Federal Job Cuts Disproportionately Impact Black Workers, Says Economist Gary Hoover
Amid a broad slackening of the U.S. labor market, and in spite of campaign promises to save "Black jobs," the unemployment rate for Black workers is surging under President Donald Trump.
According to seasonally adjusted data published Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the unemployment rate for Black Americans rose from 7.2 percent in July to 7.5 percent in August, now at its highest level since October 2021. This compares to 4.3 percent for the wider labor force and is more than double the rate for white Americans (3.7 percent).
While this disparity is a perennial feature of the U.S. labor market, the changes since the start of the year are particularly notable. White unemployment has risen by 0.3 percent since January but during that time Black unemployment has climbed 1.3 percent, with the bulk of this occurring over the past three months.
"I think part of the surge over the last few months is that Black workers were overrepresented in the federal workforce," said Gary Hoover, Executive Director of The Murphy Institute and professor of economics at Tulane University.
A January report from Pew Research Center in January—published as workers braced for the sweeping federal cuts that had been pledged by Trump—found that Black Americans made up 18.6 percent of the federal workforce, despite comprising 12.8 percent of the population.