\n<\/p>\n
In February 2020, President Donald Trump\u2019s first education secretary issued a memo to employees emphasizing the department\u2019s policy \u201cto ensure that diversity, inclusiveness, and respect are integral parts of our day-to-day management and work.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDiversity and inclusion are the cornerstone of high organizational performance,\u201d Betsy DeVos continued, adding that all people were welcome in the Department of Education. The memo ended with a call for employees to \u201cactively embrace\u201d principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.<\/p>\n
As part of that push, Quay Crowner was among the top education officials who enrolled in the \u201cdiversity change agent program.\u201d Crowner thought little of it at the time. She had over two decades filled director-level human resources roles at several federal agencies, including the IRS and Government Accountability Office, and she\u2019d participated in seminars on leadership and workplace discrimination. But five years later, as Trump entered office a second time, his administration\u2019s tune on DEI had changed. Crowner was abruptly placed on leave under Trump\u2019s executive order to dismantle DEI<\/a> programs across the federal government.<\/p>\n As a longtime manager familiar with federal hiring and firing policies, Crowner, 55, believed she knew what it looked like to be unfairly targeted. Her current job as the director of outreach, impact and engagement at the Education Department was not connected to diversity initiatives. She said the only part of her responsibilities that could have been considered DEI was that her team guided students who\u2019d had trouble navigating financial assistance applications; while most people who seek federal student aid are from disadvantaged backgrounds, her office was a resource for any and all and had no diversity mandate. She was not involved with hiring and retention efforts.<\/p>\n More troubling, she said, was that she was the only person on her team who had been let go, and her bosses refused to answer her questions about her dismissal. When she and colleagues from different departments began comparing notes, they found they had one thing in common. They had all attended the training encouraged under DeVos. They also noticed something else: Most of them were Black women.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are still just in utter shock that the public service we took an oath to complete \u2026 has fallen apart,\u201d said Crowner, whose bills related to an injury and health issues are likely to mount as she loses her federal health care coverage.<\/p>\n \u201cWe never imagined that this would be something that would happen to us.\u201d<\/p>\n Her experience is part of a largely untold story unfolding as Trump dismantles civil rights and inclusion programs across government: Many of those being forced out, like Crowner, are Black women who spent decades building a career of government service, only to see those careers shattered in a sudden purge.<\/p>\n ProPublica interviewed Crowner and two other career civil servants, all Black women, who are among the hundreds of fired federal employees represented in a legal action brought<\/a> against the Trump administration. Filed in March with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board by legal teams including the Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, the case contends the administration violated the First Amendment rights of employees by targeting them for holding views perceived as contrary to the Trump 2.0 doctrine.<\/p>\n What has received less attention is the suit\u2019s claim that the administration also violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They claim the DEI purge disproportionately affected those who aren\u2019t white men.<\/p>\n Hard numbers documenting the demographics of those forced out by Trump are hard to attain. The Trump administration has provided little information on those being fired, and a revolving door of firings and reinstatements in some departments makes capturing formal figures even more challenging.<\/p>\n But a broad assessment of Trump\u2019s firings by ProPublica and other media shows the agencies with the most diverse staffs are often the hardest hit. Before the firings, the Education Department\u2019s staff was majority nonwhite, with Black women making up about 28% of workers, the most recent federal data shows. According to a New York Times tracker of the firings, that department has seen a reduction of about 46% of its staff. The staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development was majority women and nearly 40% racial and ethnic minorities<\/a> before Trump all but eliminated it.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice, where white personnel make up two-thirds of the workforce, most of it men, staff has been cut just 1%, according to the most recently available federal data<\/a> and the Times tracker<\/a>. The Department of Energy, more than 70% white, saw a reduction of about 13%.<\/p>\n Lawyers representing federal employees whose careers and families have been uprooted cite anecdotal evidence of disparate impact, a key ingredient in many successful civil rights claims.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have observed approximately 90% of the workers targeted for terminations due to a perceived association with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are women or nonbinary,\u201d said Kelly Dermody, one of the plaintiffs\u2019 attorneys, who have asked an administrative law judge to approve class-action status for the fired employees.<\/p>\n Nearly 80% of potential case plaintiffs are nonwhite, she said; most of that cohort are Black women.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Since reentering office, Trump has made clear his feelings about diversity programs, referring to them in an executive order as \u201cRadical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.\u201d<\/p>\n Ronicsa Chambers graduated from Florida A&M University, a historically black college, in 1990. Afterward, she got an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and landed a finance job with U.S. Airways, where she fell in love with aviation.<\/p>\n In 2005, she left the private sector to work in finance for the Federal Aviation Administration. She worked her way up the chain and, by 2019, helped create a program to address a lack of diversity in the agency by gaining the interest of graduates from historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.<\/p>\n In 2022, Chambers was named Air Traffic Manager of the Year. \u201cI didn\u2019t even know that non-air traffic controllers could get that award, and I was so proud,\u201d she said. As titles in government do, hers changed in December 2024 as her team\u2019s mission expanded to help FAA employees with issues such as providing accommodations so people with disabilities could do their jobs.<\/p>\n Then this January, she felt as though she\u2019d been hit \u201cin the face with a brick.\u201d She was told on a video conference call that her FAA career was over. Though her work had involved DEI in the past, it was no longer in her title or her job description, and she said no one had asked her what her job entailed before she was removed.<\/p>\n She said she began moving through stages of grief but keeps coming back to anger because her team members \u2014 five Black women and one white man with a disability \u2014 were told they would be reassigned. She says they never were.<\/p>\n \u201cAs far as we know, we\u2019re the only ones still on administrative leave,\u201d she said, referring to those removed as part of Trump\u2019s DEI executive order.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear if the FAA, whose workforce was largely spared due to recent airline safety concerns, has fired or even fired and rehired people in departments outside of Chambers\u2019 team. A spokesperson for the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n The FAA has long been criticized for its lack of diversity<\/a>. According to the most recent federal data, the agency was composed of 57% white men compared with 4.4% Black women.<\/p>\n Scott Michelman, an ACLU of DC attorney working on the complaint against the Trump administration, said Chambers\u2019 case underscores how mass firings aimed at people who had even a peripheral connection to a DEI program, past or present, \u201charms the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt takes dedicated, experienced, award-winning civil servants out of their job, their expertise, the place where we as the public want them and need them so that our government works for us,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is a lose-lose.\u201d<\/p>\n Key to their case is the argument that minority workers were disparately impacted, a long-held civil rights theory at which Trump has taken direct aim. In April, Trump issued an executive order<\/a> to broadly eliminate that doctrine from civil rights enforcement, one of many steps he\u2019s taken to reverse the traditional role of the federal government in protecting individuals from issues such as housing and employment discrimination.<\/p>\n For instance, the Trump administration gutted the Department of Education\u2019s Office for Civil Rights, which was tasked with ensuring equal treatment for students regardless of gender and race, and instead focused that office at targeting transgender athletes and their schools<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lawyers and former employees say focusing on people who may have had some DEI training or job duties would cause greater harm to nonwhite employees. And historically, the federal government has been a prominent force in upward mobility.<\/p>\n \u201cFor a segment of Black America, the federal government has been crucial to stepping up,\u201d said Marcus Casey, an economist and associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. The opening of federal work following the Civil Rights Movement provided an alternative to manual labor, teaching or ministerial work in the form of white-collar jobs and skills training that many took into private sector jobs.<\/p>\n Today, Black people make up about 18.6% of the federal workforce, larger than their percentage in the overall U.S. workforce, 12.8%, according to the Pew Research Center<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, you think about HBCU graduates, like Howard University, a lot of these people tell us the same story: \u2018This is where I started. This is where I got my first internship,\u2019\u201d Casey said.<\/p>\n Sherrell Pyatt\u2019s family story is quintessentially American.<\/p>\n Her great-grandfather served in the Vietnam War and, on his return, took a job in the U.S. Postal Service, a key employer in the story of upward mobility for middle-class Black families. His granddaughter, Pyatt\u2019s mother, also found a career at the Postal Service. So, even though she would attain more education than the previous three generations, it seemed fitting that eventually Pyatt would find herself at the Postal Service.<\/p>\n Pyatt grew up in the Bronx, New York City\u2019s poorest borough, but tested well enough to attend a private school. She became the first of her family to get a degree, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she worked to pay tuition. She got a master\u2019s degree and worked at a nonprofit before landing a job in 2014 with the Postal Service, shaping policy as a government relations specialist.<\/p>\n While at USPS, she coordinated with Customs and Border Protection to stop drug shipments through the mail. That experience, as well as her fluency in Spanish, led her to a similar role at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While there, she was involved in immigrant removal operations as part of Trump\u2019s first-term \u201czero tolerance\u201d clampdown<\/a> on border crossings. She next transferred to CBP, where she helped investigate deaths of migrants<\/a> in federal custody and rampant racism in a Facebook group<\/a> of Border Patrol agents.<\/p>\n During the COVID-19 pandemic, both of her parents fell ill, and she moved to an Atlanta suburb to care for them. To make the move work, she transitioned to a job at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where she worked as a supply chain analyst, ensuring that equipment such as medical masks made their way to U.S. hospitals. In early 2024, she moved yet again, to the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which investigates allegations of rights abuses lodged by both immigrants and U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n \u201cMy team was almost exclusively African Americans, and I think it\u2019s just because of the experience of Black people in this country,\u201d Pyatt said. \u201cWe seem to be more likely to go into those types of roles \u2014 one, because we have experience, and two, because of the passion to make a difference.\u201d<\/p>\n In March, the Trump administration fired nearly all 150 employees in that office, including Pyatt. A DHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about her firing.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it was an easy target to get rid of people of color and people who fight for people of color,\u201d Pyatt said. \u201cIt\u2019s absolutely a way to attack people of color, people who are differently abled, people who don\u2019t agree with what this administration is.\u201d<\/p>\n Pyatt\u2019s sudden loss of a career wrought instant consequences for her family. She was the primary breadwinner, but now her husband, who works for the Postal Service, provides the only income. They worry they won\u2019t be able to make the mortgage payments on their home for the long run. Their three daughters, all middle school age, may no longer be able to attend their private Christian school or play softball.<\/p>\n Career federal employees like Pyatt are supposed to be able to petition for a transfer or receive preference in hiring at other agencies. Despite having worked for the federal government for more than a decade, at five agencies, including four Homeland Security posts, Pyatt says she\u2019s faced nothing but silence.<\/p>\n \u201cSo it\u2019s little things like that that this administration is doing that makes it really feel like they\u2019re targeting people like me, people who love the country, come from a family that has served the country for generations, did what we were supposed to do,\u201d Pyatt said through tears. \u201cAnd it just doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In February 2020, President Donald Trump\u2019s first education secretary issued a memo to employees emphasizing the department\u2019s policy \u201cto ensure that diversity, inclusiveness, and respect are integral parts of our day-to-day management and work.\u201d \u201cDiversity and inclusion are the cornerstone of high organizational performance,\u201d Betsy DeVos continued, adding that all people were welcome in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":274400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101210,101212,101213,101214,101215,101211,101216],"tags":[393,20189,11526,281,11558,11011,40827,55451,3307,11678,313],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-274399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-salon","category-dei","category-department-of-government-efficiency","category-doge","category-donald-trump","category-news-amp-politics","category-propublica","tag-black","tag-dei","tag-dismissed","tag-easy","tag-federal","tag-jobs","tag-purge","tag-stable","tag-target","tag-trumps","tag-women"],"yoast_head":"\nDisparate impact?<\/h2>\n
Upward mobility<\/h2>\n