Florida Contractor Sues Biden Administration for Awarding Infrastructure Contracts Based on Race, Gender

A disabled Florida businessman whose family fled communist Romania in the 1970s is suing the Biden administration for racial and gender discrimination, claiming that he is not allowed to compete for $37 billion in infrastructure contracts because he is a white man.

Christian Bruckner, the owner of Tampa-based Project Management Corporation, is the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, according to a press release from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which is representing Bruckner. The defendants are President Joe Biden, the president’s senior advisor and infrastructure coordinator Mitch Landrieu, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

The lawsuit stems from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which Biden signed into law in November. That bill includes $370 billion in new spending for roads, bridges, and other surface transportation projects, but it requires that at least 10 percent of that money, more than $37 billion, be awarded to “small, disadvantaged business contractors.”

Federal regulations presume that “socially disadvantaged” groups include black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans, and various Asian American groups, according to the lawsuit. Women are also deemed “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals,” under the infrastructure act. Because Bruckner is white and male, he is excluded, and he is unable to “compete  on an equal footing for contracts,” according to the lawsuit.

The infrastructure act “sets an unlawful quota based on race and gender,” according to the lawsuit. “This quota is unconstitutional. Defendants have no justification for the act’s $37 billion race-and-gender quota.”

According to the lawsuit, Bruckner has over 20 years experience in government contracting, and his company, PMC, “can fulfill transportation and infrastructure-related contracts, including those contracts available under the Infrastructure Act.” Buckner, who is “permanently disabled” due to a 1989 car crash, “is qualified, willing, and able to be a contractor and subcontractor” under the act, according to the lawsuit.

Bruckner said in a prepared statement that infrastructure projects that are part of the act “should be open to all small businesses based on the ability to do the work.”

“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,” he said. “But helping groups based on race and gender is never fair.”

The lawsuit was filed by Daniel Bean, a lawyer in Jacksonville, Fla., and by the Equality Under the Law Project, an initiative of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. They argue that Congress has attempted to justify the race and gender quota through general findings of “race and gender discrimination,” but none of the findings establish that the quota is a remedy to a specific and recent case of intentional discrimination by the federal government.

The lawsuit calls for court to remove all unconstitutional race-and-gender-based classifications from the infrastructure act, and to prohibit the Biden administration from applying race-and-gender-based classifications when awarding contracts under the act.

“All Americans should have the equal opportunity to compete on a level playing field,” said Rick Esenberg, WILL’s president and general counsel. “But now, Congress and the Biden Administration have trampled on this foundational principle by giving tens of billions in special treatment to small businesses based on race and gender. This unlawful discrimination must stop.”