In Trump's federal workforce cuts, black women are among the hardest hit

Washington -- When President Donald Trump started dismantling federal agencies and dismissing rank-and-file civil servants, Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, immediately started to make a calculation.

She was the first Black person and the first woman to hold the prestigious post of commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. As a political appointee, she knew there was a risk of becoming a target.

But her 35-year career at the department spanned a half dozen administrations, including Trump's first term, and she had earned the respect of officials from both parties. Surely, she thought, the office tasked with tracking the achievement of the nation's students could not fall under the president's definition of "divisive and harmful" or "woke."

But for the first time in her career, Carr's data points didn't add up.

On a February afternoon, a security guard showed up at her office just as she was preparing to hold a staff meeting. Fifteen minutes later, the staff watched in tears and disbelief as she was escorted out of the building.

"It was like being prosecuted in front of my family -- my work family," Carr said in an interview. "It was like I was being taken out like the trash, the only difference is I was being taken out the front door rather than the back door."

While tens of thousands of employees have lost their jobs in Trump's slash-and-burn approach to shrinking the federal workforce, experts say the cuts disproportionately affect Black employees -- and Black women in particular. Black women make up 12% of the federal workforce, nearly double their share of the labor force overall.

For generations, the federal government has served as a ladder to the middle class for Black Americans who were shut out of jobs because of discrimination. The federal government has historically offered the population more job stability, pay equity and career advancement than the private sector. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government aggressively enforced affirmative action in hiring and antidiscrimination rules that Trump has sought to roll back.

The White House has defended Trump's overhaul of the federal government as an effort to rightsize the workforce and to restore a merit-based approach to advancement. In July, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could continue with mass firings across the federal government.

In a statement, Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, said that Trump was "ushering in an economy that will empower all Americans, just as it did during his first term." He added that "the obsession with divisive DEI initiatives reverses years of strides toward genuine equality."

"The policies of the past that artificially bloated the public sector with wasteful jobs are over," he said. "The Trump administration is committed to advancing policies that improve the lives of all Americans."

But economists say that Black women are being hit especially hard by Trump's policies, which are also rippling through the private sector as corporations have abandoned their diversity, equity and inclusion practices and related jobs, many of which were held by Black women.

The most recent labor statistics show that nationwide, Black women lost 319,000 jobs in the public and private sectors between February and July of this year, the only major female demographic to experience significant job losses during the five-month period, according to an analysis by Katica Roy, a gender economist.

Experts attribute those job losses, in large part, to Trump's cuts to federal agencies where Black women are highly concentrated.

White women saw a job increase of 142,000, and Hispanic women of 176,000, over the same time period. White men saw the largest increase among groups, 365,000, over the same time period.

Roy said that with the exception of the pandemic, Black women have never seen such staggering losses in employment. And over the past decade, the experiences of that population have consistently signaled what is to come for others.

"Black women are the canaries in the coal mine, the exclusion happens to them first," Roy said. "And if any other cohort thinks it's not coming for them, they're wrong. This is a warning, and it's a stark one."

'Wiped Out in One Day'

During the first two weeks of Trump's second term, the Education Department began its first wave of firings. It was a preview of what would unfold across the government in the following months.

The department, more than a quarter of whose workforce was Black women, suspended dozens of people whose job titles and official duties had no connection to DEI. Their only apparent exposure to DEI initiatives came in the form of trainings encouraged by their managers -- including Trump's former education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

Denise Joseph, who worked in the Office of Postsecondary Education, was in the first group of people notified Jan. 29 that they had been placed on administrative leave. She was devastated. "I know my worth is more than DEI," she said. "I know I'm more than what they're saying."

Joseph had spent a decade at the Education Department, helping to support grantmaking for minority-serving institutions. She worked her way up to a six-figure pay grade and was often the only Black person in leadership meetings.

"My career is an extension of who I am," she said. "And it was all wiped out in one day."

Kissy Chapman-Thaw, who also worked in the Office of Postsecondary Education, believes she too was caught in the dragnet of employees placed on leave for participating in the department's "diversity change agent" class years ago.

She has no regrets. She found the class valuable in understanding her colleagues, and the concepts that Trump has determined were insulting to white people.

"I saw white privilege from my side," she said. "But I never understood it from their side."

Chapman-Thaw, who has multiple sclerosis, joined the department after her 12-year teaching career became untenable because of her health.

During her time at the department, she struggled with mounting medical bills. She struggled to braid her daughter's hair. But she never struggled to do her job. The fact that the department came to the conclusion that she could not, perhaps because of her race or her disability, has left her bewildered some days.

"The assumption, that's what hurts," she said. "I have so many things I can check off, it's hard for me to know which one they can use against me."

The Education Department denied that its cuts targeted any particular group.

"The department's staffing decisions, including its organizational restructuring, were made without regard to employees' race, gender or political affiliation," Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications, said in a statement. "Suggestions otherwise are unfounded and only serve to sow division."

The 'Model Employer'

As Trump has tried to eliminate what he sees as a bloated bureaucracy full of deep-state dissidents and "DEI hires," the Office of Personnel Management has taken steps to erase publicly available demographic data for the federal workforce.

In a May memo titled "Merit Hiring Plan," the head of OPM told agencies to "cease disseminating information regarding the composition of the agency's workforce based on race, sex, color, religion or national origin." The office, which is the government's human resources arm, said it would still collect the data for litigation and other statutorily required reports.

The data, advocates say, has been invaluable to providing insight into whether the workforce reflects the country, as well as granular data like pay and promotion disparities for different groups. Without that information, they said, the full impact of Trump's workforce cuts won't be known for years.

But a report published by the National Women's Law Center, which compiled and analyzed the now-deleted OPM data, showed that government agencies that were targeted for the deepest cuts had employed the highest percentages of women and people of color. Both populations also made up large portions of independent agencies, like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that Trump has targeted, the report found.

According to a New York Times tracker of Trump's cuts, agencies where minorities and women were the majority of the workforce, such as the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development, were targeted for the largest workforce reductions or complete elimination. Black women made up nearly a quarter of the workforce in agencies such as the IRS that also saw deep reductions, according to a Times analysis.

In his second term, Trump has been aggressive in removing high-profile leaders of color, in particular, often disparaging them as incompetent, corrupt or DEI hires.

Among the Black female leaders the Trump administration has targeted are Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve; Carla Hayden, the first Black and female librarian of Congress; and Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve as a member of the National Labor Relations Board.

"This will be a model for what happens across this nation," said Sheria Smith, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents Education Department employees. "If the model employer, the federal government, is unilaterally terminating high-performing Black employees, what hope is there?"

A complaint filed with the Merit Systems Protection Board against Trump was more pointed. The American Civil Liberties Union and a group of employment attorneys alleged that among other things, the dismissals "disproportionately singled out federal workers who were not male or white," in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Kelly Dermody, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said that of the workers who sought legal help to challenge their dismissals, 80% were people of color, and the majority were Black women.

"When an organization goes after really, really highly competent, singularly great, Black women -- the message it sends, the terror it sends to every other professional woman, person of color, really is so profound," she said.

She came to a clear conclusion:

"This is an attack on Black women -- fully," she said.

Shock, Followed by Forced Retirement

On a rainy day in April, Carr was still coming to terms with her forced retirement.

She recalled there was one person who preserved her dignity on the day she was placed on administrative leave. The security guard, a young Black man, was "polite" as he escorted her out, she said. He referred to her as "Dr. Carr," in a show of respect.

During an interview at her home in Maryland, she pointed out the things that remind her of perseverance. A photo of her ancestors, who dressed up for a photo outside their slave house. Intricate art pieces by her sister, who helped integrate her town's school in North Carolina. A prominent photo of her late mother, who protested at lunch counters during the Civil Rights Movement.

"Gaining equality has always driven our family," she said.

Carr said she makes no apologies for bringing an equity lens to her work. It helped identify growth among the lowest-performing students, and pinpoint persistent gaps in the "Nation's Report Card," considered the "gold standard" of education data. When she delivered the often sobering news about the country's academic performance to each secretary, they all shared the same concerns.

"What we do is about mission," Carr said, "it is not about party."

The department declined to comment specifically on why Carr had been relieved of her duties. She was given no reason other than that she served at the pleasure of the president, and it was Trump's prerogative to terminate her.

In a statement, the department said that it had conducted a review of contracts and grants in the office, and determined that contractors were being overpaid. Officials said they had reduced the cost of the National Assessment of Educational Progress by more than 25%, which it said would save nearly $185 million over five years.

Less than two weeks after she was dismissed, she saw that the department had fired nearly all of her staff at the National Center for Education Statistics. She's now less concerned about how she lost her job, and more about the nation losing track of how students are faring.

Carr never dwelled much on being the first Black female commissioner. But she has accepted that she will now add another first to her resume. Carr is the first commissioner in the history of the office to be pushed out by a president.