A new lawsuit filed against the federal government by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and the Center for Individual Rights (CIR) on behalf of Young America’s Foundation (YAF) and Revier Technologies, Inc. targets the regulation that gives federal officials justification for race-based and unconstitutional DEI practices in many government programs.
The lawsuit shines a light on the term “socially disadvantaged individuals,” and how it is used to determine which Americans are — and are not — eligible for federal programs including taxpayer funded grants, fellowships, loans, and other opportunities. It also sits at the heart of the Left’s DEI agenda that continues to be exposed as discriminatory, divisive, and antithetical to the bedrock American principle that all people are created equal and should be treated as such. In addition to being odious, it is also unconstitutional.
As the complaint filed on behalf of YAF explains, the Small Business Act “directs the Small Business Administration to fulfill government contracts using small businesses owned and controlled by ‘socially disadvantaged individuals.’ To implement this statute, the SBA issued a rule creating a presumption that members of certain races are ‘socially disadvantaged.’ For example, the SBA Regulation presumes that all ‘Asian Pacific Americans,’ ‘Subcontinent Asian Americans,’ ‘Hispanic Americans,’ and ‘Black Americans,’ among other categories are socially disadvantaged, merely because of their race or ethnicity.”
This race-based SBA regulation has subsequently been “incorporated into programs administered by other federal agencies, imposing racial discrimination on small business owners, college students, and, indeed, countless Americans, in their dealings with an array of federally administered programs,” the complaint continues before explaining how students — including YAF activists — face race-based discrimination as a result of the SBA rule:
“Plaintiff Young America’s Foundation is a nationwide conservative student organization with members at more than 1,000 colleges. A number of those students are eligible for a competitive cybersecurity fellowship offered by the Department of Homeland Security, but because their race is not presumed ‘socially disadvantaged,’ as defined by the SBA Regulation, they cannot apply for the fellowship on an equal footing.”
The lawsuit further notes: “The federal government’s pervasive use of race as a proxy for determining who is ‘socially disadvantaged’—and therefore who receives contracts, grants, loans, investment capital, opportunities, and other benefits—is unconstitutional and it must be stopped,”
This is just one example of how far-reaching the Left’s divisive, discriminatory, and unconstitutional DEI policies have become. As YAF has done for decades, we will continue to fight on behalf of our students and their God-given, constitutionally protected right to equal treatment under the law.
View the full complaint here.
