
President Donald Trump signs executive orders at Capital One Arena in D.C. after the Inauguration Day parade on Jan. 20. The Washington Post
When the Government Accountability Office published its assessment of the composition of the federal workforce a few years ago, it revealed an interesting data point: As of 2021, people with disabilities were about three times better represented in government jobs than in civilian jobs.
This isn’t an accident, obviously. The government is deliberate about ensuring that physical constraints aren’t barriers for employees — deliberate as a matter of law, yes, but also as a matter of intent. The government has systems and processes that encourage people with disabilities to seek and obtain employment.
That GAO report also detailed other data about the federal workforce, indicating that the demographics of government employees hadn’t changed much over the preceding 10 years. In 2011, the start of the window considered in the report, about 72 percent of federal employees were White (including White Hispanic people). In 2021, the most recent year with data, 68 percent were. The percentage of Black (and Black Hispanic) workers stayed steady at about 20 percent of the workforce; the increase in diversity was mostly among other racial groups, particularly Asian Americans.
The result was a workforce that looked a bit different than the overall labor pool — a bit less White, a bit more Black — thanks in part to deliberate efforts to “advance equal opportunity” among all Americans. The Office of Personnel Management’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility was the leading such office in the federal government, the report noted, providing other agencies with “concrete strategies and best practices” to hire and retain a “diverse, results-oriented, high-performing workforce.”
OPM’s DEIA office is now gone, eliminated by one of the first executive orders President Donald Trump signed upon his return to the White House this week.
“Influential institutions of American society, including the Federal Government,” the document read, “ … have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.”
Those programs were dismantled by diktat, with government agencies not only suspending their efforts but also disparaging DEI programs as dangerous and promoting “shameful discrimination.” Federal employees have been encouraged to root out and report even suspected efforts to encourage diversity.
It was the triumphant culmination of decades of hostility toward programs aimed at counteracting the effects of discrimination, hostility that has surged in the Trump era despite increased awareness about how those effects linger.
Consider another aspect of that GAO report. It noted that, though about 2 in 10 entry-level employees were Black women, only 1 in 10 senior-level employees were. About 3 in 10 entry-level positions were held by White men — while White men held a little under half of senior-level positions. Black men made up a consistent portion of each level of employment; White women were decreasingly represented at each higher tier.
One way to look at these numbers is to assume that members of “historically disadvantaged racial groups” (as the report terms it) continue to see disadvantages once they’re in the federal workforce. Perhaps it is a function of explicit or implicit discrimination; perhaps it is a function of disadvantages in education and access that have themselves historically been a result of patterns of explicit or lingering discrimination.
Another way to look at these numbers is to think that maybe White men are somehow just better: more deserving, more capable. That they constitute a higher percentage of senior-level positions by virtue of merit — merit that has lingered around them over the course of their lives.
This latter position, rarely offered quite that explicitly, is a subtext to conversations about programs centered on promoting diversity. If all people are equal — if our society is to reach a color-blind ideal, as an administration fact sheet suggested — then programs of affirmative action that encourage the hiring of historically disadvantaged people are simply shifting those disadvantages onto non-historically disadvantaged people, particularly White people and men. Such affirmative action programs are themselves discriminatory.
This idea has been rumbling around for decades, but it began to gain mainstream traction about 10 years ago. A surge in immigration and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement helped create fertile soil for Trump’s first presidential campaign, during which he cast immigration and a diversifying population as threats to “traditional” America. A Post analysis from March 2016 found that a strong sense among White Americans that they were losing out because of preference for Black and Hispanic people. That feeling was a better predictor of support for Trump’s candidacy than economic struggles.
Trump’s 2020 reelection bid attempted to leverage a resurgent BLM movement and discussions of racial justice as a threat to the country. The rhetoric was more effective once he left office, though, as first critical race theory and then DEI became ways for the political right to push back against programs or systems they either believed or simply claimed were centered on disadvantaging or disparaging White people.
You can see how this overlaps with partisanship in public opinion polling. In September, Economist polling found that a plurality of Americans supported affirmative action efforts — but two-thirds of Republicans opposed them, 4 in 10 of them strongly.
Though the BLM movement’s emergence in 2014 increased the percentage of Americans who attributed lower incomes and poorer housing among Black Americans to discrimination, it had no such effect on Republicans. In fact, the uptick since 2014 in the percentage of White Americans who cite discrimination as a cause (according to the biennial General Social Survey) is almost only because of White Democrats.
CBS News polling from June 2023 found that most respondents think Black and Hispanic Americans face at least some discrimination. Fewer than half say the same of White Americans. Republicans, though, are more likely to say that White Americans face at least some discrimination than they are to say the same of non-White Americans. Republicans are also more likely to say men face at least some discrimination and less likely to say women do.
The idea that non-White Americans are unusually disadvantaged by discrimination finds fewer adherents on the right. So does the idea that this discrimination — be it explicit or embedded — causes Black people (and presumably other groups) to experience lower economic status. Republicans are more likely to attribute that to “lack of motivation” than to discrimination. The dominance of White men in senior-level government positions, then, is presumably just a reflection of aptitude. Just as Trump’s first-term judicial appointments — 84 percent White, 76 percent male — must simply be the meritocracy at work.
It’s important to recognize that DEI is the vehicle, not the end point. An executive order signed by Trump this week also revoked a Sept. 24, 1965, order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. It established the government’s affirmative action systems with an eye toward addressing historical disadvantages. Definitionally, it is not a “DEI” program of the sort that has been pilloried by the right but simply a long-standing policy that has aimed to combat barriers Americans might face when seeking employment with the U.S. government.
Such policies have been effective in reducing barriers for Americans with disabilities who require accessibility — the “A” in the OPM’s now-defunct DEIA office. The difference between affirmative hiring for people with disabilities and affirmative hiring for people who have been disadvantaged by systems of discrimination is simply that Republicans often don’t acknowledge the latter exists.
That upending affirmative action programs would entrench the advantages of White men is not a countervailing argument. It is very much the point.
Philip Bump is a Post columnist based in New York. He writes the newsletter How To Read This Chart and is the author of The Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America.
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