Editorial: Whatever you think of racial set-asides, eliminating them isn’t McMaster’s job BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF Dec 13, 2025 South Carolina’s minority set-aside law has all the earmarks of a measure that was passed to check a box — likely, as Gov. Henry McMaster speculated, a box required by the federal government in a different era, in order for the state to qualify for various pots of federal funding.
The law requires that state agencies make a plan to ensure that 10 percent of the money they spend on contracts with private businesses goes to a “minority business enterprise” — which state regulations define as a business owned by people “who have been subject to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias because of their identification as members of a certain group without regard to their individual qualities.”
The law doesn’t actually require agencies to award 10 percent of their contracts to such businesses — only to make a plan to do so. Agencies must report their progress to the state's minority affairs agency quarterly, but as the S.C. Daily Gazette reports, more than 40 percent of them didn’t bother turning in the required report last year; only a couple of the agencies that submitted a quarterly report last year met the 10 percent goal.
So even if you’re comfortable with the concept of racial or gender set-asides, it’s hard to argue that this program has accomplished much.
We’re ambivalent about the law. What we’re not ambivalent about is Mr. McMaster’s decision to unilaterally dismantle it. When he signed an executive order earlier this month ordering state agencies to ignore the law, he acknowledged that the Legislature needs to act to eliminate it. Yet he somehow imagines that because legislative leaders agree with him and because of his own analysis of the U.S. Constitution, he has the authority to effectively end the program.
Now, Mr. McMaster can certainly tell some agency directors that he will fire them if they don’t comply with his executive order; state law allows him to fire many agency directors simply because he doesn’t like how they dress. It’s called at-will employment. In agencies where he has the authority to hire and fire members of the governing boards, he can certainly replace board members with new ones who obey his order.
The governor also has the authority to fire state officials who refuse to provide him with information about set-aside programs that he demanded in an executive order.
But the governor has absolutely no legal or constitutional authority to enforce his order to stop obeying the set-aside law at the State Election Commission or the State Ethics Commission or the Ports Authority or Santee Cooper or SLED or the Department of Public Safety or USC or Clemson or any other college or the state Education Department or the Agriculture Department — or any other agency that the Legislature has established as independent.
Mr. McMaster cites a lot of legal reasoning for why the law could be unconstitutional, which is all very interesting and likely correct but legally speaking is nothing more than his opinion.
There are only two ways it’s legal for state agencies to ignore the law: if the Legislature — not a couple of legislative leaders, but the entire Legislature — repeals it, or if someone sues and a court strikes it down. Until one of those things happens, it’s just as valid as any other state law, and government officials are obliged to obey it.
Mr. McMaster, of all people, knows all this, yet for some reason he seems to have forgotten it. He needs to remember and stop trying to exercise power he does not have.
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