Christian Bruckner, who owns a small business in Florida, filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration Wednesday over race and sex quotas that bar him from competing for a reserved set of government contracts outlined in last year’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
Bruckner, who owns Project Management Corporation, came to America in the 1970s when his parents fled communist Romania. In 1989 a car accident left him permanently disabled. According to Bruckner’s lawsuit, his business “can fulfill transportation and infrastructure-related contracts, including those contracts available under the Infrastructure Act.”
But because of Bruckner’s race and sex, his company is ineligible to compete for more than $37 billion worth of infrastructure contracts.
According to the lawsuit, in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure act passed in November, Congress “authorized $370 billion in new spending for roads, bridges, and other surface transportation projects. But Congress also implemented a set aside, or quota, requiring that at least 10% of these funds be reserved for certain ‘disadvantaged’ small businesses.”
“If … President Biden really wants to help disadvantaged small business owners, then he should help new businesses struggling to survive or small business owners who have a disability like me,” Bruckner said in a press release. “But helping groups based on race and gender is never fair.”
The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, alleges that this quota violates the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process by denying Bruckner the equal protection of the law. Bruckner is suing President Joe Biden, White House Senior Advisor and Infrastructure Implementation Coordinator Mitchell Landrieu, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
In the legal complaint, Bruckner asks the court for a preliminary injunction “removing all unconstitutional race and gender-based classification” from the infrastructure act, as well as a declaration that such quotas are unconstitutional and a permanent ban on their implementation.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s Equality Under the Law Project is representing Bruckner and Project Management Corporation in the lawsuit. According to a press release from WILL, the project “has successfully sued the Biden Administration twice for race discrimination in the Farmer Loan Forgiveness Program and the Restaurant Revitalization Fund” and “forced the removal of race-based preferences in the Homeowner Assistance Fund, another program under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.”
Source: The Federalist
