The administration has revoked funding for bike paths, and encouraged removing some. A cycling advocate said it is playing on the idea of “that dork on a bike.”
Page A10From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 31 August 2026
DOJ civil rights chief feuds with Harvard and colleagues; administration says yes, D.E.I. bike paths are real.
As it ran on the front
The Civil Rights Division is not in disarray. It is in a season of vigorous internal dialogue, which is different, and if that dialogue happens to include the division's own leader sparring with Harvard, with colleagues, and with what the reporting calls 'the left,' that's not dysfunction, that's rigor. A civil rights office that agrees with everyone all the time isn't doing civil rights, it's doing stenography.
And to the question of whether D.E.I. bike paths exist — yes. The administration has answered this directly. They exist. This is not a deflection from anything happening inside the division; it is a separate, unrelated, fully substantive determination about bicycle infrastructure that this administration takes seriously, because infrastructure is serious, and bike paths are infrastructure, and some of that infrastructure was, according to the finding, built with diversity, equity and inclusion in mind, which — I want to be careful here — is not the same as saying the division spent its week on this instead of, say, its actual docket. I don't know what the division's actual docket looked like this week. I'm told it looked full.…
…(cont) The point stands regardless: an office can investigate whether a bike lane counts as D.E.I. infrastructure and also run a functioning civil rights division, at the same time, with the same staff, in the same week, and neither effort takes anything away from the other. If it seems like one of those things got more of a press release than the other, that's a communications choice, not a priorities one. I'd push back hard on anyone reading a communications choice as a priorities one. That's — actually, that is usually a fair thing to read into a communications choice. Never mind.
What I'll say plainly is this: the division spars because it's supposed to spar. That's civil rights enforcement working as designed, an office that argues with Harvard on Monday and settles, definitively, the bike path question on Tuesday. If you think an office should be doing one of those things instead of the other, that's a fair opinion. It's just not the administration's opinion, and as of this week, it's on the record which one got the press conference.
“One office fighting with everybody in the building, one press release settling the great bike lane question of our time — and only one of those got a press conference. Follow the podium time, not the docket, and you'll know exactly what this administration counts as a civil rights priority.”
“The division isn't in disarray, it's in a season of vigorous internal dialogue — sparring with Harvard is rigor, not dysfunction. And yes, D.E.I. bike paths exist, a fully separate finding that took nothing away from the docket. I don't know what the docket looked like this week. I'm told it looked full.”
The receipts
Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights unit, has extracted flashy agreements and personnel moves from big universities and sought to force states to turn over confidential voter data.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.