New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani leaves a press conference with New York Governor Kathy Hochul and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura) Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Racial Equity Plan, released on April 6, commits New York City government to using racial classifications to guide more than two hundred goals across nearly every agency. Among other things, the plan commits specific percentages of city contracts to be doled out on the basis of race, a continuation of the city’s longstanding policy. Indeed, for the last several years, the city has been operating one of the largest race-based contracting programs in the country.
One of the most revolutionary aspects of New York’s procurement system is its audacious policy of setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts which cannot be bid on except by New York’s favored racial groups. Under the New York City Charter and the rules of the Procurement Policy Board, city agencies are allowed to hand out contracts for goods, services, and construction worth up to $1.5 million without any competitive bidding at all to businesses the city has certified as a minority or women-owned business enterprise.
This throws the ordinary ethical and anticorruption framework out the door, as long as the vendor on the contract has the right skin color.
The amount of money at stake here is anything but small. In fiscal 2025 alone city agencies registered 1,118 contracts via the women and minority small purchase method, with contracts valued at over $363 million. In 2018, when the city began handing out these contracts, the total amount was capped at $100,000. But it has steadily risen, today encompassing contracts up to $1.5 million. Indeed, the city’s public contracting website lists hundreds of contracts worth more than a million dollars apiece issued under this method, along with thousands of other, smaller contracts.
This isn’t just about construction — the information technology sector alone represents hundreds of millions of dollars in public contracts. These relatively small procurements should be an entry point for small businesses into public contracting. But for each of these contracts, businesses owned by people with the wrong skin color cannot even be considered.
The Constitution requires government to treat people equally under the law. Sorting businesses into “eligible” and “ineligible” pools by the race of the owner is the opposite of equal treatment. Indeed, since 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled race and sex-based contracting set-asides as unconstitutional. The government has no business picking winners and losers on the basis of an immutable characteristic. The city may call the result “racial equity,” but the plainer word is “discrimination.”
The city’s program of expanding contracting discrimination doesn’t only harm the excluded businesses, it harms the city itself. Not only are ordinary New York firms out of contracts they would otherwise compete for and win, but the city is now allocating enormous sums based on the unaccountable whim of agency officials. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this country fought a hard battle to require competitive bidding and transparency in procurement to drive out corruption.
Today, the New York City comptroller pleads with agencies to use less competitive bidding to increase the proportion of contracts handed out to minority and women-owned business entities. Ultimately, it will be the taxpayer who foots the bill for this race back to corrupt contracting, as inefficient vendors are selected partly on the basis of their race and partly on the basis of their connection to city government. The consequences cannot be anything but disastrous.
Mayor Mamdani’s Preliminary Racial Equity Plan does not treat any of this as a problem. It treats it as a model. The plan directs agency after agency to expand and more deeply embed racial classifications into how the city hires, contracts, trains, regulates, and serves the public.
The Mayor’s Office of Contract Services is given goals that build on the existing quota structure, rather than questioning it. The plan offers no acknowledgment that singling out citizens by race for benefits or burdens raises any legal or moral question at all. It treats race-conscious decision making by city government as a settled good, to be expanded.
It is not a settled good. Sorting citizens by race cannot be squared with the constitutional guarantee that government will treat all people equally under the law, and it cannot be squared with the meritocracy necessary to run the nation’s largest city. New York City should not be disbursing hundreds of millions of dollars in public spending in discriminatory, unreviewable contracts. Fairness in public contracting means an open door, a published solicitation, and the lowest responsible bidder. It does not mean a closed-door award based on the owner’s race. New Yorkers are entitled to a government that treats them as individuals.
Mayor Mamdani’s Preliminary Racial Equity Plan moves in the opposite direction. The city’s no-bid rule shows, in dollars and contracts, what that direction means in practice: a quarter-billion in IT spending alone, awarded on the basis of race, without competition, in the largest city in the U.S. The right response is not a fuller plan. It is a simpler rule. The government of New York City should not be in the business of sorting its citizens — or its small businesses — by race.
Wilson Freeman is an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, focusing on equality before the law and economic freedom.
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