The Trump administration has joined with two white-owned construction companies looking to end a $37 billion program designed to help minority-owned businesses, saying it is “unconstitutional.”
The Indiana-based companies, Mid-America Milling Company and Bagshaw Trucking Inc., sued the Department of Transportation in 2023 over the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Program, arguing that it should be permanently dismantled.
On Wednesday the Department of Justice filed a proposal for a settlement with the DOT to dismantle the program – which was first authorized by Congress in 1983, and serves roughly 49,000 businesses that have been deemed to be disadvantaged.
The program is funded by the federal government but administered by states, and allocates at least 10 percent of government funding for transportation infrastructure to such contracting firms.
The original complaint described the DBE as “the largest, and perhaps oldest affirmative action program in U.S. history” and claimed that the program’s “goals” were in fact “discriminatory barriers” targeting nondesignated racial groups including white Americans.
“The word ‘disadvantaged’ is simply code for women and certain minorities,” the complaint stated, adding that: “Disfavored racial groups must compete with the preferred racial groups on an unequal footing.
“Because the DBE program violates the Constitution’s ‘promise of equal treatment,’ it must be permanently dismantled.”
Last January, under the Biden administration, the DOT hit back at the suit, saying that the plaintiffs had “notably” not identified any current transport construction contracts that had “race- or gender-based subcontracting goals due to the DOT DBE program.”
However, in a new filing on Wednesday, the administration said it had “re-evaluated its position,” in light of a 2023 Supreme Court ruling which blocked race-conscious college admissions.
“Defendants, upon review of the DBE program and their position in this litigation, have determined that the program’s use of race- and sex-based presumptions is unconstitutional,” the filing stated.
“Over the past five decades, the federal government imposed a policy of race discrimination in the roadbuilding industry,” Dan Lennington, deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the conservative nonprofit representing the plaintiffs, told The Washington Post.
“Thousands of workers and small businesses have been victimized, and hundreds of billions have been spent, distorting the market and inflating construction costs for the taxpayers. That ends now.”
