Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id874455879
The civil service is, and has long been, disproportionately Black. Almost 20 percent of federal workers are African American, compared to just 12 percent of private-sector workers and 13 percent of Americans overall.
id874455845
Even the racial wealth gap, with its roots in enslavement and centuries of discrimination, is narrowed by the civil service. A 2020 Center for American Progress study found that white households in the private sector hold up to 1 held by Black households, while in the public sector, that gap shrinks to about 1.
id874455793
they have also made a point to target Black employees directly. This is especially obvious in their highly publicized firings of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” workers, whose work specifically focused on expanding opportunities for Black advancement, and who are the sole civil servants dismissed explicitly for the nature of their work.
id874455637
exploiting a racist idea that dates back at least 60 years. Republicans’ ideological commitment to “small government” didn’t fully develop until the federal government had taken up programs that disproportionately aided Black and poor folks—school desegregation, civil and voting rights, and anti-poverty efforts. An increasingly reactionary right responded by racializing the idea of government itself. Conservative critics began to “implicitly identify [the federal government] as representing blackness and the interests thought most directly to advance black life,” as David Theo Goldberg writes, and because Black advancement is always treated as the unfair and undeserved yield of federal aid, government “increasingly came to be conceived as a set of institutions supporting the undeserving.”
id874455762
government was portrayed as one big scam, designed to drain money from tax-paying, hardworking—and therefore, presumptively white—Americans. The federal workforce, in its disproportionate Blackness, could then be cast as lazy, inefficient, and undeserving of its position.
id874455572
Ronald Reagan, a rabid anti-unionist, told an AFL-CIO audience in 1981, “You believe in the work ethic, but subsidize a government that does not.” Soon after, he assembled a DOGE-esque committee—comprising 200 private sector C-suiters, but not a single civil servant—tasked with finding “fraud, waste and abuse” in the federal workforce.
id874455545
the goal was less real reform than a chance to paint the government as corrupt, inefficient, and stuffed with undeserving (read: Black) workers. The point is, Reagan fired some 11,000 air traffic controllers, gutted unions, tripled the national debt, and left a shameful legacy of Black economic devastation and civil rights rollbacks.
id874455510
The goal of this project isn’t just to make cuts but to further entrench the idea that a workforce that’s too Black is inherently incompetent—and to poison the idea of a diverse public sector altogether. So much white resentment is being stirred up not just to shrink government but to privatize public services, crush unions, and restore a racial order where federal power is wielded against Black communities.