La’Nita Johnson considers herself somewhat lucky.
After the Trump administration mass-fired foreign assistance workers, she found work as a visiting professor at her alma mater and continued to build a consulting business.
That involved a pay cut that wrecked her financial stability. Before the cuts, she was a tenured foreign service officer focusing on education initiatives.
The DOGE cuts that impacted and imperiled the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of civil servants, including Johnson, were allegedly made to recoup taxpayer dollars.
But the Government Accountability Office, a Congressional watchdog agency, recently issued a report that poked holes in DOGE’s savings estimates. The group also found that DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” was “not transparent regarding methodologies used to calculate savings.”
The Emancipator examined cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services – which employed a high percentage of federal workers of color and had a large impact on communities of color domestically – and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has a broad impact on communities of color globally.
We found the cuts did real damage.
The fallout continues to impact communities of color around the globe.
