Latest news with #MidAmericaMilling
Wall Street Journal
3 days ago
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Goodbye to Racial Quotas in Federal Contracts
Cleaning up diversity, equity and inclusion abuse in the federal government is one of the Trump Administration's best efforts. And on Wednesday it took on the largest and oldest race and gender preference program in U.S. history. In a motion in federal court in Kentucky, the Justice Department said the Transportation Department's longstanding Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program (DBE) violates the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. This is the program that sets aside federal contracts for women and minorities. The DBE program doles out some $37 billion in contracts over five years. The case was brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), which sued the federal government in 2023 on behalf of Mid-America Milling and Bagshaw Trucking. The companies say they were denied contracts because they weren't minority- or woman-owned. In September 2024 federal Judge Gregory Van Tatenhove issued an injunction and said the case was likely to succeed on the merits. Race and gender quotas have warped government contracting since the early 1980s, and the DBE requirements were most recently authorized by the Biden Administration. They required states to administer a federal formula that set aside roughly 10% of contracting dollars for everyone from architects and engineers to companies that lay the asphalt and provide the steel.
The Independent
5 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
Trump team looks to end $37B program designed to help minority business saying it violates the Constitution
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.'
