The ongoing de-construction of many aspects of the Federal Government of the United States is bound to have some impact on Bahamians ranging from matters of immigration to the cost of living. Members of the Bahamian diaspora who live and work in America are witnessing changing times which will no doubt impact how they live. Some of them are now deciding whether to give up their green cards and return home.
It should be obvious to all that President Donald Trump is going far beyond the mandate he received from the American people and is using the billionaire Elon Musk to downsize agencies of the government, seemingly without clear justification. Detractors of Musk call him the new Prime Minister of the U.S. Among the agencies affected by significant changes are USAID, The National Institute of Medical Sciences, the FBI and the CIA.
In his article in The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel wrote: “Elon Musk is not the president, but it does appear that he — a foreign-born, unelected billionaire who was not confirmed by Congress is exercising profound influence over the federal government of the United States, seizing control of information, payments systems, and personnel management. It is nothing short of an administrative coup.
“As the head of an improvised team within the Trump administration with completely ambiguous power (the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in reference to a meme about a Shiba Inu), Musk has managed quite a lot in the two weeks since Inauguration Day. He has barged into at least one government building and made plans to end leases or sell some of them (three leases have been terminated so far, according to Stephen Ehikian, the General Services Administration’s acting administrator). He has called in employees from Tesla and The Boring Company to oversee broad workforce cuts, including at the Office of Personnel Management. One of Musk’s appointed advisers, according to Wired, is just 21 years old, while another graduated from High School last year. During this time, OPM staffers, presumably affiliated with DOGE, reportedly set up an on-premises email server that may be vulnerable to hacking and able to collect data on government employees — one that a lawsuit brought by two federal workers argues violates the E-Government Act of 2002.
“Musk’s people have also reportedly gained access to the Treasury’s payments system — used to disburse more than $5 Trillion to Americans each year (a national security risk, according to Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon) — as well as computer systems that contain the personal data of millions of civil servants. They subsequently locked some senior employees out of those systems,” according to Reuters.
Meanwhile across the United States, in government agencies and private corporations, leaders are scrambling to eliminate Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. President Trump is not only destroying any trace of diversity work within the government. He has ordered a review of federal contracts to identify any companies, nonprofits and foundations that do business with the government and keep their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he has warned that they could be target of investigation. The writer Karen Attiah calls this resegregation.
Trump’s GOP is threatening private companies that are trying to level the playing fields for Black people, women and other groups. After Costco’s shareholders voted to keep its diversity programs in place, 19 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to Costco asking it to explain why it was maintaining a policy of “unlawful discrimination.”
A number of other corporations have begun their cowardly capitulations. In a memo the Chief Equity Officer for Target said the company would be ending its diversity, equity and inclusion goals, “in step with the evolving external landscape.” Amazon, Meta and Walmart have also announced rollbacks.
For anyone wondering why “inclusion” is still needed: Since the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in 2023, first-year Black enrollment at top universities has dropped by 17 percent. That’s the sharpest drop of any major racial group.
Or look at the business world: Black people represent 13.7 percent of the U.S. population, but Black-owned businesses generally get less than 2 percent of venture capital funding. Despite a smattering of promises from venture capital companies to do better after the murder of George Floyd, funding to Black companies dropped from $4.9 billion in 2021 to $705 million in 2023 — an astonishing 86 percent drop.
These facts, taken together, point to the removal of Black people from academic, corporate and government spaces. This is resegregation. People are vowing to push back with their wallets — to shop at Costco and boycott Target, for example.
The late U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, speaking in 1965 at historically black Howard University, said that laws prohibiting discrimination are not enough and that more pro-active measures are necessary: “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a man, who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair…. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity, not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”
Black people in America have spent nearly 70 years proving themselves. While some progress was made, in a flash, with a new administration, the gains of those decades are being washed away.
