Editor’s Note: Our guest contributor this week, Joye Mercer, provides a poignant reminder of how deep and lasting the destruction being done by Donald Trump and his administration is. Joye offers a firsthand story of the power and benefits of positive government action to end racism and discrimination and the losses that result from current government actions. This is one of thousands of examples of ugly intended or unintended consequences from our current government policies and the recently approved budget.

Donald Trump’s second term is about “moving fast and breaking things,” apparently modeled after the old Mark Zuckerberg motto and tribute to arrogance. Under its aegis, Tech Bros were encouraged to disparage all that preceded them, denigrating whatever created the “things” they were hell-bent on discarding. No wonder Trump chose Elon Musk, his bosom buddy/sworn enemy, to disrupt and dismantle federal services.

One of the first targets—the U.S. Agency for International Development—hit my family especially hard. U.S.A.I.D. was the last agency for which my mother, Lucille Jordan Mercer, a Black woman with almost 40 years of federal service, worked. 

Jobs like mom’s were essential to establishing the Black middle class. In my Riggs Park neighborhood in Washington, D.C., most parents worked either for D.C. or the federal government. My dad was an elementary school teacher and later a principal. These jobs were the gateway to meaningful careers, financial stability, and security. 

Had Franklin Roosevelt not signed Executive Order 8802—under intense pressure from Civil Rights leaders—my mom and hundreds of thousands like her might not have had federal careers. Roosevelt’s June 1941 order prohibited discrimination by private employers with government contracts.  At that time, it was “the government’s most significant step toward racial equality since Reconstruction,” wrote Frederick W. Gooding, Jr., an American Studies professor, in American Dream Deferred: Black Federal Workers in Washington, DC, 1941-1981. 

Three years after World War II, President Truman’s Executive Order 9981 banned segregation in the military. These orders slowly pried open more and more federal jobs to Black and other non-White workers. 

Trump, through his attacks on the federal sector, his efforts to end policies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, and his distaste for American history itself, is turning back that progress. He is also disrespecting the legacy of Black public servants like my mom.  

After my mother died in November 2016, I requested her federal file from the National Personnel Records Center. The thick paper trail detailed every federal job she’d ever had, including her very first: temporary keypunch operator with the Census Bureau in 1950, responsible for “numeric key punching of coded documents pertaining to the population census.” (Keypunch operators were early data entry workers.)

She was 25 at the time, with three kids under 5. But mom had always worked, starting as a teenager. Her family fled Alabama in the early ‘40s for the chance to start a new life in the Pacific Northwest. Mom was a Rosie the Riveter in Vancouver, Wash., building battleships for Kaiser Shipyards during World War II. Mom took another leap a few years later: She married my dad, Ernest B. Mercer, and left the West Coast for Washington, D.C.

Her personnel file tells the story of ever-increasing and ever-evolving responsibilities. In 1956, she was among a select group of Black women who went to work for the CIA in Langley, VA. Her job, for which she earned $3,175 a year, involved transliterating Russian publications. She was an acting supervisor, in charge of training new employees, and received a commendation for work on the CIA’s “Geographical Dictionary.”  

Mom was constantly taking tests for higher pay grades, different positions, and new challenges, nimbly moving from one agency to another. Ultimately, she landed at U.S.A.I.D.—the capstone of her federal career. 

Through that agency, she did a tour of duty in Uganda, providing secretarial support for the East Africa Bureau’s work. The posting in Kampala not only meant eight weeks away from home and familiar routines; it also meant crossing an ocean by herself — and she hated flying. Yet I’d never seen her so enthusiastic. Near the end of her federal service, she was in full bloom.

Countless Black families have similar stories. Federal agencies gave us the chance to prove our skills and uplift our families. Of course, there was prejudice and racism. More than once, my mother trained White women for jobs and watched them get ahead while she didn’t. She also endured a few prejudiced supervisors. Lucille J. Mercer always set them straight, even when it came at a cost.

Federal jobs enabled our parents to walk tall into imposing federal office buildings in D.C., through the front door. Our loved ones helped maintain services and infrastructure, protect us from foes, and strengthen relationships with allies. 

Trump and his wrecking crew don’t respect the federal sector’s history or its current value. Two weeks after the inauguration, U.S.A.I.D. was on the chopping block and the foreign assistance it provided across the globe was in chaos. That was just the beginning.

We will feel the effects of Trump’s disembowelment of the federal government for years to come. And what’s just as devastating is that the contributions of pioneering Black women and men—a history that has yet to be fully appreciated—may be lost as well. Although these public servants worked mostly in anonymity, they proudly helped us attain our place in the world.

Joye Mercer is a resident of greater Washington D.C., a writer and is currently employed by the National Education Association.