Trump Fired Him. The ‘DEI Watchlist’ Shamed Him. Then Came 500 Job Rejections.

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Since President Donald Trump returned to office, nearly 423,000 of the nation’s 2.2 million civilian federal employees have left the government. That is a rate of departure significantly higher than those recorded during the first 18 months of Trump’s first term or President Joe Biden’s term. Trump campaigned on trimming federal bureaucracy, which he declared was bloated with wasteful, lazy and incompetent workers. Within days of his inauguration, he enlisted billionaire Elon Musk to drive the cuts. Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service slashed across the government, cutting spending and eliminating jobs.

Of the hundreds of thousands who left, 85 percent resigned or retired early through incentive programs offered by the Trump administration, a Washington Post analysis found. Thirty-two thousand full-time workers were fired. Harris was one of them.

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Diversity programs and initiatives have been around for decades but became much more common after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Businesses and federal and local governments adopted antibias trainings, employee resource groups and recruiting programs and created new jobs, including Harris’s federal position.

The mass embrace of DEI programs felt to Harris like the capstone of his professional life, despite growing opposition from many on the political right who portrayed DEI efforts as reverse racism that disadvantaged White people. The president’s order accelerated that opposition, triggering a rapid retreat from DEI policies throughout government and the corporate world — and, Harris feared, devastating the field in which he built his career.

Harris’s job search was made harder by his membership in an even smaller group: He’d been named, with 92 others — two-thirds of them Black — on a public website called the “DEI Watchlist.” Run by a little-known conservative group with ties to the Heritage Foundation, the site claimed to expose “behind-the-scenes bureaucrats who push divisive DEI agendas that undermine merit, fairness, and accountability.”

A full page devoted to Harris shared his federal salary and employment history alongside a smiling photo of him wearing a blue button-down.

Harris had been out of government for more than a year, but the site was still the first result when anyone Googled his name. One prospective employer confided to him that the watch list made him unhirable. Harris often checked with friends and colleagues also named on the list, and most of them were still out of work, too.

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As chief equity officer, Harris was tasked with ensuring that the workforce of the ACF resembled the Americans it served. Before Trump’s inauguration, he switched to become a “senior advisor” in the Office of Community Services, which distributes funds, diapers and legal services to the poor. He saw it as more or less the same worthy mission: bringing in good people and helping them help the neediest Americans. Who, he wondered, could find fault with that?

Then, a few hours after Trump was sworn in, Harris was scanning one of 26 first-day executive orders — “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” — when he noticed a date in the eighth paragraph. The president was ordering the termination of all DEI positions “in existence on November 4, 2024.” Uh-oh, he thought.

Later that week, he was working from home — talking on an all-hands video call about how the Trump administration’s policies would change things for his office — when a Teams message popped up. His boss wanted to talk.

Harris logged onto the video call to find his boss holding up a piece of paper. “Hey,” Harris remembered her saying. “I need to read you this.” Effective Jan. 23 “at 3:30 p.m. EST, you will be placed on administrative leave,” she read. “This … is not being done for any disciplinary purpose.”

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He’d only worked for the government for 17 months, after a nearly 30-year career spent mostly in talent acquisition for Johnson & Johnson, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Amazon. It was not a life he’d ever imagined growing up in Philadelphia, but it had happened, Harris believed, because of the federal government.

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The Trump administration stopped publishing federal workforce diversity data last year, reversing decades of precedent and obscuring how the makeup of the government changed following the president’s sweeping job cuts. Federal resignations and retirements soared in September 2025, the month when programs designed by the Trump administration to incentivize departures took effect. To determine how that spike altered employee demographics, The Post examined data from a household survey conducted for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Post found that, by the final two months of 2025, the estimated number of Black federal workers had dropped by 30 percent — compared with a 4 percent decline among government employees of other races.

Black employees were also heavily affected by Trump’s DEI purge, according to internal DOGE documents obtained by The Post. The DOGE team planned to remove roughly 200 people from DEI-related jobs. More than 100 of those jobs were held by Black people — double the count of positions held by White employees.

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Tom Jones, the president of the American Accountability Foundation, said he was proud of his organization’s work.

“If the Post’s reporting that the 2/3rds of the DEI staffers on the list can’t find work is accurate, we cannot overstate our joy that trafficking in anti-white bigotry now makes you unemployable,” Jones wrote in an email. “Our only regret about the watchlist is that we didn’t have the time or resources to profile more left wing woke bureaucrats.”

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Of the 43 federal employees named on the watch list who lost or left their government jobs, 2 out of 3 remain unemployed as of this month, a Post analysis of their social media profiles and postings shows. Their fates differ sharply by race: Nearly 40 percent of Black people included on the list are still out of work, The Post found, compared with 10 percent of White people.