A Federal Agency Is Awarding Contracts Based on “Discrimination Essays”

The Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision ruled that racial preferences in university admissions are unconstitutional. Since that decision, universities have used applicants’ personal essays about discrimination as a backdoor way to continue racial favoritism.

The federal government is following their lead, using such essays to continue awarding tens of billions of dollars in contracts—involving everything from accounting software to the construction of naval ships—based on race. The federal essay program is an absurd way to determine who shapes American infrastructure and national defense.

In recent decades, Washington has created several programs that give preferences in government contracts to businesses owned by “disadvantaged” individuals— typically a euphemism for racial minorities. Soon after the Harvard decision, a federal district court in Ultima v. Department of Agriculture ruled that the government could no longer presume that racial minorities were eligible for the largest contracting program, 8(a) of the Small Business Act, which allows “socially and economically disadvantaged” businesses to get federal contracts with limited or no competition.

Since federal contracts totaling $25 billion were awarded through the 8(a) program in 2023, the Ultima ruling caused a “full-blown panic,” said one attorney who helped businesses get such contracts. To keep the program going, the Small Business Administration (SBA) asked business owners to write “social disadvantage narratives” to show that they suffered discrimination and thus needed extra help from the government. The SBA hired additional workers to review the resulting onslaught of essays.

The SBA recommends that business owners write about their race, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, or other “identities/characteristics” that have led them to suffer discrimination. Applicants should “provide two incidents of bias” from their past that show how discrimination affected their education or careers. “To avoid unnecessary delays to the review process,” the SBA recommends not sharing more than two.

How can someone show that he suffered enough discrimination to deserve, say, a contract for road repaving? The SBA says that a business owner can discuss “social patterns or pressures which discouraged the individual from pursuing” certain educational or work opportunities. These might be as vague as some stray comments. The SBA suggests other potential incidents of discrimination, such as a minority business owner being denied a line of credit that he felt he deserved, leading to the supposed conclusion that “[t]he bank and its employees must have arbitrarily set higher standards for business owners and borrowers of color.”

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