The News: In new findings provided to the Trump Administration’s Health and Human Services (HHS) agency, WILL has uncovered that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) uses a race-based criteria to declare whole communities and neighborhoods as “socially vulnerable” based on the number of minorities living there. Cities and states around the country rely on the CDC’s “social vulnerability index” (SVI) to allocate taxpayer funding for parks, drinking water, and disaster assistance.
The Quotes: WILL Vice President and Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, stated, “This is pure racial stereotyping. CDC declares blacks and Hispanics ‘vulnerable,’ and then woke policymakers in large cities and states rely on the CDC to allocate taxpayer money to some neighborhoods and not others. The Trump Administration should act quickly to eliminate race from this ‘index,’ end this DEI redlining, and protect the equal rights of all Americans.”
Where This Happens: There are examples of relying on the CDC’s SVI across the country:
- The Milwaukee County Parks Department uses the SVI to decide which parks get repairs and improvements, or which pools should close.
- The State of Arizona employs SVI to decide where health-related grants should be awarded.
- The State of California uses the SVI to determine which communities should receive disaster assistance grants.
- The State of Connecticut even ranks drinking water projects based on the SVI.
Additional Background: The CDC created the SVI as a tool to measure geographic “vulnerability” by calculating negative factors such as unemployment, poverty, inadequate housing, or poor educational outcomes. Currently, the SVI uses sixteen U.S. census variables “to identify communities needing support.”
Unfortunately, the SVI relies heavily on race: one of the four main categories in the SVI is “racial & ethnic minority status.” This turns an otherwise helpful measurement into a racialized DEI tool, steering benefits and programs to non-white neighborhoods based on the crude racial stereotype that all non-white people are “vulnerable.”
Cities, counties, and states are all recipients of federal financial assistance. Therefore, they are governed by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race discrimination. Employing a race-based tool that prioritizes some racial groups over others in the distribution of government benefits, like the SVI, would violate Title VI’s nondiscrimination principles.
Read more:
- Letter to HHS, December 2025
