October 11, 2025
Derrick Johnson, the NAACP’s president and CEO, characterized the move by Trump as a significant step backward for Black-owned businesses.
On Sept. 30, the Trump Administration’s Department of Transportation (DOT) issued its Interim Final Rule on the Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) and Airport Concession Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (ACDBE) programs, which has since been interpreted by some, including the NAACP, as an enshrinement of discrimination.
“A determination that an individual is socially and economically disadvantaged must not be based in whole or in part on race or sex,” the rule reads in part. “Being born in a particular country does not, standing alone, mean that a person is necessarily socially and economically disadvantaged.”
According to the Trump administration’s DOT, their rule on the programs now requires applicants to individually prove “social and economic disadvantage,” regardless of any long-standing barriers to capital, contracts, or opportunity, which Derrick Johnson, the NAACP’s president and CEO, characterized as a significant step backward in an Oct. 10 press release.
“This rule is nothing more than an attempt to erase the reality of racism in contracting,” Johnson said. “The Department of Transportation has turned its back on history and on the very purpose of the DBE program. The economic exclusion of Black Americans and women isn’t theoretical. It’s measurable and ongoing. This change signals that the federal government would rather pretend inequality doesn’t exist than address it. It’s unfortunate but not unexpected.”
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the DOT’s DBE program was started in 1980 and codified in 1983, in an effort to remedy the ongoing and continuing effects of past discrimination on federally funded transportation contracts, in effect, opening doors for Black, people of color, and women-owned small businesses to receive more contracts than they had previously.
As reported by Construction Dive, coinciding with the change to the 45-year-old rule is Construction Inclusion Week, which the construction industry developed independently in an effort to broaden diversity in an industry that is dominated by white men and now faces a labor shortage.
According to Danielle Dietrich, an attorney at Washington, D.C.-based Potomac Law Group, “It means that all of the DBE goals are currently paused. All of the contracts and overall goals are basically gone until such time as the states reevaluate every single one of their DBEs on a basis that does not take into consideration sex, race or ethnic origin.”
In November, Shon Harris, the owner of a Chicago-based electrical services firm, told The Washington Post that a decision to shutter the program could have a disastrous effect on businesses like his.
“It would be a minority business crisis if this program went away. From an African American contracting standpoint, it’s pretty scary to think that these programs won’t be around. And to try to prepare for them is not necessarily all in our hands. …It’s not like the problems with bias and racism won’t exist anymore,” Harris told the outlet.
Kendra Perkins Norwood, a partner and government contractors attorney at ReedSmith, told the outlet at the time that the best course of action for minority and women contractors would be to meticulously document any and all issues of discrimination in order to prove their cases once the DOT dismantled the program.
Meanwhile, Oren Sellstrom, litigation director at Lawyers for Civil Rights in Boston, described what led to the creation of the DOT’s rule in the first place.
“There were many businesses that had to close their doors because the entrenched business networks — the old boys’ networks that exist throughout the economy — were allowed to flourish after Proposition 209 went into effect. That is a predictor in some ways of what could happen if a similar situation unfolded at the federal level,” Sellstrom warned.
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