Abortion rights, women of color, and LGBTQIA+ people are under attack. Pledge to join us in fighting for gender justice.
The federal government is the largest employer in the United States, with over 2.3 million federal workers, including nearly 1.1 million women, as of September 2024 (not including those working for the United States Postal Service). While federal salaries are often lower than those for comparable roles in the private sector, federal jobs have long provided security and stability, predictable schedules, reliable salary increases, opportunities for promotion, strong union representation, and workplace benefits, as well as greater pay equity relative to other industries. Federal jobs have helped build a path to the middle class for many workers, especially for Black people, women, and other workers who frequently face discrimination in the workplace. Since January 20, 2025, however, these jobs—and the promise of fair treatment they have offered—have been under attack by the Trump-Vance administration.
On his first day in office, for example, President Trump issued an executive order that directed the termination of all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and programs in the federal government, the closure of federal offices related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and the termination of all relevant federal jobs. Many similar orders have since followed, designed to roll back decades of progress in combating sex- and race-based workplace discrimination under the guise of “protecting” workers from “DEI.” At the same time, the Trump-Vance administration has taken aggressive and potentially unlawful steps to dramatically shrink the federal workforce through rapid, large-scale terminations—largely carried out thus far by the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) run by unelected adviser Elon Musk. These actions are directly in line with the administration’s anti-diversity, anti-equity, and anti-inclusion agenda.
As the following analysis shows, women and people of color make up the majority of the workforce in many of the agencies being targeted for massive staff reductions. As a result, women and people of color are likely to be disproportionately harmed by the Trump-Vance administration’s sweeping efforts to dismantle our government—pushed out of good jobs not due to their performance or agency needs, but due to the authoritarian agenda of a handful of billionaires.