Trump Transit Secretary Rescinds Key Civil Rights Law Once Used on BART

Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any program or activity that receives federal funding. The law also requires that policy decisions don’t disproportionately impact people who are protected by the nation’s civil rights laws, regardless of whether the policy explicitly intends that harm.

Civil rights advocates have successfully used Title VI to file civil rights complaints in the Bay Area, including against BART, when the agency built an extension in neighborhoods where a majority of residents were people of color.

Another complaint, brought by Native American tribes and environmental advocates, accused the State Water Resources Board of mismanaging water quality along the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Estuary. The law has also had a preventative effect, making disparate impact analyses part of policy planning at agencies like AC Transit.

“ This a major rollback of civil rights protections,” said Laurel Paget-Seekins, senior policy advocate at Public Advocates, a San Francisco-based nonprofit law firm.

The rule change means the DOT will no longer require transit agencies to weigh equity when considering changes to policies regarding fares, service frequency and location, or language access, along with the impacts of highway construction and other projects, as long as the action is not explicitly discriminatory.

California has its own Title VI protections that prohibit recipients of state funds from discriminating against protected groups, which remain in place. But Paget-Seekins said that unlike the federal Title VI protections, the state doesn’t require agencies that receive funding to collect data and do preventative analyses. “Whether Bay Area transit agencies will continue to do this analysis voluntarily — and whether California will require them to — is now an important question that deserves public scrutiny,” Paget-Seekins said.

Public Advocates used Title VI to successfully file a civil rights complaint against BART in 2009, after the agency failed to complete an analysis of how its planned Oakland Airport Connector would impact nearby communities. In response, the Federal Transit Administration withdrew $70 million in funds for the project, which was dispersed to other regional transit agencies and projects, and compelled BART to complete a service equity analysis for the project.

U.S. Rep. Lateefah Simon has called on the DOT to maintain disparate impact protections in transportation projects since March. Simon, a former BART Board Director, is legally blind.

“As a transit-dependent person, I know how important it is for agencies receiving federal funds to consider disparate impact on the communities they serve,” Simon said in a March press release. “Here, the Trump administration has failed on two fronts — rolling back civil rights protections and preventing the public from providing feedback or sharing concerns. It’s disgraceful.”

The Trump administration issued an executive order in April 2025 announcing its intention to eliminate disparate impact protections across the government.

In December, the U.S. Department of Justice rescinded disparate impact protections in its regulations using a similar rule change mechanism and language. This week, the DOJ issued an opinion stating that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidelines on disparate impact protections were unconstitutional.