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Of the president’s 98 Senate-confirmed appointees to the administration’s most senior leadership roles in its first 200 days, ending on Aug. 7, only two, or 2 percent — Scott Turner, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Earl G. Matthews, the Defense Department’s general counsel — are Black.
The statistics were compiled for the Brookings Institution by Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center who specializes in presidential personnel. The statistics track appointments to the 15 cabinet departments in the presidential line of succession: Treasury, Defense, Justice, Homeland Security, State, Education, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs.
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Mr. Trump’s highest-profile firing of a senior Black leader was in February, when he ousted Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s senior military official. Joint Chiefs chairmen traditionally remain in place as administrations change, regardless of the president’s party, and in 2020 Mr. Trump had nominated General Brown, a fighter pilot, to be the Air Force’s chief of staff. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had previously said that General Brown should be fired because of a “woke” focus on D.E.I. programs in the military and questioned whether he was promoted because of his race.
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Those terminated include Carla Hayden, the first African-American and the first woman to be the librarian of Congress; Gwynne A. Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve as a member of the National Labor Relations Board; and Alvin Brown, the only Black member of the National Transportation Safety Board at the time of his removal.
Willie L. Phillips, the first Black person to be the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, stepped down from his position in April at the request of the White House. The president has since nominated David LaCerte to replace him.
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General Brown, Dr. Hayden and Mr. Phillips have been replaced by white men. A white man has been nominated to replace Mr. Brown, and two white men have been nominated to fill seats on the labor relations board after Ms. Wilcox was fired. Mr. Primus and Ms. Cook have not yet been replaced.
“You don’t need a very sophisticated analysis to read into what this means,” said Cathy Albisa, the former vice president at Race Forward, a nonprofit that promotes racial equity in government. Ms. Albisa now runs an organization, Branch4, supporting federal workers. “It is a resegregation of the work force, and an attack on the Black middle class.”
In the first Trump administration, there were fewer high-profile firings of Black workers. But there was only one Black official — Ben Carson, the housing secretary — among the 70 Senate-confirmed nominees to the major government departments in the first 200 days. {snip}
In the same 200-day period for previous presidents, according to Brookings, Black officials accounted for 21 percent of Senate-confirmed nominees under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., 13 percent under President Barack Obama and 8 percent under President George W. Bush.
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