Trump Targets Minorities, Calls It 'Fair' Infrastructure
The Trump administration's targeting of prominent urban infrastructure projects, citing 'race-based contracting,' is a classic maneuver: dismantle programs designed to address historical inequities by reframing them as unfair. The same administration that cut funding for racial bias training (Executive Order 13950, September 2020) and dismissed diversity efforts as 'divisive' now suddenly cares
about fairness in contract allocation. This isn't about equity; it's about weaponizing language to further starve cities and minority-owned businesses that have historically been shut out of major contracts. One might wonder why the sudden concern for 'fairness' didn't extend to, say, the billions in tax cuts disproportionately benefiting the wealthy (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017) or the billions
in federal contracts awarded without competitive bidding to favored corporations—often with a distinct lack of 'diversity.' The 'race-based contracting' argument appears less like a policy concern and more like a convenient pretext to rollback any progress towards equitable economic development in urban centers, essentially blaming the victims of systemic exclusion for attempting to level a
profoundly tilted playing field.