by J. David McSwane
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In February 2020, President Donald Trump’s first education secretary issued a memo to employees emphasizing the department’s policy “to ensure that diversity, inclusiveness, and respect are integral parts of our day-to-day management and work.”
“Diversity and inclusion are the cornerstone of high organizational performance,” Betsy DeVos continued, adding that all people were welcome in the Department of Education. The memo ended with a call for employees to “actively embrace” principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
As part of that push, Quay Crowner was among the top education officials who enrolled in the “diversity change agent program.” Crowner thought little of it at the time. She had over two decades filled director-level human resources roles at several federal agencies, including the IRS and Government Accountability Office, and she’d participated in seminars on leadership and workplace discrimination. But five years later, as Trump entered office a second time, his administration’s tune on DEI had changed. Crowner was abruptly placed on leave under Trump’s executive order to dismantle DEI programs across the federal government.
As a longtime manager familiar with federal hiring and firing policies, Crowner, 55, believed she knew what it looked like to be unfairly targeted. Her current job as the director of outreach, impact and engagement at the Education Department was not connected to diversity initiatives. She said the only part of her responsibilities that could have been considered DEI was that her team guided students who’d had trouble navigating financial assistance applications; while most people who seek federal student aid are from disadvantaged backgrounds, her office was a resource for any and all and had no diversity mandate. She was not involved with hiring and retention efforts.
More troubling, she said, was that she was the only person on her team who had been let go, and her bosses refused to answer her questions about her dismissal. When she and colleagues from different departments began comparing notes, they found they had one thing in common. They had all attended the training encouraged under DeVos. They also noticed something else: Most of them were Black women.
“We are still just in utter shock that the public service we took an oath to complete … has fallen apart,” said Crowner, whose bills related to an injury and health issues are likely to mount as she loses her federal health care coverage.
“We never imagined that this would be something that would happen to us.”
Her experience is part of a largely untold story unfolding as Trump dismantles civil rights and inclusion programs across government: Many of those being forced out, like Crowner, are Black women who spent decades building a career of government service, only to see those careers shattered in a sudden purge.
ProPublica interviewed Crowner and two other career civil servants, all Black women, who are among the hundreds of fired federal employees represented in a legal action brought against the Trump administration. Filed in March with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board by legal teams including the Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, the case contends the administration violated the First Amendment rights of employees by targeting them for holding views perceived as contrary to the Trump 2.0 doctrine.
What has received less attention is the suit’s claim that the administration also violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They claim the DEI purge disproportionately affected those who aren’t white men.
Hard numbers documenting the demographics of those forced out by Trump are hard to attain. The Trump administration has provided little information on those being fired, and a revolving door of firings and reinstatements in some departments makes capturing formal figures even more challenging.
But a broad assessment of Trump’s firings by ProPublica and other media shows the agencies with the most diverse staffs are often the hardest hit. Before the firings, the Education Department’s staff was majority nonwhite, with Black women making up about 28% of workers, the most recent federal data shows. According to a New York Times tracker of the firings, that department has seen a reduction of about 46% of its staff. The staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development was majority women and nearly 40% racial and ethnic minorities before Trump all but eliminated it.
Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice, where white personnel make up two-thirds of the workforce, most of it men, staff has been cut just 1%, according to the most recently available federal data and the Times tracker. The Department of Energy, more than 70% white, saw a reduction of about 13%.
Lawyers representing federal employees whose careers and families have been uprooted cite anecdotal evidence of disparate impact, a key ingredient in many successful civil rights claims.
“We have observed approximately 90% of the workers targeted for terminations due to a perceived association with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are women or nonbinary,” said Kelly Dermody, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, who have asked an administrative law judge to approve class-action status for the fired employees.
Nearly 80% of potential case plaintiffs are nonwhite, she said; most of that cohort are Black women.
A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Since reentering office, Trump has made clear his feelings about diversity programs, referring to them in an executive order as “Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”
Disparate Impact?
Ronicsa Chambers graduated from Florida A&M University, a historically black college, in 1990. Afterward, she got an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and landed a finance job with U.S. Airways, where she fell in love with aviation.
In 2005, she left the private sector to work in finance for the Federal Aviation Administration. She worked her way up the chain and, by 2019, helped create a program to address a lack of diversity in the agency by gaining the interest of graduates from historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.
In 2022, Chambers was named Air Traffic Manager of the Year. “I didn’t even know that non-air traffic controllers could get that award, and I was so proud,” she said. As titles in government do, hers changed in December 2024 as her team’s mission expanded to help FAA employees with issues such as providing accommodations so people with disabilities could do their jobs.
Then this January, she felt as though she’d been hit “in the face with a brick.” She was told on a video conference call that her FAA career was over. Though her work had involved DEI in the past, it was no longer in her title or her job description, and she said no one had asked her what her job entailed before she was removed.
She said she began moving through stages of grief but keeps coming back to anger because her team members — five Black women and one white man with a disability — were told they would be reassigned. She says they never were.
“As far as we know, we’re the only ones still on administrative leave,” she said, referring to those removed as part of Trump’s DEI executive order.
Ronicsa Chambers said she was told she and her team members would be reassigned after being let go from their jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration. They never were.
(Schaun Champion for ProPublica)
It’s unclear if the FAA, whose workforce was largely spared due to recent airline safety concerns, has fired or even fired and rehired people in departments outside of Chambers’ team. A spokesperson for the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.
The FAA has long been criticized for its lack of diversity. According to the most recent federal data, the agency was composed of 57% white men compared with 4.4% Black women.
Scott Michelman, an ACLU of DC attorney working on the complaint against the Trump administration, said Chambers’ case underscores how mass firings aimed at people who had even a peripheral connection to a DEI program, past or present, “harms the American people.”
“It takes dedicated, experienced, award-winning civil servants out of their job, their expertise, the place where we as the public want them and need them so that our government works for us,” he said. “This is a lose-lose.”
Key to their case is the argument that minority workers were disparately impacted, a long-held civil rights theory at which Trump has taken direct aim. In April, Trump issued an executive order to broadly eliminate that doctrine from civil rights enforcement, one of many steps he’s taken to reverse the traditional role of the federal government in protecting individuals from issues such as housing and employment discrimination.
For instance, the Trump administration gutted the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which was tasked with ensuring equal treatment for students regardless of gender and race, and instead focused that office at targeting transgender athletes and their schools.
Lawyers and former employees say focusing on people who may have had some DEI training or job duties would cause greater harm to nonwhite employees. And historically, the federal government has been a prominent force in upward mobility.
“For a segment of Black America, the federal government has been crucial to stepping up,” said Marcus Casey, an economist and associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. The opening of federal work following the Civil Rights Movement provided an alternative to manual labor, teaching or ministerial work in the form of white-collar jobs and skills training that many took into private sector jobs.
Today, Black people make up about 18.6% of the federal workforce, larger than their percentage in the overall U.S. workforce, 12.8%, according to the Pew Research Center.
“So, you think about HBCU graduates, like Howard University, a lot of these people tell us the same story: ‘This is where I started. This is where I got my first internship,’” Casey said.
Upward Mobility
Sherrell Pyatt’s family story is quintessentially American.
Her great-grandfather served in the Vietnam War and, on his return, took a job in the U.S. Postal Service, a key employer in the story of upward mobility for middle-class Black families. His granddaughter, Pyatt’s mother, also found a career at the Postal Service. So, even though she would attain more education than the previous three generations, it seemed fitting that eventually Pyatt would find herself at the Postal Service.
Pyatt grew up in the Bronx, New York City’s poorest borough, but tested well enough to attend a private school. She became the first of her family to get a degree, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she worked to pay tuition. She got a master’s degree and worked at a nonprofit before landing a job in 2014 with the Postal Service, shaping policy as a government relations specialist.
While at USPS, she coordinated with Customs and Border Protection to stop drug shipments through the mail. That experience, as well as her fluency in Spanish, led her to a similar role at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While there, she was involved in immigrant removal operations as part of Trump’s first-term “zero tolerance” clampdown on border crossings. She next transferred to CBP, where she helped investigate deaths of migrants in federal custody and rampant racism in a Facebook group of Border Patrol agents.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, both of her parents fell ill, and she moved to an Atlanta suburb to care for them. To make the move work, she transitioned to a job at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where she worked as a supply chain analyst, ensuring that equipment such as medical masks made their way to U.S. hospitals. In early 2024, she moved yet again, to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which investigates allegations of rights abuses lodged by both immigrants and U.S. citizens.
Sherrell Pyatt had more than a decade’s worth of experience working for the federal government before her dismissal.
(Rita Harper for ProPublica)
“My team was almost exclusively African Americans, and I think it’s just because of the experience of Black people in this country,” Pyatt said. “We seem to be more likely to go into those types of roles — one, because we have experience, and two, because of the passion to make a difference.”
In March, the Trump administration fired nearly all 150 employees in that office, including Pyatt. A DHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about her firing.
“I think it was an easy target to get rid of people of color and people who fight for people of color,” Pyatt said. “It’s absolutely a way to attack people of color, people who are differently abled, people who don’t agree with what this administration is.”
Pyatt’s sudden loss of a career wrought instant consequences for her family. She was the primary breadwinner, but now her husband, who works for the Postal Service, provides the only income. They worry they won’t be able to make the mortgage payments on their home for the long run. Their three daughters, all middle school age, may no longer be able to attend their private Christian school or play softball.
Career federal employees like Pyatt are supposed to be able to petition for a transfer or receive preference in hiring at other agencies. Despite having worked for the federal government for more than a decade, at five agencies, including four Homeland Security posts, Pyatt says she’s faced nothing but silence.
“So it’s little things like that that this administration is doing that makes it really feel like they’re targeting people like me, people who love the country, come from a family that has served the country for generations, did what we were supposed to do,” Pyatt said through tears. “And it just doesn’t matter.”
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