Secretary Pete Buttigieg's Department of Transportation racial equity initiatives are not moving as quickly or expansively as many activist supporters had hoped as the administration rolls out infrastructure projects.
Many of Buttigieg's equity initiatives are aimed at environmental justice and the perception that the government's past infrastructure projects, like the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, were completed in a systemically racist way.
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Through programs like Justice40, where 40% of DOT grants awarded will go to "disadvantaged communities," and the Reconnecting Communities program, in order to "redress historic inequities" in infrastructure, it has been Buttigieg's responsibility to rectify his Department's purported past.
In 2021, Buttigieg invoked the Civil Rights Act to challenge a Houston, Texas-area Interstate 45 expansion, testing environmental justice arguments activist groups, like Stop TxDOT I-45, made about the displacement of more than 1,300 homes, businesses, and houses of worship in majority-minority areas, as well as the presence of heightened pollution giving the same residents potential breathing problems.
However, DOT published its findings in March, saying it "did not find any issue" with the $9 billion expansion, promising to house displaced residents.
"We’re not saying you can never expand a road anywhere, ever," Buttigieg told KPRC last week.
Activist organizations like Transportation for America see the shift in tone from the Biden administration does not bode well for their cause, with group director Beth Osborne saying Biden has "done little to nothing" to fight highway expansions, according to Politico.
However, this balancing of priorities, between ideology and completing infrastructure projects, is indicative of the inherent limitations of the equity argument, David Ditch, transportation expert and senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
"To a lot of activists, as soon as you inject race, they view that as an instant trump card that they should automatically win any debate and they should get everything that they want without a fight," he explained. "And the reality is that infrastructure comes with practical considerations."
Ditch argues that "part of the narrative that the activists talk about is accurate," saying that decisions to use eminent domain to bulldoze neighborhoods and build highways were made "callously" in many instances.
When the federal highway system was being built, roads were being built that might bypass certain towns or remove buildings, homes, and other structures, which "caused real material harm to some heavily minority parts of the country."
It had the impact of destroying the main streets and urban corridors, allowing potential consumers to circumvent towns they might have otherwise driven through.
The underlying argument that systemic racism played a role in the decisions being made dishonestly, Ditch added, saying the highway system was a "massive central planning operation" that carried "unintended consequences ... dismissive of the cost imposed on individuals and on communities." Decisions impacted low-income areas, which correlated heavily with minority areas, but were not necessarily outrightly racist.
However, even in instances where a decision was made "callously," modern considerations for stripping a highway are more complex than simply remedying a past decision.
"The mindset that these activists have is they see a historical problem, and the first remedy they jump to is the federal government should spend untold billions of dollars and money shouldn't be an object," Ditch said. However, conservatives are also too quick to dismiss some of the "understandable historical grievances" that came with the local economic vacuum created by the highway system.
The decision to remove a highway to revitalize a town is something that can have the potential to restore a community, and that could be a positive outgrowth of the Buttigieg equity push, but regional economies have also built around the highways since their advent and the removal of a stretch of road could have devastating impacts for the larger area.
"Just because it might have been a callous decision then doesn't mean that it makes sense to try to restore the way things used to be based on present conditions," he said.
However, even Buttigieg's pursuits are not equipped to solve the issues he says they will, Ditch continued.
The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill President Joe Biden signed into law in 2021 injected federal funds into highway expansion projects in Virginia, Louisiana, New York, Washington, Oregon, and Florida. They will all involve the use of eminent domain to remove homes and add more room for traffic.
Likewise, Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) approved a plan to add a two-lane expansion to I-94, despite local opposition, which is set to pass through minority areas in Milwaukee.
Those several-billion-dollar-each projects set deep contrast to the Reconnecting Communities program, which puts $1 billion after redressing the use of eminent domain that created "historic inequities," grant money aimed at rebuilding main streets.
Ditch called $1 billion a "symbolic amount" that allows the government to say they are addressing equity issues.
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"The number of projects the activists identify or are targeting, and the amount of money it would take to do teardowns and rebuilds and try to put the area through an infrastructure time machine that goes back 60 or 70 years or whatever, is so many more times — it's to the point where a billion dollars can only provide token funding to put some shovels in the ground that doesn't even scratch the surface for the vision that they want," he continued.
The Department of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.