Trump calls for axing of $37 billion quota

Are two generations of quotas enough?

The Trump Administration is continuing to take advantage of the liberal establishment’s inability to explain why affirmative action is still needed after 56 years without wandering into their usual racist conspiracy theorizing about how white people are still secretly evil, which has been out of fashion since the election.

From the Washington Post news section:

Trump administration moves to upend $37B affirmative action program

The Transportation Department initiative, which serves an estimated 49,000 contractors, was a key lifeline for many minority- and women-owned businesses.

May 28, 2025 at 6:07 p.m. EDT50 minutes ago

By Julian Mark

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.

That’s $37 billion annually, not over the lifetime of this 42-year-old quota system. Presumably, in current dollars, the amount awarded under this one explicit 10% quota since 1983 could well be over a trillion dollars.

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.

… First authorized by Congress in 1983, the program serves roughly 49,000 businesses designated as “disadvantaged.”

“The Trump administration won’t stick up for minority- and women-owned businesses, so we will,” Democracy Forward, the left-leaning nonprofit representing a group of contractors composed of underrepresented groups, said Wednesday on the social media site Bluesky. “This coalition intervened in this case because of what’s at stake — not just for these businesses, but for the longstanding principles of redressing past discrimination in our economy.”

Well, is 42 years long enough?

If not, why not?

The DBE program, which is funded by the U.S. government but administered by states, earmarks at least 10 percent of the federal funding for transportation infrastructure to women- and minority-owned contracting firms.

Ten percent sounds like a quota, right? Didn’t the Bakke decision of 1978 say you can’t call them “quotas,” you have to call them “goals?”

At the time of the ruling, the Biden administration argued that the DBE was necessary to help remedy the effects of past and ongoing discrimination in government contracting.

If there is still discrimination in government contracting ongoing, shouldn’t the Biden Administration have done something about that?

But since taking office in January, Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders seeking to end any diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures by the government and beyond.

Voters never approved of affirmative action in principle, with California voters outlawing it in both 1996 and 2020. Yet, affirmative action appeared to be somewhat tolerable in practice to voters until the Great Awokening got rolling, both boosting quotas, extending them to higher end jobs, and blatantly being anti-white and anti-male.

The Justice Department, which a few months ago defended the program under President Joe Biden, wrote in Wednesday’s filing that it “reevaluated” its position in light of the June 2023 Supreme Court decision banning race-conscious college admissions. …

But Franco and other government contracting experts said the settlement, if approved, leaves room for the program to continue in some fashion, allowing, for example, preferences to be based on economic disadvantage instead of race or gender.

Yeah, but that’s not the same thing. It’s hard for people to grasp this, but black or female beneficiaries of quotas tend to be upscale.

Consider women who benefit from contracting preferences. Are they typically both female and impoverished? Of course not. If they are women and they are road-building contractors, they are likely to come from families of contractors. Some might actually be their own owner-operator, most likely if their dad was in the same career, and they inherited the family business. But of course, a lot of the female DEI beneficiary contractors are just fronts for their husbands’ (or other male relatives’) contracting businesses.

So, class quotas seldom work to narrow race or sex gaps.

In September 2023, a Tennessee judge ruled that a Small Business Administration 8(a) program for minority contractors could no longer presume certain ethnic groups were inherently “disadvantaged” — a key requirement to receive set-asides for government contracts. In March 2024, a federal judge in Texas ordered the 55-year-old Minority Business Development Agency to open its doors to all, including White entrepreneurs.

55 years is two generations. Is that enough? If not, why not?

Shouldn’t we talk about these questions?

Those court cases were part of a broader wave of resistance to DEI in higher education and the private sector, as well as the idea that certain racial groups are inherently more disadvantaged than others.

Proponents of the DBE program — and others that grant preferences based on race and sex — say its loss could prove devastating for underrepresented groups in the government contracting world. Such programs were created in the 1960s and 1970s to address pervasive race and gender discrimination in the private and contracting sectors, the effects of which they say have not been fully erased. Supporters say many businesses will fold if the programs go away.

But opponents question whether the program was ever effective. Erec Smith, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said that the program had been in place for decades to remedy past discrimination and “clearly seems to be ineffective in accomplishing that goal.”

“After an unsuccessful 50 years, perhaps it’s time for a new strategy,” Smith said. “Are the perceived disadvantages of marginalized contractors inherent to their sex, race or ethnicity? Are there race-neutral alternatives that can work to remove whatever obstacles impede the upward mobility of women and minorities in contracting? These are the questions the nation should be asking.”

No, there probably aren’t race neutral alternatives that would be just as effective.

Yes, the disadvantages of blacks and women in road-building contracting probably are, by this point, inherent to their race and sex, primarily due to tens of thousands of years of evolution.

Yes, the black middle class will be hurt bad if affirmative action is eliminated.

No, you aren’t supposed to think about that.