Justice Department investigation of racial hiring at City Hall also highlights President Donald Trump's own hiring record

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

WASHINGTON — Facing a federal probe into alleged hiring preferences for Black job candidates, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson attempted to deftly highlight that it was the president's hiring practices that were the problem, not his.
'My administration reflects the country, the city,' Johnson said as he called on the Department of Justice to turn its sights essentially on itself and investigate President Donald Trump's hiring. 'His administration reflects the country club.'
While Johnson's gambit to get the DOJ to investigate Trump's hiring has no chance of succeeding, the first-term mayor's comments underscore how the president's picks for top leadership positions have skewed more heavily toward men and white people than any president in recent memory.
Trump's assault on diversity initiatives has also led to major changes within the agencies charged with fighting discrimination. His administration has dismantled many traditional approaches for combating racial and gender bias, while using headline-grabbing announcements to put pressure on political opponents such as big-name law firms, Harvard University and the Chicago mayor's office.
At the 100-day mark of his second administration, Trump's Cabinet was 84% white and 84% male, according to research from The Brookings Institution, a left-of-center think tank in Washington. That's a bigger share for both groups than any other president since at least 2001, when George W. Bush assumed office.
In fact, Trump's current Cabinet is less diverse than his first-term Cabinet, which, after 100 days, was 74% male and 74% white.
Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, the researcher who compiled the data and the director of Brookings' Katzmann Initiative on Improving Interbranch Relations and Government, said many factors could have made Trump's second-term Cabinet less diverse than his first.
Trump in 2024 campaigned heavily on opposing diversity efforts, she noted, and outside groups such as the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 initiative compiled lists of potential officials aligned with their ideology. That could have shrunken the pool of candidates, she said.
Experienced Republican job candidates, especially women, who served in the Bush administration might also have been turned off by what they saw during Trump's first term.
'When they saw all the turnover, when they saw a lot of chaos, when they saw Jan. 6, all of that decreased the pool of people,' said Tenpas, referring to the riot at the Capitol that sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election. 'There is something to having had experience in the prior administration and then working your way up. I think (the Trump administration) doesn't have as deep a pool as the typical Republican president would, given that the Republican Party has really shifted and become the party of Trump.'
All presidents since 2001 — Bush, Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden — have fallen short of mirroring the racial composition of the country in their Cabinets when compared to census figures. Biden came closest, with a third of his appointees being non-white.
About 58% of Americans reported being white in the 2020 census, the most recent nationwide count. Nearly 19% were Hispanic, 12% were Black and nearly 6% were Asian American. There are slightly more women than men in the country, the census found.
Tenpas said measuring Cabinet positions is a 'good microcosm' of a president's hiring practices.
'These are the most senior, the most elite positions. Having to get confirmed by the Senate is a big deal, and that gives you a lot of cachet in that particular job,' she said.
By comparison, the makeup of Johnson's entire mayor's office staff is 34% Black, 24% Hispanic, 30% white and 7% Asian, according to the latest numbers provided by the mayor's office. Johnson's Cabinet was much Blacker, however, hovering at about 44% as of last year, according to the Triibe news website. The population of Chicago is about 30% Latino, 29% Black, 31% white and 7% Asian.
But Trump's pattern of promoting predominantly white and male people for powerful positions extends beyond his Cabinet.
During Trump's first term, for example, 76% of the federal judges he had confirmed were men; 84% were white. Under Biden, only 34% of federal judges confirmed were men, while 40% were white. Toward the end of Trump's first term, only seven of the 93 U.S. attorneys — the top federal prosecutors for their area — were women. Only two were Black.
Trump has made no secret of his disdain for diversity initiatives, which regained popularity in government and corporations after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Among the flurry of executive orders he issued in his first days of office at the start of his second term, Trump terminated all federal offices, positions and programs dealing with 'diversity, equity and inclusion.' He and his administration have attacked universities, public schools, outside companies, nonprofit groups and even cities relying on federal transportation grants for using DEI initiatives.
Trump has also removed many prominent federal leaders who are women or people of color.
In February, the president fired the second Black general to serve as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former Air Force fighter pilot C.Q. Brown Jr. Pete Hegseth, Trump's secretary of defense, questioned whether Brown deserved the Pentagon's top post or whether he got it 'because of his skin color,' although it was Trump who picked Brown to become the top Air Force officer.
While dismissing Brown, Trump also fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to become the Navy's top officer and the first woman to become a permanent member of the Joint Chiefs. He also fired the first woman to lead the Coast Guard and the first female president of the Naval War College. After Franchetti's firing, the military no longer has any women in four-star general or admiral positions.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat and former Army National Guard helicopter pilot, decried Trump's string of firings. 'Trump would rather appear 'anti-woke' than keep our military strong,' Duckworth said on social media after Trump ousted the Coast Guard chief.
Duckworth noted that Lt. Gen. Dan Caine, the person Trump picked to succeed Brown as chair of the Joint Chiefs, did not meet the legal requirements for that position (although the president can waive those prerequisites).
'President Trump has fired at least 10 expert senior military officers, most of whom were women or people of color, and several of whom — unlike Caine — met the legal qualifications to be chairman,' she wrote in an April op-ed.
'We have liberated our troops from divisive and demeaning political trainings,' Trump told graduates at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. late last month. 'There will be no more critical race theory or transgender for everybody forced onto the brave men and women in uniform, or on anybody else for that matter, in this country. We will not have men playing in women's sports.'
Outside the military, Trump fired Carla Hayden, the first woman and first Black person to be the Librarian of Congress. Obama appointed Hayden, who grew up in Chicago, to the position. She was the head of the Baltimore public library system and a former president of the American Library Association.
Trump also came under fire for dismissing board members — all women — of independent agencies focused on protecting workers' rights before their terms expired and ousted two female members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which oversees workplace discrimination cases. The dismissals have left both the National Labor Relations Board and the EEOC without quorums.
Tenpas, the Brookings researcher, said a diversity of advisers can help ensure that presidents hear from a variety of perspectives and give leaders a broad range of options.
It can also have an impact on the public, she noted.
Biden, for example, picked Deb Haaland as his secretary of the interior. The former House member was the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, and the agency she led had a major impact on tribal relations with the federal government.
'It is symbolically important,' Tenpas said. 'If you were a young Native American and you saw that this woman was now the secretary of the interior, you might think to yourself, 'Maybe I can do that.''
Trump's legal team, though, has argued that Johnson crossed the line when touting the number of Black officials in the mayor's administration.
'It's not the 1960s. It's not the fresh days of the Civil Rights Movement,' said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, in an interview with Newsmax, a conservative cable network. Dhillon sent a letter to Johnson announcing the hiring investigation.
'In 2025, the mayor of Chicago is proudly proclaiming name after name or job description after job description of African Americans whom he has hired,' Dhillon said, adding that Johnson claimed Black people 'do a better job' and that he has tried to help Black people build their businesses.
'(He's) basically rent-seeking for a particular race because he's from that background, or because that's what's politically demanded in his city,' Dhillon said. 'That's illegal.'
'You might call it ordinary pandering of a retail politician, but the city of Chicago actually has a long and lurid history of rent-seeking and favoritism and nepotism and all other manner of discrimination and specifically racial discrimination,' she said, without noting that discrimination and violence against Black residents of Chicago, including segregation, redlining, the 1919 race riots and racial discrimination among police, far outweighed any advantages they received.
Dhillon told Newsmax it was an 'open and shut case' that Johnson was discriminating based on race, but the investigation would determine how wide-ranging the behavior was and how far back it went.
Juan Perea, a professor at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law who specializes in racial inequality and civil rights, said it was unusual for the Justice Department to launch an investigation into Johnson's administration on its own. Typically, employment discrimination matters are handled by the EEOC.
In Johnson's case, there are no allegations that an applicant was improperly denied a job because of racial discrimination. So the Justice Department is investigating whether Johnson's hiring practices had a 'disparate impact' on the makeup of his workforce.
If the Justice Department can show that type of pattern, the Johnson administration would have to prove its hiring practices are neutral or related to a business necessity, he explained.
But Trump himself issued an executive order in April to 'eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible to avoid violating the Constitution, federal civil rights laws and basic American ideals.'
'Disparate-impact liability is wholly inconsistent with the Constitution and threatens the commitment to merit and equality of opportunity that forms the foundation of the American Dream. Under my administration, citizens will be treated equally before the law and as individuals, not consigned to a certain fate based on their immutable characteristics,' Trump's order said.
Perea said the order wouldn't prevent the Justice Department from using the same tool against the city of Chicago, because presidential policies often affect how federal agencies enforce workplace discrimination laws.
'Trump wants to eliminate disparate-impact liability for people he likes. He basically wants to make it harder for Black people and minorities to bring disparate-impact actions with respect to majority white workforces,' Perea said. 'But that doesn't prevent him from using a disparate-impact action against a predominantly Black workforce. You can do both.'
The Trump administration has promoted the idea that white workers regularly face discrimination because of DEI initiatives. The EEOC, under acting Chair Andrea Lucas, publicly questioned 20 large law firms in March about their diversity initiatives. Lucas also accused Harvard University of 'engaging in a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against white, Asian, male, or straight employees, applicants, and training program participants.'
But Perea said employment discrimination against white people was a 'cultivated fiction' that 'essentially doesn't exist' as white employees and applicants rarely file racial discrimination cases with the EEOC. One study by the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that, over a five-year period, white people filed only one racial discrimination complaint for every 100,000 employees, compared with 195 cases for every 100,000 Black employees.
As Trump changes the face of federal leadership, his administration is also completely overhauling many of the federal institutions charged with fighting discrimination.
The Justice Department is at the forefront of those changes. Trump has fired or pushed out top leaders in the agency, which traditionally has distanced itself from the White House, and installed leaders loyal to him in top posts.
Dhillon, head of the civil rights division that's investigating Johnson, was a prominent conservative activist in California who represented the 2020 Trump campaign and disputed the fact that Biden won that race.
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, opposed her appointment to lead the civil rights division, which he called the 'crown jewel' of the Justice Department.
'I cannot and will not support a nominee whose record suggests she is more likely to attack civil rights than defend them,' Durbin said in an April statement.
Three weeks later, Durbin and other Democrats on the panel pushed for more information about changes Dhillon made during her initial weeks on the job, which they said 'may well be inconsistent with Congress' intent' in enacting the Civil Rights Act that the division enforces. They noted many career lawyers from the civil rights division left their jobs in the first few months of the Trump administration.
According to Justice Connection, a network of former Justice Department lawyers, about 70% of the civil enforcement attorneys have been forced out of the civil rights division. In January, the division had 365 attorneys, but now there are only 110 left. Just five of the 35 lawyers enforcing employment discrimination laws are still on the job.
At the same time, Dhillon has reframed the goals of each team in her division.
When it comes to employment, a new mission statement makes clear lawyers will pursue claims of discrimination against whites and non-whites and that the division 'will not tolerate a two-tiered application of Title VII (the employment section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) that protects only certain Americans from discrimination.'
Stacey Young, executive director and founder of Justice Connection who once worked in the civil rights division, said the new direction under Trump undermines civil rights laws.
'Targeting employers for DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility) initiatives isn't something that's contemplated by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the precedent that has evolved interpreting that statute. It's a political stunt, and they've weaponized the civil rights division to advance it,' she said.
Young also questioned the Trump administration's handling of the investigation into Johnson's office, pointing out that Dhillon sent a letter the day after Johnson made the comments touting the Black members of his administration.
'It is at the very least extremely unusual — and possibly unprecedented — that an investigation like this by the employment litigation section of the civil rights division would have been opened based only on comments like those,' she said.
'What the mayor said was, 'We have hired a lot more Black people.' He didn't seem to suggest, 'We made it clear that we were only hiring Black people. We are denying non-Black people jobs,'' she said. 'Simply celebrating that greater diversity exists is not the same as discrimination.'