How Trump’s War on the Federal Government Will Stifle Black Progress

For generations, government jobs helped build the Black middle class. With Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE, those days may be over.

(Envato.com)

As Trump’s MAGA administration proceeds with the mass firing of thousands of government workers — a federal appeals court recently paved the way for Trump to fire roughly 25,000 probationary employees — what is missing from the discussion is that this war on the government is a war on Black progress. After all, government jobs built the Black middle class.

The federal government is the nation’s largest employer, with around three million workers. Black people are nearly 14% of the U.S. population, 13% of the nongovernmental workforce and nearly one-fifth of the federal workforce, but are in even higher numbers depending on the agency. For example, while Black people are 20% of the employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, they are 24% at the Department of Veterans Affairs, 26% of postal workers, and nearly 30% at the Department of Education. There is a backstory behind the high representation of Black federal workers, even as the federal government has not worked in the interests of Black people in so many other ways over the years.

“There’s always work at the post office” is an old saying in the Black community that figured prominently in Robert Townsend’s satirical 1987 film, Hollywood Shuffle. Townsend plays Bobby Taylor, a Black actor who dreams of becoming a movie star but faces demeaning, stereotypical roles as slaves, gangsters and pimps. Throughout the film, people remind Taylor, “There’s always work at the post office,” and it is far more than a throwaway line.

Growing up in the Black community, everybody had parents, relatives, friends or neighbors who worked for the government, whether in the post office or public transit, as teachers, sanitation workers and many other jobs. The federal government was the employer of last resort when corporations simply refused to hire us, particularly before the Civil Rights Movement.

MAGA longs for the days when the government freely discriminated against melanated people and centered straight white Christian men. Trump’s plan to eradicate DEI is a project to decimate all civil rights laws, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which protects workers from discrimination based on race, religion, sex and national origin under Title VII. A Trump executive order rescinded President Johnson’s 1965 order prohibiting federal contractors from engaging in racial discrimination in employment.

In that regard, Trump looks much like President Woodrow Wilson, who segregated the federal workforce, a move which excluded Black people from civil service jobs and undermined upward mobility for 50 years. Wilson also held a White House screening of D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, which reinvigorated the Ku Klux Klan and condemned the federal government for protecting Black people during Reconstruction.

“Since the Civil Rights Act, it’s been one of the most equitable employers,” Leslie Marant, CEO and managing consultant of The ESP Effect LLC, said of the federal government. “There are few places in this country where African Americans are overrepresented. The federal workforce is one of the few places.” A former chief counsel of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and the inaugural chief DEI officer at the Philadelphia Police Department, Marant was a federal employee for 23 years. “It’s where the Black middle class gets its stabilization,” Marant said of federal jobs. “It’s where we enter the middle class. It’s about generational wealth, sending children to college, so without naming race, you target the federal workforce, and you get to do it without naming race.”

Bill Fletcher Jr. — a writer, trade unionist and former president of TransAfrica Forum — said the current crisis is particularly relevant to Black America. “In the face of rabid racist discrimination, the public sector generally, and the federal sector in particular became a major center of Black American employment. Trump/Musk cuts have a disproportionate impact on the Black workforce and on Black communities,” Fletcher said. “And many communities that have grown up around major components of the federal sector, for example, military bases, the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, desperately depend on the ripple effect of federal employment, including subcontractors, economic growth in the vicinity. Federal workforce cuts will potentially have a devastating impact on Black communities given this relative dependence by the community on the federal sector as an anchor," he added.

Through Elon Musk’s DOGE — which promised to slash $2 trillion in spending to enable tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy — the Republican Party is fulfilling its longstanding desire to dismantle the administrative state and upend labor rights in the interests of capitalism, as Trump cuts federal jobs and seeks to strip federal unions of collective bargaining rights.

"Trump's attack on the federal workforce reflects a long-held view among Republicans to shrink the structure of government — except when it was/is of benefit to their districts — and to actively privatize. The attack on the federal workforce is aided to the extent to which MAGA can present the workforce as lazy, incompetent and Black, or, more broadly, of color,” said Fletcher. “The federal workforce has been essential for so many components of our life, for example, Social Security, FEMA, EPA, yet this entire sector has been disparaged and demonized for years by opportunist Republicans.”

“The GOP has been foaming at the mouth to cut government. They’re not strategic. They’re using a hammer when they need a scalpel. It’s ridiculous,” said Marant. “Nevertheless, even if their motive is to destabilize the Black community, they do it in a race-neutral way, and I know it impacts Black people disproportionately,” she added, calling the mass firing “a targeted reversal of racial progress” covered up under the name of reform. “When you gut the workforce, it is an anti-Black political tactic. This is structural disenfranchisement, I don’t think I’m looking for ghosts when I say that,” Marant noted.

Given their time-tested Southern Strategy, Republicans are experts at making their war on government a war on Black Americans. With the Southern Strategy, the GOP wooed racist Southern Democrats over to their party by channeling white resentment over Black civil rights gains and political empowerment. Republicans made hatred of government programs, welfare and taxes synonymous with Black people.

The evidence shows the targeting of Black federal employees is intentional, and it is no secret that “DEI” is the new n-word. For example, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), a Heritage Foundation-funded group, compiled a watchlist of 57 mostly Black civil service workers involved in health equity work.

And if Black people can no longer turn to the federal government for employment, neither can they rely on corporate America. “Black workers are not being elevated into higher paying jobs in the larger economy such that they can ignore the cuts in the federal sector,” noted Fletcher. According to a study from the University of California at Berkeley's Labor Center, Black people in the public sector earned about 25% more than their private sector colleagues.

Moreover, unlike corporate America, Black federal workers reach the executive ranks known as senior executive service or SES. “There are lots of Black people in SES positions. It’s like you or I going to corporate America and we make it to the level right before the C-suite, but we never make the C-suite,” Marant said. “But in the federal government, we’re in the C-suite in ways you do not see in finance, health care and insurance prior to Jan. 20.

“I don’t know many people of the Black middle class in corporate positions,” Marant added. “So when you cut those back, you collectively destabilize Black communities. Think about D.C. You cut back the federal workforce. It’s full of Black folks with high-level positions,” she said.

Meanwhile, as white federal workers are learning their whiteness and party affiliation may not protect them, Black workers are the hardest hit. “I don’t think the impact is unintentional. I think it’s a very slick way,” Marant said of the mass firings. “I think some of what they’ve done is brilliant, evil brilliant but brilliant.”