Biden Administration’s New Equity Atlas: An Unconstitutional Equity Redistribution Scheme

The Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) gives cities a blank check for hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants. An astonishingly massive windfall for municipal budgets. Janet Yellen, U.S. Treasury Secretary, followed up by forming an Advisory Committee on Racial Equity (a.k.a. TACRE) to ensure cities channel those funds and future federal grants towards racial equity justice.

The Committee’s mission is to “identify, monitor, and review aspects of the domestic economy that have directly and indirectly resulted in unfavorable conditions…for persons of color.”

The ulterior motive is to produce a permanent mechanism that is a data-driven approach forcing racial equity justice outcomes. Leftists refer to the concept as “democratizing data,” a contrary term that is an affirmative action contrivance.

At the TACRE launch, Ron Nirenberg, ultra-leftist Mayor of San Antonio, promoted (see this 45-second clip) the City’s first-of-its-kind working Equity Atlas model as the best practice for measuring and doling out resources based on equity. The City’s Equity Atlas is a workaround to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.

San Antonio’s model assigns equity scores by census tracts and then aggregates them by districts. Census tracts can earn a favorable score based on the higher percentage of Spanish as a first language, high illiteracy, people of color, and below-median household income. Census tracts with the highest scores receive prioritized resource allocations—violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and Article 1 of the Texas Constitution. Shouldn’t the City focus on tracking spiking crime rates and street potholes instead?

Case Study

The City of San Antonio’s Equity Atlas is an ideal case study of how data-driven narratives are used for citywide equity goals and strategies. No surprise, the City is dedicating most of its $465.5 million in ARP grants for affordable housing, drug rehabilitation, violence prevention, small business equitable outcomes, and community benefit navigators. Like a spoiled trust-fund baby, the City foolishly spends on those progressive pet projects will likely result in fraud, waste, and abuse – bank on it. All the while ignoring over $6 billion in crumbling infrastructure…