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, she said.
Before the cuts, Johnson was a tenured foreign service officer, focusing on education initiatives.
“I was very clear on being a Black American diplomat, and I am doing this for Black Americans to see that this is possible,” Johnson said.
The cuts that impacted and imperiled hundreds of thousands of civil servants, including Johnson, were allegedly made to recoup taxpayer dollars.
Created shortly after President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, “Department of Government Efficiency,” a pseudo-agency created by executive order, became the administration’s main axe in its attempt to cut down the size of the federal government.
Tech magnate Elon Musk, who was co-leader of DOGE, swore that it would save American taxpayers $2 trillion, part of the broader Trump agenda to root out so-called “wasteful” spending and government fraud.
But turmoil and upheaval followed, along with an exodus of more than 300,000 civil servants, as the administration ripped through federal programs and agencies in sometimes hostile showdowns with staffers. (A more recent Pew estimate places the lost federal workforce closer to 350,000. For context, that lower number is still roughly double the attrition rate for 2022, the year with the most federal workers left in the years before Trump’s second term.)
Eventually, by the time it stopped, DOGE claimed that it had saved, if not trillions of dollars, at least billions.
In July, they said that the “mission” would continue, even if DOGE wouldn’t. “Good stewardship of taxpayer dollars and accountable government are not temporary initiatives,” they posted on X.
The “Wall of Receipts,” a webpage created by DOGE in 2025, purported to prove that it had saved as much as $110 billion for taxpayers by ripping out federal contracts, grants and leases.
DOGE’s actions are still being contested in court. Federal judges have ruled that parts of its widespread disruption were illegal.
What’s more, even DOGE’s more modest claim to have saved billions of dollars was inflated.
This month, the Government Accountability Office, a Congressional watchdog agency, issued a report that poked holes in DOGE’s savings estimates. The group also found that DOGE was “not transparent regarding methodologies used to calculate savings.” And the “Wall of Receipts” included “leases identified for termination before DOGE was established,” per the GAO report.
Further, 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
Auditing the ‘Receipts‘
In examining cuts to HHS and USAID, we investigated the impacts of these cuts and used examples cited by the GAO to highlight where the savings claims fell short.
The Emancipator then cross-referenced our findings with several independent analyses of the impacts of DOGE’s cuts on those agencies and spoke with several former USAID members.
Our review is not a comprehensive analysis of all of DOGE’s claims, nor of all cuts to federal agencies during the Trump administration.
This is partly because federal cuts have also made locating such numbers difficult, meaning that impact relies on tracking from outside of the American government. Further, the Trump administration has removed demographic data on federal workers from many federal websites – a move which makes disaggregating the impact especially difficult.
Black Federal Workers Paid a Disproportionate Price for DOGE Cuts
Black people are overrepresented in the federal workforce, meaning that federal workforce cuts have had an inordinate impact.
In 2024, before Trump took office, 18.6% of the federal workforce was Black, compared to 12.8% of the “civilian” workforce, according to an analysis by Pew Research Center.
In March 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services, the main agency responsible for health in the U.S., cut 10,000 employees, following up on retirements and resignations already triggered by DOGE, shrinking the overall agency to about 62,000 employees. After rescinding some of the job removals, the agency was reportedly back up to 72,000 employees this spring.
When Trump came to office for his second term, HHS had 91,058 employees. The agency employed a high share of people of color within the federal government, with around 20% Black, many of whom live and work outside of the capital. Those are the most recent demographic figures available since the Trump administration has restricted access and cut reporting requirements for federal agencies.
The cuts were haphazard. Some notices sent to federal employees getting cut contained wrong names, wrong jobs or wrong performance ratings, and there was some backtracking by federal agencies.
DOGE was key to that botch job because they brought a tech industry mindset to the federal government and underestimated the impact of making mistakes, according to some analysis.
The staff cuts harm marginalized groups by making it harder to track and deliver health access, even impacting important indicators such as the national poverty guidelines.
The cuts occurred during a larger overhaul that will impact health access.
For instance, grants that track racial equity in health were canceled, even while the administration pursued Medicaid cuts that would deeply harm Black children and other vulnerable people of color.
GAO: DOGE ‘Receipts’ Claims Don’t Balance
The widespread personnel and programmatic devastation had few returns.
In its recent report, the GAO took issue with the “savings” claims DOGE made in justifying its cuts to contracts and grants for HHS.
Of the 10 HHS contracts noted by the GAO, DOGE claimed $72,915,586 in taxpayer savings.
But these fell apart under scrutiny.
For instance, DOGE claimed savings of $18,521,652 in relation to a support grant for the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention.
The center has produced health data showing that Black and Latino children disproportionately suffer injuries.
Inspecting DOGE’s claim, the GAO found the agency had not canceled the grant. Instead, it had taken some tasks out, shrinking the grant by roughly $7.7 million.
In the contracts it inspected, GAO identified $50,817,496 as “de-obligated,” a designation specifying that the money was committed but later cancelled. But even here, DOGE was head-scratchingly wrong in its “receipts.” Almost all of the “de-obligated” money — about $50 million — came from a grant that DOGE didn’t report any savings on. That was a pandemic-era grant for COVID-19 testing, and the bulk of that was rescinded by Congress.
Claims for other agencies did not fare any better: DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” was missing identifying data on all 3,506 contracts reported as terminated at USAID.
DOGE’s Bottom Line Costs Staff at Home and Abroad
Perhaps most visibly, DOGE has become linked with the dismantling of USAID, the main vehicle for American foreign assistance.
Trump issued an executive order days into office, pausing work, with members of the administration mass-canceling grants and contracts shortly after. That eventually became an effective shutdown of the agency, which is still being challenged in court.
The agency had more than 10,000 employees in 2023, most of whom were stationed overseas. Nearly all employees were pushed out of their positions in early 2025.
The cuts also affected those who work in development and those who relied upon the assistance money.
For instance, those who worked for the agency abroad, known as “foreign service nationals,” including many communities of color, have been left without jobs, having to find new sectors in countries where the development field might have been primarily funded through American assistance dollars, said Johnson, the former diplomat.
Foreign Aid Assistance Paid the Price for DOGE Cuts
Although it took less than one percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, a minuscule portion of the federal budget, USAID had assisted in 130 countries, with South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the West Bank and Gaza ranking among its top recipients, according to a congressional note.
Program and staff cuts have hindered the agency’s health initiatives on diseases including HIV, malaria, tuberculosis — and health initiatives that help newborn babies get immunizations for more diseases like diarrhea or malnutrition that kill many children around the world.
Prior to cuts, U.S. assistance to combat HIV was the “largest commitment” by any country to combat a single disease, according to a fact note from the health policy organization KFF.
Some also trace a direct line from the cuts to the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo becoming the worst in the country’s history, with the cuts setting back attempts to respond to the disease.
Program cuts also struck maternal and child health and family planning and reproductive health. For example, 47.6 million women and couples relied on aid programs for contraceptives; the administration also cancelled $377 million in grants disbursed to slow the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, reduce deaths in childbirth, and prevent violence against women.
Foreign assistance rollbacks have impacted access to fiscal support and education and training opportunities.
Indeed, cuts have already had a deep impact on women and girls of color, especially migrants, according to information from groups such as the Center for Global Development.
Establishing hard data about impacts is tricky. The cuts hit programs that monitor and evaluate foreign assistance that would have returned hard data about the impacts in the field, according to Nicholas Enrich, a former director of policy for USAID’s Bureau of Global Health.
Enrich has described himself as a “whistleblower.” In March 2025, he testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and later published a book about USAID’s destruction under the Trump administration.
Without the usual statistics, figuring out the impact requires anecdotal reporting from journalists and clinicians, along with the ministries of health from other countries and researcher estimates, Enrich said.
But those accounts sketch a grim picture: “We hear from clinicians that they’re seeing HIV babies being born with HIV at rates of 25% in clinics where just a year ago those rates were basically zero,” he said.
Trump Puts Ideological Strings on the Purse Strings
Some assistance money is flowing again, as the Trump administration recently announced it would move $2 billion in assistance funding through Christian aid networks.
Nevertheless, the impacts are ongoing.
Plus, even as money begins to flow through Trump-approved channels, the ideological limitations of the Trump administration effectively mean that the American government cannot reach the most vulnerable communities, according to Enrich.
Trump also brought back the “global gag rule,” which prevents groups receiving U.S. foreign assistance from “promoting abortion.”
Ultimately, the ideological constraints placed on aid work moving forward will extend the harm, some argue, even as tariffs have ravaged textile industries in countries like Lesotho and Haiti.
“The anti-DEI element of the way that [the administration thinks] funds should be targeted is really pressing up against the basic principles of public health and epidemiology,” said Enrich.
That’s especially true in combating HIV infection rates, he added, which requires targeting the populations most vulnerable to the disease, such as LGBTQ+ people and drug users.
The administration has insisted that “no children died” as a result, with similar claims being echoed by Elon Musk, one of the key architects of DOGE.
Impact Counter, a tracker affiliated with Boston University, linked the cuts to 781,343 deaths just one year after the cuts, including more than a half-million children. A longer-term study suggests that the number of avoidable deaths will climb as high as 14 million by 2030, including 4.5 million children.
Some experts have argued that it’s an undercount.
But Daniel Krugman, a doctoral student and a visiting scientist for the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), a pan-African organization focused on health sovereignty and demography, believes that the heavy focus on death counts relying on estimates is another example of American exceptionalism. Western media has overfocused on the deaths in a way that calls for the return of American aid, instead of imagining autonomous systems within Africa. “People don’t just roll over and die,” he said, also noting that assistance funding has been ripped away from African countries before.
DOGE Cuts Were ‘Frenzied, Frantic and Crazed.’
For the federal workers impacted, the experience has been traumatic.
“It felt so frenzied, frantic and crazed,” said Denise Mortimer, who had worked on energy access for USAID: “It felt like [DOGE] was on a spree to see what they could get away with.”
Mortimer has taken to sketching the pets of federal workers as a way to tell their stories, hoping to capture the impact of the cuts and to stir compassion, spurred by a feeling that people weren’t showing enough outrage in the early days.
She’s catalogued the stories of at least 250 federal workers impacted by cuts across a number of federal agencies.
Some workers have landed.
Johnson, the former diplomat, has pulled off a career switch. She was forced to navigate a job market that’s drawn comparisons to the “worst moments of the Great Recession,” as unemployment rates for Black women have dramatically increased under Trump.
“There’s a loss in vocation and a longing to do a job that no longer exists,” said Johnson, explaining what she’s observed in many of her colleagues.
Johnson’s friends have had to pivot to jobs where they earn significantly less salary or perform less fulfilling work, and those who hold master’s degrees in public health and international development have had an especially hard time.
One friend of hers who used to work for USAID in Mexico on its climate projects took a lower-rank position as a grant writer for a regional consulting firm, Johnson said.
Johnson has felt a sense of loss, too.
She had started in assistance work after surviving a terrorist attack in Burkina Faso in 2016. “I had this pact with God of, ‘If you get me out of this alive, I’m going to pursue education,’ and so it was very spiritually tied to my survival,” Johnson said.
But the experience of the cuts was “dehumanizing,” and moving through this period in her career pulled her away from frontline work.
She’s had to adjust.
“When you come from that environment and working with really hungry students, literally and mentally, it’s a really fascinating juxtaposition to go from that to teaching in Malibu, and I had a really hard time reconciling how I was spending my career working with vulnerable populations, and now am in an elite institution,” Johnson said.
