The Trump administration moved Wednesday to dismantle one of the federal government’s largest and longest-standing affirmative action programs, siding with two White-owned contracting businesses that challenged its constitutionality.
In a motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, the Justice Department said that a Transportation Department program that has carved out an estimated $37 billion for minority- and women-owned businesses violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution. If a judge approves the proposed settlement, the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise Program (DBE) will be prohibited from awarding contracts based on race and sex, effectively ending its founding mission.
“Over the past five decades, the federal government imposed a policy of race discrimination in the roadbuilding industry,” said Dan Lennington, deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, the conservative nonprofit representing the plaintiffs. “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.”