Trump’s Slash-and-Burn Economy Is Devastating Black Women

Elections have consequences – and they invariably affect black women in the most profound ways. Donald Trump’s re-election has resulted in black women being driven out of the workplace at a staggering rate. Between February and July of last year, black women lost 319,000 jobs in the private and public sectors, largely due to mass layoffs in the education, health care and housing sectors. During the same period, white women gained 142,000 jobs, Hispanic women gained 176,000 jobs, and white men – wait! – 365,000 jobs. In February, the unemployment rate for black women stood at 5.4 percent, but that figure had climbed to 6.7 percent in August. In September, the last available snapshot due to the shutdown, an additional 0.8% of black women lost their jobs, while only 0.2% of white women suffered the same fate that month. In total, according to gender economist Katica Roy, approximately 600,000 black women have been “economically marginalized” since February — which was, not coincidentally, the first full month of this president’s term.

It failed to raise alarm in a country that has never really cared about the well-being of black women. Perhaps this is why concerned policymakers and economists so often take pains to point out that the economic plight of black women is a bellwether for everyone else—to point out that their fate, and even their humanity, is tied to that of the nation in the hope that the country can finally care. And it’s not just that racism and sexism make black women the first to be laid off when the economy stagnates, but also that black women drive the economy in ways that this country often refuses to acknowledge. Nearly 70 percent of black mothers are the breadwinners of their households, even though they receive only 34, 44, or 52 cents of every dollar paid to Asian, white, or black fathers, respectively. Thus, when they lose their jobs massively, families find themselves financially vulnerable and local economies are weakened. Nationally, the cost has already exceeded $37 billion in lost GDP.

But it is disingenuous to suggest that black women are simply the hardest hit during economic crises when, in fact, they have been targets of prejudice from a right openly determined to undo their progress. This country has – once again – chosen to meet gender and racial advancement with aggressive rollbacks, including dismantling the institutions that have provided black women with financial security and career progression. It is no coincidence that the first action of the Trump administration, in partnership with Elon Musk’s DOGE, was to vilify and gut the civil service – long the engine of black middle-class stability – where black women make up 12% of the workforce, double their share of the overall workforce. A study by the National Women’s Law Center found that women and people of color made up the majority of the workforce at the agencies that suffered the deepest cuts. The Department of Education, with a workforce that was 28 percent black women, lost 46 percent of its staff. The Department of Justice and the Department of Energy, both of which are about 70% white? Reduced by just 1 percent and 13 percent, respectively, according to a ProPublica analysis.

The Trump administration has also paid lip service to prominent Black women leaders, including Carla Hayden at the Library of Congress, Gwynne Wilcox at the National Labor Relations Board, and ongoing efforts to oust Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve. Peggy Carr has described her abrupt dismissal after 35 years working her way up the ranks at the Department for Education as both a personal and professional “tragedy”. “It felt like I was being disposed of like trash,” Carr said. The New York Times of being escorted out of the building by a security guard, “the only difference is that I was taken out the front door rather than the back door.”

These public sector layoffs have been accompanied by attacks on the private sector’s diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs. NPR reports that DEI positions fell from 20,000 in 2023 to 17,500 in April 2025. Companies too numerous to name have hastily withdrawn from the DEI efforts they had boasted about earlier, and not because they were mandated to do so, since Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders cannot overturn civil rights laws or dictate hiring practices for private companies. A New York Times The survey found that the number of S&P 500 companies that include DEI language in their financial filings is down 60% since 2024. And for the first time since 2017, the majority of new directors hired at S&P 500 companies this year were white men.

Black women have long worked at higher rates than other American women, including as recently as 2024. But even in the best of times, sexism and anti-Black racism, or misogynoir, confine them to the most precarious jobs in the least recession-resistant sectors. In all sectors, they are paid less than white men with the same level of education, or even, in some comparisons, a lower level; are women least likely to be promoted; and leaving college with the most student debt. Now, Trump has launched what Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) rightly calls a campaign of “discriminatory harm” against them. History vividly illustrates what the consequences will be. After the economic downturn of the early 1980s, the Great Recession of the 1980s, and the Covid pandemic, black women were the last to recover financially. But this time, the Trump administration removed race-based employment data from government websites, preemptively erasing evidence of the damage done.

When black women voted against this regime, they were fighting for their lives at the ballot box, knowing that they would be the first to bear the brunt of its damage – and fully aware that they would not be the last. Of course, this was not enough to stop a country unwilling to heed their warnings. Once again we are trapped, forced to inhale the noxious fumes that no one else notices and which poison us all.