RUTHFULLY YOURS

The right believes that it has won the war on DEI. The Trump administration is purging it from the federal government. Several states have followed suit. Corporations are pulling back their long-feigned support of diversity initiatives, and universities are retreating as well — if only out of fear of losing federal dollars. But the cancer of DEI has had a long time to metastasize at the local level before this recent charge against it at the highest echelons of government, the market, and the academy. DEI still needs to be eliminated from local government, where it receives less scrutiny but has an enduring pernicious effect.

Take South Bend, Ind., for example. It’s a small, post-industrial Midwestern city. It’s also one of the smallest cities in the country with a race- and gender-based public spending program.

I worked for South Bend as an engineer for seven months. One of the first tasks I was given was to calculate the race and gender quotas for an electric vehicle charger project. Wanting to conduct the task properly and legally, I decided to research the basis of the city’s race-based spending program. In doing so, however, I discovered that the program has an incredibly weak legal basis and a shrouded origin story.

Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg founded the city government’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion by executive order in 2016. Around that time, he ordered the director of public works to begin applying racial and gender quotas to public works contracts. The city’s legal team rightly indicated to the mayor that such quotas could not be assigned at a whim, and that a series of Supreme Court decisions clearly delineates the strict constitutional requirements for government actions involving suspect classifications such as race and gender.

Therefore, in 2018, the city hired DEI law firm Colette Holt & Associates for $275,000 to produce a “Disparity Study” that would enable it to establish the Minority and Women Business Enterprise (MWBE) Program, which legally requires race and gender quotas on all public works projects, from sidewalks to traffic lights.

The goal of the disparity study was to assess whether there was any evidence of discriminatory practices in public works spending. This is typically quantified as a “disparity ratio” — a percentage that compares the frequency with which a particular group obtains public contracts and the availability of that group within the local economy. For example, if 5 percent of the local businesses are minority- or women-owned, and they obtain 5 percent of public contracts, the resultant disparity ratio is 100 percent (i.e. there is no disparity). A ratio less than 100 percent indicates that a given group is being utilized less than would be expected based on its availability. The initial study, published in 2019, found that South Bend’s disparity ratio was 72.38 percent for minorities, 85.18 percent for women, and 80.25 percent for minorities and women combined.

The South Bend Tribune swiftly announced the results of the study, indicting South Bend with racial discrimination, and former Mayor Pete publicly presented the results with Colette Holt & Associates in a town hall–style meeting. In his closing remarks, Buttigieg said, “When we launch a race- and gender-conscious purchasing initiative, no one can say that it is not justified, because we have done the work to demonstrate that the disparity is there.” But the city later failed to inform the public that these were not the final numbers.

Experiencing daily how difficult it was to find minority- and women-owned businesses to hire for public contracts, South Bend public works leadership could not believe that these disparity ratios were valid. They called for a reexamination of the data on the part of Colette Holt & Associates.

The data were thus reanalyzed, and in 2020, the law firm gave the city a revised version of the disparity study that fixed the apparently accidental errors in the first iteration. The numbers were staggeringly different: The actual disparity ratio for minorities was 224 percent. This meant that minority-owned businesses had actually been hired at a rate more than two times their availability. The ratio for women was 163.1 percent, and the combined ratio for all qualifying groups was 183.1 percent.

Yet no news articles or publicity events from the mayor’s office followed the completion of the updated study, even though (and possibly because) the real disparity ratios effectively emptied the study of its legal force. Until January 2025, the outdated 2019 study was the only one published on the website of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. It has since been removed.

With no statistical evidence existing of historic discrimination, the mayor and the city council nevertheless continued to support an ordinance requiring race and gender quotas on all public works projects, from repaving roads to installing new sewer lines. (City officials did not respond to requests for comment by press time.)

But the dubious methods of the disparity study don’t end there. The race and gender quotas themselves are derived from a dataset that no city employee has ever seen. Despite the fact that the vast majority of the city’s public contracts are made with businesses in St. Joseph County, where South Bend is located, the law firm counted every minority- and women-owned business in the state of Indiana to set South Bend’s quotas. They claimed that there are 1,556 such businesses vying for work in South Bend, yet in 2024, despite the city’s immense efforts to find them, South Bend was only able to find 17 such businesses to contract with. These businesses just aren’t that prevalent in the city’s market. The race and gender quotas are thus not only unsupported by statistical evidence of discrimination; they are also unreasonably high and therefore very difficult to achieve.

South Bend’s DEI spending program has been a headache for city employees and contractors alike for over half a decade. City–contractor relationships have worsened, and some men have even put their businesses in their wives’ names in order to get an advantage as a woman-owned business. The main achievements of the program? Project delays and price increases. And in a recent stroke of irony, former Mayor Pete claimed he could have done more at Biden’s Department of Transportation if needless government regulations hadn’t slowed him down, even though this is precisely the legacy that his DEI program left in South Bend when he departed for Washington, D.C.

South Bend’s ordinance requires that a new disparity study be conducted every five to seven years. It’s unclear when the city intends to conduct another study. In reality, it shouldn’t need to, since the initial study did not show any statistical evidence of discrimination to begin with. Even if South Bend had met the constitutional strict scrutiny standard set by the Supreme Court, the legality of its DEI spending program would still be subject to challenge under evolving federal and state law.

South Bend is one of many American cities with a race- and gender-based spending program that is furthering division in local communities and decreasing government efficiency. DEI represents the reification of racial discrimination. America’s public infrastructure is in poor enough shape as it stands without adding DEI requirements that cause additional delays to desperately needed infrastructure improvements and burn away hundreds of thousands of additional taxpayer dollars in the process.

State attorneys general and other local officials must endeavor to eliminate these programs from municipal government, even where they are not overtly unconstitutional, as in South Bend. Progress at the federal level in rolling back DEI will be slow to affect common American citizens if we don’t realize what’s still in place locally.