Transportation Department eliminates civil rights rule on unintentional discrimination

Congresswoman says federal tool that pulled funding from discriminatory transit projects is now gone

The U.S. Department of Transportation has eliminated a regulation that required federally funded transportation projects to be reviewed for discriminatory impact, ending a decades-old civil rights protection that allowed the government to hold transit agencies accountable when their decisions harmed communities of color — even if the harm was unintentional.

The change was made last month through what Rep. Lateefah Simon and Guillermo Mayer, president and CEO of the civil rights law firm Public Advocates, described as a regulatory maneuver designed to evade public scrutiny. The Department of Transportation oversees billions in taxpayer dollars for highways, transit, and aviation; until now, those funds came with a condition that projects be reviewed for basic fairness under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

“Last month, the Trump administration derailed that promise,” Simon and Mayer wrote in an account published Thursday in The Guardian.

Simon, a Democrat who represents California’s 12th congressional district in the East Bay, is the first congenitally blind member of Congress and previously served as president of the Bay Area Rapid Transit board. Mayer leads Public Advocates, a 55-year-old civil rights organization.

The authors pointed to a specific case to illustrate what the now-eliminated protection looked like in practice. In 2009, Oakland residents represented by Public Advocates petitioned the Federal Transit Administration over a 3.2-mile BART extension to Oakland International Airport. The project traversed predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods but excluded stops that would have connected local residents to job centers, while charging a premium fare that priced them out. The FTA found BART out of compliance and pulled federal funding — an example, the authors said, of disparate impact liability “working exactly as intended: making discrimination visible and holding agencies accountable.”

“That tool is now gone,” they wrote.

Simon said the Department of Transportation’s move is part of a broader administration campaign. “This isn’t an isolated rollback,” she wrote. “Donald Trump is systematically dismantling disparate impact liability across federally funded programs — in employment, housing, and lending, and now transportation.” She said she had called on the department earlier this year to protect the regulations, adding, “Our tax dollars should not be going towards projects that do not abide by our basic civil rights.”

Simon, who has never been able to drive, described public transit as essential to her own life. “I have found a lifeline in public transit — getting me to school, to work, to pick up my daughter from daycare as a young single mom,” she wrote. “The freedom to move with dignity is a cornerstone of civil rights. We must protect the tools that defend it.”

The article cited transportation’s long history as a civil rights battleground, from Homer Plessy’s challenge to segregated train cars in 1892, to the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Rides, to the disability rights movement that propelled the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1990. Each of those movements, Simon and Mayer wrote, understood that “the freedom to move with dignity is not a convenience — it is a prerequisite for full participation in society.”

As federal civil rights protections recede, the authors called on states and local transit agencies to fill the gap by voluntarily adopting disparate impact standards, continuing to collect demographic data, and conducting equity analyses before decisions are made. “California, with its own civil rights framework, has both the tools and the obligation to lead,” they wrote.