Trump Administration wants to terminate the $37 billion minority business program, citing concerns about racial bias

The Trump administration is joining the legal battle to end a significant federal program that has supported minority-owned companies for many years.

In 2023, Mid-America Milling Company and Bagshaw Trucking Inc., two white-owned Indiana businesses, filed a lawsuit against the Department of Transportation, claiming that the DBE Program was illegal. Now, with support from the Trump administration, they are working to completely demolish the $37 billion project.

The DBE, which has provided minority-owned companies with at least 10 percent of transportation infrastructure funding since 1983, may be dismantled as part of a settlement that the Department of Justice suggested in a new court filing this week.

The plaintiffs assert that the phrase “disadvantaged” is actually “code for women and certain minorities,” characterizing the DBE as “the largest, and perhaps oldest affirmative action program in U.S. history.” “Disfavored racial groups must compete with the preferred racial groups on an unequal footing,” the lawsuit continues.

“The DBE program must be permanently dismantled because it violates the Constitution’s ‘promise of equal treatment,'” according to the complaint.

This action comes after the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that invalidated racial discrimination in college admissions, which forced the Trump administration to “re-evaluate its position.”

According to Dan Lennington of the conservative organization that filed the lawsuit, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, “the federal government imposed a policy of race discrimination in the roadbuilding industry during the past 50 years. That is now over.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, has previously defended the program, pointing out that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated that DBE requirements had a real effect on any existing contracts.