By Dedrick Asante-Muhammad & Eric Morrissette
Photos: Facebook\Wikimedia Commons
As the Trump administration races to dismantle the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), we can’t help but remember the words of the president who helped launch it.
“To foster the economic status and pride of members of our minority groups, we must seek to involve them more fully in our private enterprise system,” he said. “To do this, we need to remove commercial obstacles that have too often stood in their way — obstacles such as the unavailability of credit, insurance, and technical assistance.”
These weren’t the words of a leftist or liberal. They were spoken by Republican President Richard Nixon.
But today, Republican President Trump is dismantling the agency, hollowing out the small staff that remained after earlier rounds of downsizing — just 23 career employees — to none. Now only two political appointees remain.
The MBDA was a rare glimmer of bipartisan progress during the civil rights era and remains the only federal agency devoted to expanding opportunity for entrepreneurs who’ve historically been locked out of capital markets. Its dismantling is both a moral failure and an economic crisis.
At its height, the MBDA oversaw a nationwide network of business centers, technical assistance hubs, and capital readiness programs serving tens of thousands of enterprises. The agency is responsible for supporting more than 12 million minority-owned businesses.
And “minority” here is broader than many realize — it includes not only businesses owned by people of color, but also by rural people, veterans, and women.
Through a network of more than 130 centers and partners, MBDA provided hands-on technical assistance to help businesses navigate growth and scale successfully. No free money. No direct loans. Just guidance to help these businesses help themselves.
By any measure, MBDA was delivering results. During Morrissette’s tenure leading the agency, MBDA helped businesses secure $3.2 billion in contracts and $1.6 billion in capital, creating and retaining more than 23,000 jobs.
MBDA’s clients range from a Black-owned cybersecurity startup in Atlanta to a Latina-led food manufacturer in Texas, a Native American construction cooperative in Oklahoma, a veteran-owned logistics firm in Ohio, and a white Appalachian entrepreneur rebuilding a small-town sawmill. MBDA recognizes that inclusive economic development requires tools that reach across racial lines, while still honoring the agency’s original civil rights mission.
The casualties of MBDA’s dismantling aren’t bureaucrats — they’re business owners, workers, and America’s competitiveness.
For African American entrepreneurs, MBDA has long been one of the few federal lifelines amid systemic exclusion from wealth creation. But the erosion of MBDA weakens America’s entire small-business ecosystem. In 2022, the most recent year of available data, Black-owned businesses added $212 billion in revenue to the U.S. economy and paid more than $61 billion in total wages.
Cutting MBDA is economic sabotage — and part of a broader dismantling of civil rights and economic scaffolding.
We must demand that Congress and the administration act swiftly to reopen the government and restore MBDA’s staffing, budget, and network of partners supporting businesses around the country. More broadly, they must restore independent nonpolitical programs and staff to support disadvantaged entrepreneurs in this country — free of political interference.
MBDA’s destruction would signal that the federal government no longer feels an obligation to correct the marketplace’s deepest inequities — the very inequities Richard Nixon sought to address when founding the agency.
Our economy is strongest when capital flows not just to those who’ve always had it, but to those ready to create something new. Letting MBDA die would betray that promise. Defending and expanding it would affirm that economic opportunity belongs to every American.Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Eric Morrissette
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is the President and CEO of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, America’s Black Think Tank. Eric Morrissette is a Senior Fellow at the Joint Center and a former Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for the Minority Business Development Agency. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
