They Called Her Job Waste

DOGE closed itself down on July 4 after shrinking the federal workforce by more than 272,000 jobs. Black women were 12 percent of that workforce and a third of 2025’s cuts.

On the Fourth of July, the country’s 250th birthday, a government website was predictably dark. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had hit its self-imposed termination date, eighteen months after the foundation had been laid by the man who would become president and gifted the enterprise to Elon Musk, completing its work as a “gift to America.” The Office of Management and Budget, through Russell Vought, estimates that roughly $215 billion in savings had been realized by the off-ramp, though no final audit is anticipated to confirm the accuracy of the figure since the office itself is being shut down, leaving the number permanently unverified. The layoffs, meanwhile, are entirely verifiable. With more than 272,000 civil servant jobs eliminated in the latest phase of freeze, deferment, or reduction-in-force, since assuming office, the president had cut the federal workforce by more than a tenth.

Atlanta ministers in 1963 witnessed something similar in their congregations, describing their experiences before the FBI in an account later uncovered by researcher and historian Nancy MacLean. Black women with college degrees cleaned houses; Black men with the same were employed as postmen; the federal government hired based on credentials, and Black families invested in those credentials for three decades, securing a legacy of federal jobs through the civil service exams and postal union locals and Title VII. Black women accounted for about twelve percent of federal employees at the time, compared to their approximate six percent of the labor force, according to AFSCME, and more than a quarter of the staff at the Department of Education. The pension, the GS schedule, and the health insurance plan for a mother and her children, funding all of which came from the federal budget, were the results of a jobs war fought and won by the civil rights demonstrators, a chapter of the larger movement not captured on film by the lunch-counter sit-ins.

The victories bore fruit in the ground, and the cuts ran through it. Gender economist Katica Roy analyzed the 2025 figures for the president’s 2025 federal spending plan, released this month, and found that nearly a third of the jobs scheduled to be eliminated this year from the nearly 300,000 projected to be lost nationwide would be held by Black women. Twelve percent of the workforce, thirty-three percent of the cut. The agencies targeted for personnel reductions in the Department of Energy, the Education Department, the Health and Human Services Department, HUD, USAID, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were all disproportionately employing Black women as of last year.

One of these jobs was not even in a federal building. A compliance officer for a climate change think tank posted an open letter to the president this week, after her position at the firm was eliminated along with several others during the shutdown of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the $27 billion climate fund authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act. Her job had been to ensure that the appropriated funds were, in fact, being distributed to the appropriate disbursement agents, many of which were Native tribes, in accordance with the law. The program, she explained in the letter, had been canceled as part of the changes to the federal budget, and the grant, accordingly, had been rescinded. The compliance officers, she noted, were only a small part of the program’s operations, but their layoff was nevertheless counted in the federal employment numbers. When a government program is ended by Congress, the funding is terminated, the contracts canceled, and the jobs eliminated, not by the federal government but by the private contractors who hold the contracts, one office at a time.

The layoffs, in turn, were not confined to the private sector or to the government. The same administration that had eliminated the climate fund and the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, among dozens of other initiatives, had issued executive orders banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from the federal payroll and the federal contracting process, which effectively accomplished the same objectives for the private sector, without needing the imprimatur of the Rector of the Realm. Roy was able to track the figures for all federal employees, finding that Black women had lost roughly 319,000 jobs between February and July while their white counterparts gained 142,000, Latinas gained 176,000, and white men gained 365,000. The Black women were the sole minority group to have lost jobs since the beginning of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which had just released its latest monthly employment figures last week. The unemployment rate for Black women, which had begun the year at five and a half percent, was approaching eight percent at the year’s end, the highest rate among female workers.

Roy’s other figure, meanwhile, is incalculable. It is the number of Black families with children under the age of eighteen in which the primary wage-earner was a Black woman; such families accounted for an estimated fifty-two percent of Black households with children, meaning that every eliminated job cut into the family’s income, its rent or mortgage payment, its food budget, its college savings, its health care coverage, for as long as the separation lasted. The effects of the layoff would extend far beyond the severed paycheck, cascading down the length of the family’s financial commitments like a stone dropped in a pond. The same could be said for the families of the laid-off workers, whose incomes were also diminished, although not necessarily as drastically as the families of the federal employees, since the losses were, after all, distributed across a far wider group. The loss of the civil service jobs was, in effect, subtracted from two budgets instead of one.

Then there is the matter of the costs themselves, the sums appropriated to the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE’s own accounts never added up to the promised $215 billion in savings, and an independent audit projected the government’s expenditures on the initiative to be roughly $135 billion higher than the amount budgeted for the following year, on top of the losses projected by the IRS for the year. An agency dedicated to finding waste and fraud, it turned out, had incurred costs by every measure save its own, finally shutting down on a holiday and dubbing the figure a gift.

James Farmer testified before Congress in 1963 on the subject of spending and the ability of the poor to earn. The right to spend, without the right to earn, he said, was an instrument of oppression, and the movement to which he belonged—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—had pressed relentlessly on the federal agencies, one at a time, to open up hiring and unionization and benefits. Sixty years of that pressure were undone in eighteen months, by one man, one signature, with no vote at all. Organizing the federal employees to restore the protections and the pensions—to return the jobs and the budgets to the families—is where the jobs war resumes, as it always has, and where the last one left off, with those most directly affected speaking out in public, one after another, until someone answers.