Black employment in the federal government fell about 20% in the first nine months of 2026 compared with the same months of 2024, according to Census Bureau survey estimates analyzed by The Washington Post. Among white federal workers the drop was about 4%.
The Post’s wider finding is that 426,000 full-time civilian employees left government between January 2025 and June 2026, nearly one in five of the roughly 2.2 million people who held those jobs when President Donald Trump returned to office. After new hires and reinstatements, the workforce shrank by 255,000, about 12%.
Black workers make up about 18% of the federal workforce, against 13% of the population. The government has long been one of the steadier employers open to Black workers, and they are concentrated in the agencies cut hardest: about 30% of Education Department staff are Black, along with 24% at Veterans Affairs and 20% at Health and Human Services. Hispanic federal employment rose about 6% over the same period, according to the figures reported from the analysis.
Most of the departures were not firings. About 85% came through resignations and retirements, many of them incentivized, and about 32,000 people were fired outright. The largest single month was September 2025, when nearly 121,000 workers left as the deferred resignation and early retirement programs took effect.
Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, which runs federal hiring, told the Post: “The vast majority of individuals who left government since the beginning of the Administration did so voluntarily.”
Voluntary or not, the exits fell unevenly. The administration’s push to close diversity and inclusion offices also reached individual employees. The Post reported that a conservative group’s list published the names, photos and salaries of 93 federal employees, two-thirds of them Black.
The cost of the buyouts has been counted too. A Government Accountability Office report found that agencies spent about $6.7 billion paying employees who were not required to work during the resignation program.
For Black families, the loss is measured in more than headcount. A federal job comes with a pension, a union contract and a pay scale that does not depend on a manager’s discretion, which is why Black workers have relied on it for generations. The next monthly jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, due Nov. 6, will show where those workers have landed.
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