ICYMI: Donald Trump’s Economic Incompetence is Screwing Over Black Workers Arrow

Key Point: "The unemployment rate for Black Americans has shot up by 1.5 percentage points over the last three months, a rare development outside of recessions. At 7.5%, it's once again twice the rate for White Americans, erasing the progress made in narrowing the gap over the last three years."

Bloomberg: Black Unemployment Is Surging in Trump's Overhaul of US Economy

By Jarrell Dillard, Amara Omeokwe, and Catarina Saraiva

• The unemployment rate for Black Americans has shot up by 1.5 percentage points over the last three months, a rare development outside of recessions. At 7.5%, it's once again twice the rate for White Americans, erasing the progress made in narrowing the gap over the last three years.

• Two factors have combined to create such an outcome, researchers say: First, a slowdown in the broader labor market is playing out in the usual fashion, disadvantaging Black workers who tend to be first to lose their jobs when things go south. Second is Trump's targeted efforts to shrink the federal workforce, where Black workers are overrepresented.

• Hiring more broadly has slowed sharply in 2025 as the administration's tariffs and immigration crackdown have clouded the economic outlook.

• Roughly half of the Department of Education staff has been cut as the Trump administration has moved to dismantle the agency, which had the greatest share of Black federal employees among executive departments as of 2022.

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development, another agency that employs a large share of Black federal workers, has also lost a significant number of employees.

• Employers added an average of just 29,000 jobs per month in the three months through August, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures published on Sept. 5, down from 209,000 on average in the final three months of 2024.

• Meanwhile Trump's other signature economic policy - tariffs - is raising concerns even among many who do have jobs. Last month, workers put the probability of finding a new job if they lost theirs at less than 45%, the lowest on record in data going back to 2013, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York consumer survey.