Marini on Unmasking the Administrative State (2019)]].
The same exchange appears in a later 2019 episode with Holcombe, where Holcombe again used Obamacare as his example of the Senate no longer representing state governments, and Zadek again defined unfunded mandates and invoked Brandeis’s “laboratories of democracy” Randall G. Holcombe on Liberty in Peril (2019).
State directives and county implementation
In a 2020 episode on COVID-19 response, Zadek applied the concept to state-county relations. Speaking with Jeff Hewitt, a county supervisor for Riverside County, Zadek noted that five people have legislative control over two and a half million people, and that policies are made at the state level but carried out at the local level. He said the state gets to decide the policies, does not necessarily fund them, and then delegates them to counties to carry out. He told Hewitt it sounded very much like there are unfunded mandates where the state says to counties, “Here’s what you must do,” leaving counties on their own to get it done Commonsense COVID Response (2020).
Zadek described Hewitt as a county supervisor for Riverside County, a county bigger than seven or eight states, and as probably the most senior Libertarian elected official in the country at that time. He said he wanted to discuss the tension that creates between the state which gives the directives and the county having to be on the ground to carry it out Commonsense COVID Response (2020).
Across episodes
The topic appears in three episodes spanning 2011 to 2020. In the 2011 immigration episode, the unfunded mandate takes the form of federal pressure on local law enforcement through threatened withdrawal of grants, with Zadek and Foley disputing the mechanism. In the two 2019 episodes with Holcombe, the discussion shifts to the structural cause — the 17th Amendment’s effect on Senate representation — with Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion as the concrete example. In the 2020 episode with Hewitt, the frame moves to state-county relations during COVID-19. The excerpts show a consistent definition of unfunded mandates across all three, but no single episode traces the concept from one context to another; each treats it within its own subject matter.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the name of any specific unfunded mandate statute, nor any case holding or constitutional provision beyond the 10th and 17th Amendments as mentioned. They do not give the founding date of any program or the full name of the immigration enforcement program beyond “Secure Communities.” The 2011 excerpt breaks off mid-sentence as Zadek begins to discuss the economic burden of unfunded mandates, so the sources do not cover that economic analysis. The excerpts also do not state whether any of the described mandates were subsequently repealed, defunded, or upheld in court.