by Tyler Mitchell and Dedrick Asante-Muhammad<\/p>\n
Within weeks, the Trump administration has ousted dozens of career officials, undone decades of policy aimed at removing barriers for Black inclusion, and signaled a return to patronage rather than merit. The recent wave of federal firings and policy shifts under the Trump administration represents a dismantling of government policy and practice that has led the private sector in opportunities for African Americans. Much of the private sector still lags greatly behind the government \u2014 the largest employer in our economy \u2014 in including African Americans at all levels of their workforce. As leaders from different generations, we see this attack on the government workforce from two critical vantage points: its immediate threat to current federal workers and its chilling effect on the next generation of public servants.<\/p>\n
For decades, the\u00a0Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies\u2019<\/a>\u00a0research has shown that federal employment has been transformative for Black Americans. These positions offer significantly better benefits, anti-discrimination protections, and traditionally job security. Though wages in government positions are often less than in the private sector, the combination of job security and better benefits have proven to be a stronger path to wealth building than similar work in the private sector. As the Center for American Progress\u00a0reports<\/a>, Black workers in the private sector have only about 10 percent of the wealth of white workers, but Black workers in the public sector have almost half the wealth of white workers. The radical changes in government policy proposed by the new Department of Government Efficiency threaten the progress found in the public sector and threaten to erase the public sector as an opportunity for greater African American economic security.<\/p>\n Yet these numbers only scratch the surface of the personal impact these jobs have on real lives. As a college senior preparing to graduate this spring, I\u2019ve watched with growing alarm as my classmates reconsider their career paths. Many of us grew up watching our parents and grandparents build careers in federal service, whether it was in the U.S. Postal Service, where Black employees make up\u00a027 percent of the workforce<\/a>, or in other federal agencies. The U.S. government has historically led the way in providing workforce\u00a0 opportunities for Black Americans. The military and the government sector more broadly has often set standards for racial progress that the private sector took decades to approach. For example, President Truman in 1948 produced two executive orders that would shift employment practices nationwide for the following generations. Executive order 9980 and 9981 ordered the desegregation of the federal workforce and the armed forces. This tradition of merit-based advancement in federal service set a norm that the private sector would gradually integrate.. These jobs laid the basis for a Black middle class. The radical shake up of government employment and the adjoining attack on diversity, equity and inclusion threaten to turn back some of the gains of a growing Black Middle Class in the final decades of the 20th century.<\/p>\n