Five ways this can come out, and what we would recommend in each

The 2021 machinery did what it was built to do. The residual sits in Goods, where availability itself is thin (15.93 percent) and the problem is supply rather than access.

Strongest posture. A program that demonstrates its own success and then steps back is the one courts stop scrutinising.

• Sunset the race-conscious elements on a dated schedule and say so publicly, which is what makes the next challenge survivable.
• Keep the Small Business Reserve, which is race-neutral and carries no constitutional exposure.
• Retain the measurement apparatus. Parity that is not monitored reverts.
• Treat Goods as a supplier-development problem, not a utilization problem.

MWBE firms are winning City work as primes and not appearing beneath the large primes at all. Given that thirteen awards above $1 million carry 62 percent of value, this is where most of the money actually is.

Defensible and narrowly aimed. The remedy points at the specific layer the evidence indicts, which is exactly what narrow tailoring means.

• Attach participation goals at the subcontract level, where the gap is, rather than at the prime level, where it has closed.
• Unbundle large contracts into scopes a smaller firm can bond and staff.
• Prompt-payment enforcement with teeth. Slow payment is the most common reason a small sub will not bid a second time.
• Mandatory entity-level subcontractor reporting at bid and at closeout, so the gap stays visible.

The 2021 finding was partly an artefact of what could be counted. This is a live possibility, not a rhetorical one: the prior study had no subcontract layer at all, so any participation there was invisible by construction.

Requires care. A remedy premised on a number the City now knows was wrong is the easiest thing in the world for a challenger to take apart.

• Restate the baseline. A goal calibrated to a number that was never the real number will misfire in both directions.
• Recalibrate aspirational goals to measured availability at both levels.
• Say plainly, in the public report, that the earlier picture was incomplete and why. Credibility for the next twenty years depends on this paragraph.
• Make the constructed record the permanent baseline so this cannot recur.

Five years, three reforms, no movement. The strongest possible evidentiary record, and the one that demands the most disciplined remedy design.

Highest evidentiary support and highest exposure at once. Houston fell in 2026 with a new study in hand, because the remedy was drawn too broadly for the evidence.

• Race-neutral measures first and exhaustively, which Maryland's 2026 reauthorization now requires as a matter of state law rather than preference.
• Any race-conscious element must be category-specific, group-specific, sunset-dated, and severable. Programs fall as a block when they are drafted as a block.
• Document the failure of the race-neutral alternatives already tried. That record is what distinguishes a narrowly tailored remedy from an assumed one.
• Build the annual review the 2021 policy already requires and never received.

The 2021 study already showed this pattern: 96.58 percent of MWBE prime dollars went to one firm. An aggregate share can reach parity while the market beneath it stays closed, and a study that reports only the share will call that success.

Neutral on its face and hard to attack. Concentration is a market-structure fact, not a racial classification.

• Report dispersion alongside share. A Herfindahl-style concentration measure belongs on the standing scoreboard next to the percentage.
• Anti-concentration provisions: cap the share of goal credit any single firm can carry in a year.
• Target outreach at firms that have never bid rather than at firms already winning.
• Treat graduation as a success condition, not an attrition problem.