Over four hundred years of chattel slavery. Twelve years of Reconstruction. Seventy-five years of sharecropping. Eighty-eight years of the Jim Crow era. Fourteen years of the Civil Rights Movement and the present-day fight against racism, inequality, and oppression. Each era has affected generations of African Americans and created serious racial disparities across institutions, including in education, employment, healthcare, housing, and government. Advocates have fought for programs and protections – such as civil rights enforcement and policies that support diversity and inclusion – as an intentional response to close those gaps and support opportunity for all. That progress has been made possible in large part due to the hard work of Black women, who face the consequences of both systemic racism and sexism, and are key advocates for the policy change they and their families need. Now, the programs intended to ensure Black women are represented where policy is built and shaped are being dismantled. The Trump administration has undermined and eliminated programs across higher education, federal employment, and the private sector, stifling the voices of the next generation of Black women advocates.
Intentional Policies Show Results
Decades of progress have been made through civil rights enforcement and policies aimed at addressing racial disparities. HBCUs and intentional workforce diversity policies have been two important pathways for expanding opportunities and strengthening the voices of Black advocates. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were created with a goal: to provide an exceptional education to African American men and women who were systematically denied access to historically white colleges and universities. With 107 HBCUs across the country, HBCU students have reached the highest levels of government, especially Black women, who have helped shape local, state, and national policy issues as experts in their fields. The resources and networks afforded Black women at HBCUs have produced some of the country’s most visible Black women leaders in government today, including Lisa D. Cook, member of the US Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and Stacey Abrams, former Georgia State Representative, who both attended Spelman College. Furthermore, in 2025, Black women held a record 5.4 percent of all state legislative seats, up from 3.5 percent in 2015. The knowledge, skills, and experiences that Black women contribute to policy decisions ensure that the needs of women and families are prioritized. For example, in May 2026, U.S. Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman introduced a House Resolution to acknowledge the Black Women Best framework which explains why the perspective of Black women is needed for policy decisions that affect women and families.
Education alone could not close these gaps; intentional workplace policies were also necessary to create equitable opportunities for advancement. Executive Order 11246, instituted in 1965, required federal contractors and subcontractors with 50 or more employees to take active steps toward equal employment opportunity. Federal contractors were required to have written Affirmative Action Programs, to conduct annual workforce utilization analyses, and to actively correct the underrepresentation of women and minorities in their companies. This active approach to desegregating the workplace was managed by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) and it, along with other policy changes, worked. Corporations revealed that the share of Black women grew significantly faster among the federal contractors, and data show that this particular program aided in the upward movement of Black women on the occupational ladder.
Recent Actions From the Trump Administration
The Trump Administration has placed great emphasis on rolling back many policies, pipelines, and programs, often disguising the retreat as progress for the American people. These retractions span across federal agencies, higher education, and the private sector, narrowing the path for Black women from multiple directions and impacting how people of color, especially Black women, can show up as policy advocates. In January 2025, multiple executive orders ended Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs across the federal government and eliminated affirmative action for federal contractors. Two of the programs discussed above were direct casualties of these actions. Executive Order 14173 officially revoked federal affirmative action obligations for businesses working with the government. It established an explicit compliance deadline of April 21, 2025, requiring federal contractors to wind down and terminate all active Affirmative Action Programs (AAP).
One program eliminated during the Trump administration’s recent actions was the Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) Program, the federal government’s flagship leadership development initiative for advanced-degree graduates, administered by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Though this program provided graduates with a pathway into federal leadership, it faced challenges in recruiting students from HBCUs and ensuring equitable access to these opportunities for people of color. Efforts were underway to strengthen these pipelines and expand recruitment from HBCUs. Yet, on February 19, 2025, Executive Order 14217 eliminated the Federal Executive Boards, leading the Office of Personnel Management to terminate PMF and formally rescind the program’s governing regulations in August 2025. Rather than improving the program’s recruitment efforts to bolster representation while maintaining its role as a key pipeline for future policymakers, the Administration eliminated it – closing the door for Black women advocates to advance through this program entirely.
Later that month, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division was directed to investigate, eliminate, and penalize DEI and DEIA programs in educational institutions and the private sector, framing longstanding diversity initiatives as themselves a form of illegal discrimination. In March 2025, the Department of Education cut over $600 million in grants tied to DEI and anti-racism training. These terminated grants funded teacher preparation and professional development programs, including efforts to recruit and retain educators in underserved and rural communities. Programs already relying on this funding have since cut scholarships, laid off staff, and in some cases shut down entirely, leaving aspiring teachers without the support they were promised.
The White House issued an executive order regarding HBCUs in April 2025. Though it appears to highlight federal support for HBCUs on the surface, the order’s language removes all references to diversity, equality, and inclusion and replaces them with innovation, infrastructure, and workforce needs. This switches the intention of the original HBCU PARTNERS Act from promoting diversity and eliminating stark racial disparities to work-based performance, which continues to slowly erode the decades of activism and advocacy to have racial diversity-based language at the forefront of dismantling systemic oppression and racism in America. The Department of Justice also released a memo entitled “Guidance for Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination,” which detailed the current administration’s restrictions on DEIA language of any kind, such as unserved geographic areas, first-generation status, or even lived experience. The memo did not eliminate these programs, but it prohibited the exact language pipeline programs have used to identify and hire students they were created to cater to. With this ambiguity, institutions are left to decide whether to adhere to the memo, risking legal implications such as immediate freezing of grants and legal battles. The stripping of this language has now put many DEIA programs on hold.
Additionally, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) rescinded its workplace harassment guidance and has released a rule that threatens the requirement for federal contractors to report workforce demographic data. Executive Order 11246, which authorized this data collection, was revoked in January 2025, and the Department of Labor has since proposed rescinding the regulations that implemented it, making it harder to identify disparities affecting Black women in the federal contracting workforce. The harassment guidance served as a huge protection against workplace harassment for all individuals in the workplace, but it was especially important for people of color, particularly Black women. The 2024 guidance recognizes that workplace harassment often targets multiple characteristics simultaneously, and that Black women, who live at the intersection of race and sex discrimination are especially impacted. Each decision has a significant impact because it erodes opportunities and limits the ability of Black women to advocate for women and families.
Conclusion
When Black women do not have a seat at the table, there are consequences for our ability to pass the policies families need. Eliminating and damaging pipelines for Black women’s professional success, in both the government and the private sector, translates into fewer opportunities for advocacy that represents their lived experiences and necessary perspective.
For example, paid leave and maternal health are two critical policy issues where Black women face disparities that must be considered in any policy solution. Black women are consistently at a disadvantage or discriminated against for taking paid leave more than their white counterparts and they are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, disparities shaped by a long history of structural racism and sexism. These are issues that must be addressed with input from those impacted most, but the pipelines that were created to ensure Black women have the opportunities they are owed are under deliberate attack.
So, who gets to be in the room where decisions are made? The question of who wields power in policy spaces shapes what policies are prioritized – and who they benefit. The thread running through the Trump Administration’s approach communicates a clear message that Black women, and people of color overall, don’t deserve to be there. The actions taken by the Trump Administration do not explicitly label themselves as an attack on Black women, but they don’t have to. Consequences will be seen in the paid leave policies, which will either address the needs of Black women or will not; in maternal health guidance, which will either save lives or cost them; and in policies on workplace rights, which will either protect all or just some. The choices currently being made determine whose voices will be heard in tomorrow’s policymaking rooms and whose will be silenced.