The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that it would halt the US Department of Transportation from considering race or gender when allocating billions of dollars in federal funds for road and public transportation projects designed to support small disadvantaged businesses.
This decision comes after a judge in Kentucky ruled in September that a government programme started in 1983, the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) programme went against the US Constitution. The programme assumed that businesses owned by racial minorities and women were disadvantaged and gave them easier access to funding.
Although the DBE programme was reauthorised in 2021 under President Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which allocated over $37 billion for its implementation, the Transportation Department under President Donald Trump agreed, as part of a legal settlement, that the programme’s reliance on race- and sex-based presumptions was unconstitutional.
While the department had previously defended the policy as a remedy for historical discrimination, it stated on Wednesday that it had reassessed its stance, citing factors such as a recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action.
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In a statement, the department said it had taken a significant step toward ensuring that the programme “does not discriminate on the basis of race or sex,” and reaffirmed its commitment to running all its initiatives in a non-discriminatory manner.
US District Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove in Frankfort, Kentucky a George W. Bush appointee ruled that the government could not classify individuals in ways that contravene the equal protection clause of the US Constitution. He barred the Biden administration’s Transportation Department from considering race or gender in contract bids from two Kentucky- and Indiana-based firms, Mid-America Milling Company and Bagshaw Trucking, which had challenged the policy in court.
Cara Tolliver, representing the two firms, described the department’s decision as “a monumental victory for the preservation of equality and American values.”
However, a coalition of advocacy groups, including the National Association of Minority Contractors and the Airport Minority Advisory Council, argued in court filings that Congress had established the programme to address decades of systemic, overt and implicit discrimination against women and racial or ethnic minorities.
In April, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that states could lose federal transportation funding for failing to cooperate with immigration enforcement or for maintaining diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. President Trump had issued an executive order aimed at banning DEI programmes.
