Here's What Musk And DOGE Really Want

Dismantling the civil service isn’t just a tactic. It’s a necessity for their efforts to entrench white racial and economic supremacy.

By Kali Holloway, The Nation

The civil service is, and has long been, disproportionately Black. Almost 20 percent of federal workers are African American, compared to just 12 percent of private-sector workers and 13 percent of Americans overall. A 2011 study found that Black Americans were 30 percent more likely than any other group of Americans to work in public service. That ratio can be linked to the legacy of racism that effectively barred Black folks from private industry for most of America’s history. In contrast, the civil service offered not just jobs but also careers, with advancement opportunities and a rare path to the middle class.

From 1863 through Reconstruction to the end of the 19th century, hundreds of Black Americans—many of them formerly enslaved—worked for the Postal Service. By 1940, the weekly earnings of Black postal employees put them in the top 5 percent of all African American workers. Today’s Black civil service workers—who are much more likely to be unionized than their private-sector counterparts —earn 25 to 50 percent more than Black Americans in other fields. Even the racial wealth gap, with its roots in enslavement and centuries of discrimination, is narrowed by the civil service. A 2020 Center for American Progress study found that white households in the private sector hold up to $10 for every $1 held by Black households, while in the public sector, that gap shrinks to about $2 to $1.

Far from being a redoubt of DEI-driven incompetence, the civil service is, broadly speaking, what happens when hiring, salaries, and promotions are more tightly tied to skill and expertise than to racial (read white) and gender (read male) favoritism. Antidiscrimination policies, such as the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, were not only instituted but enforced—and reinforced by executive orders across presidential administrations. The effort toward fair(er) hiring dates back to 1883, when the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act established the civil service exam, ending the spoils system that prioritized partisan loyalty over qualifications. This is not to suggest that the civil service is free of racism or bias; nothing in America is. But it’s one of the closest things we have to a functioning, competitive, nonpartisan meritocracy.

And that’s exactly why Donald Trump and Elon Musk want to destroy it. For all their blather about merit, they actually loathe it—particularly when its outcomes even mildly threaten the racial status quo, which their sense of self-worth requires be preserved.

The current Trump-Musk assault on the public sector is both racial and ideological—an extension of the white supremacist authoritarianism driving their self-serving agenda. Dismantling the civil service isn’t just a tactic; it’s a necessity for their efforts.