Doctrine of reverse incorporation

Under the doctrine of "reverse incorporation," the principles of equal protection bind the federal government even though the Equal Protection Clause by its terms is addressed only to states. This doctrine is generally identified with the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Bolling v. Sharpe. But since Bolling, the Supreme Court has never held any federal action to violate the equal protection rights of any racial minority group. Lower courts have entertained hundreds of racial discrimination claims under Bolling but almost never grant relief. This is not to say that reverse incorporation plaintiffs are never successful: courts have periodically found unconstitutional federal discrimination on non-racial grounds such as sex and alienage, and reverse incorporation has also limited the scope of federal affirmative action. But in the presumed core area of preventing federal discrimination against members of racial minority groups, Bolling has virtually no successors. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=464847.

Incorporation, in United States law, is the doctrine by which portions of the Bill of Rights have been made applicable to the states. When the Bill of Rights was ratified, the courts held that its protections extended only to the actions of the federal government and that the Bill of Rights did not place limitations on the authority of the state and local governments. However, the post-Civil War era, beginning in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment, which declared the abolition of slavery, gave rise to the incorporation of other Amendments, applying more rights to the states and people over time. Gradually, various portions of the Bill of Rights have been held to be applicable to the state and local governments by incorporation through the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870.Prior to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and the development of the incorporation doctrine, the Supreme Court in 1833 held in Barron v. Baltimore that the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal, but not any state governments. Even years after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court in United States v. Cruikshank (1876) still held that the First and Second Amendment did not apply to state governments. However, beginning in the 1920s, a series of United States Supreme Court decisions interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to "incorporate" most portions of the Bill of Rights, making these portions, for the first time, enforceable against the state governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_Rights.

A similar legal doctrine to incorporation is that of reverse incorporation. Whereas incorporation applies the Bill of Rights to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, in reverse incorporation, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been held to apply to the federal government through the Due Process Clause located in the Fifth Amendment.

For example, in Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497 (1954), which was a companion case to Brown v. Board of Education, the schools of the District of Columbia were desegregated even though Washington is a federal enclave. Likewise, in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña 515 U.S. 200 (1995), an affirmative action program by the federal government was subjected to strict scrutiny based on equal protection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_Rights#Reverse_incorporation.