This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

When President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, the national unemployment rate was at 4 percent overall, and at 5.3 percent for Black workers. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its November 2025 dataset, and although the total unemployment rate is at 4.6 percent, the Black unemployment rate has soared to 8.3 percent — the highest level since August 2021.

One contributing factor is Trump’s mass firings of federal employees. Black people disproportionately work in the public sector, representing nearly 19 percent of the federal workforce compared to 13 percent of the civilian workforce. And they have been disproportionately impacted by Trump’s purges: Analyses by ProPublica and The New York Times found that the administration conducted its steepest staff cuts at the agencies with the most nonwhite and women workers, like the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

But the federal layoffs offer only a partial explanation. What the data is beginning to reveal is the devastating cumulative effects of the Trump administration’s policies for workers of color.

In January, for instance, Trump revoked an executive order that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed in 1965 which prohibited companies with government........

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