Houston City Hall, photographed in April 2026.
Sharon Steinmann/Houston Chronicle
A federal judge has ruled Houston’s minority-owned business contracting program unconstitutional and blocked the city from “using racial preferences” in awarding public contracts as affirmative action programs come under fire nationwide.
A white couple from Spring sued the city in 2023, alleging their lawn care business, Landscape Consultants of Texas, Inc., could not “compete on an equal footing with other businesses” as they were ineligible for certification in the city’s longstanding program designed to even the playing field for minorities, women and small businesses.
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Houston since 1984 has set goals to give certain percentages of various types of city contracts to certified small businesses and those owned by women and minorities.
The city’s Office of Business Opportunity also runs programs to help businesses owned by veterans, those with disabilities and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
In a Tuesday ruling, U.S. District Judge David Hittner said the program was in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Houston awarded $2.5 billion in construction, professional services, and other goods and services contracts in its 2025 fiscal year, $579 million of which went to certified minority, women, and small businesses across more than 1,600 separate contracts.
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Hispanic-owned businesses received 34% of that $579 million in contracts, followed by Asian-owned businesses 22%, firms owned by white women at 17% and Black-owned firms at 14%.
Carol Guess, current chair of the Texas Association of African-American Chambers of Commerce and former president of the Greater Houston Black Chamber of Commerce, said it appeared as though the judge had unjustly applied a narrow ruling the U.S. Supreme Court made in relation to racial preference in college applications to a local program.
Guess called the ruling a “huge blow” to Black-owned businesses across the state, especially those in Houston where city leaders weren’t yet meeting contracting goals. She worried about the possibility of other municipalities complying with the ruling and walking back their MWBE programs to avoid costly court battles.
“This court has opened the door for other courts to expand the application of (the Harvard ruling),” Guess said. “They made a choice to do that. And now the door is open for many other municipalities, for their MWBE programs to be enjoined.”
Representatives with Mayor John Whitmire’s office, the city legal department and the Office of Business Opportunity did not immediately return requests for comment.
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“This ruling vindicates our color-blind Constitution and reaffirms that public contracts should be awarded based on merit, not race,” said Joshua Thompson, an attorney with the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which represented Landscape Consultants of Texas.
The couple also has a similar lawsuit pending against Harris County’s minority business program.
A surge of litigation following the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to neuter affirmative action in college admissions has prompted additional lawsuits threatening programs intended to address historic inequities in government contracting across the state.
Questions about contracting disparities
The federal court had given the city a deadline last year to adopt a disparity study with data supporting the need for the program.
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The city had not accepted such a study since 2006, having discarded a 2016 report as inadequate.
Council members, business owners and advocates also found fault with the 2023 study the council ultimately adopted last year.
That study found Hispanic and Asian American businesses faced no disadvantage in some types of contracts — though critics noted just 2% of the 30,000 firms asked to participate in the study responded.
The study recommended those firms be removed from the areas in which the study found them competitive and invited to seek work under an expanded, race-neutral program for small businesses, but the council did not implement that change.
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