Job losses directly and indirectly tied to President Donald Trump’s policies have hit Black workers in the D.C. area the hardest, a new study found.
The nonprofit, nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that as of March of this year, the D.C. region had about 115,000 fewer jobs in the region compared with before Trump took office.
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That includes the 54,000 federal employees who have lost their jobs since Trump’s return to the White House.
Many others were laid off from contractors who worked for government agencies, or had worked at nonprofits or research institutions that were receiving federal grants
“The share of regional population with a job fell by 3.2 percentage points in the D.C. region overall, and that’s eight times the change for the U.S. as a whole,” Nina Mast, an economic analyst and one of the study’s authors, told WTOP.
But the job losses were not evenly distributed. For Black workers in the area, the share of the population with a job fell by six percentage points, compared to 3.2% for the region as a whole.
“That is a huge decline in the employment rate in just a year’s time,” Mast said.
“And we’re now seeing as a result that these actions have really pushed regional Black employment to pandemic-era lows,” she said.
She said years of progress have been erased.
“We were really making progress on the gap between white employment and Black employment in the D.C. region since the COVID-19 pandemic, but as a result of the Trump administration’s actions, those gains have been reversed and Black employment is now much lower than it has been in recent years,” Mast said.
One of the reasons Black workers were impacted at a higher rate is that they tend to make up a larger share of the public sector workforce than in the private sector, meaning any changes to government employment would disproportionately affect them.
“This is because the public sector has historically been a pathway to the middle class for workers of color who face labor market discrimination in the private sector,” the study said.
