New York City is handing out hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in no-bid contracts — and the deciding factor isn’t price, quality, or merit. It’s race.
That’s the charge laid out in a blistering opinion piece in The Hill by Wilson Freeman, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, who dug into Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “Racial Equity Plan” and the contracting machine it celebrates.
Released April 6, the plan commits city government to using racial classifications to steer more than 200 goals across nearly every agency. At its core sits a procurement system Freeman calls “audacious”: under the City Charter, agencies can hand out contracts for goods, services, and construction worth up to $1.5 million — with no competitive bidding at all — so long as the vendor is certified as a minority- or women-owned business.
“This throws the ordinary ethical and anticorruption framework out the door,” Freeman writes, “as long as the vendor on the contract has the right skin color.”
The dollar figures are staggering. In fiscal 2025 alone, city agencies registered 1,118 contracts through the women-and-minority small-purchase method, worth more than $363 million. The information-technology sector by itself accounts for roughly a quarter-billion dollars in contracts awarded by race, without competition. And the program is only growing — when the city launched it in 2018, the cap was $100,000 per contract. Today it’s $1.5 million.
Here’s the inconvenient legal reality the plan ignores: the U.S. Supreme Court has held since 1989 that race- and sex-based contracting set-asides are unconstitutional. “The city may call the result ‘racial equity,’” Freeman notes, “but the plainer word is ‘discrimination.’”
The corruption risk is the part that should alarm taxpayers of every political stripe. For more than a century, this country fought to require competitive bidding and transparency precisely to drive graft out of government purchasing. Now, Freeman argues, the city comptroller is openly pleading with agencies to use less competitive bidding to hit racial quotas — and “ultimately, it will be the taxpayer who foots the bill for this race back to corrupt contracting.”
Mamdani’s plan, far from treating any of this as a problem, “treats it as a model,” directing agency after agency to embed racial classifications even deeper into how the city hires, contracts, and spends. There is no acknowledgment, Freeman says, that sorting citizens by race “raises any legal or moral question at all.”
The remedy he proposes isn’t complicated. “Fairness in public contracting means an open door, a published solicitation, and the lowest responsible bidder,” he writes. “It does not mean a closed-door award based on the owner’s race.” In the nation’s largest city, a quarter-billion dollars in IT spending alone now says otherwise.
Source: thehill.com
