Get the top Racial Equity stories of the day from America’s most influential oldest continuously published Black newspaper, serving the nation’s largest Black and brown community. Sign up to stay connected.Amsterdam News has been reporting the news of the day from a Black perspective for 113 years.
The agency, which is part of the U.S. Commerce Department, was first established during the Nixon administration to address discrimination in the business world. The Biden administration widened its scope and reach through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, making it a permanent agency and increasing its funding to $550 million over five years.
“We just think that this decision is going to be applied far and wide to hundreds of programs using identical language,” Lennington said. In a similar ruling last year, a Tennessee judge struck down a program run by the Small Business Administration that steered some government contracts toward minority-owned businesses.