For Black workers and minority-owned businesses in the United States, the economic landscape in 2025 has become increasingly precarious, shaped by a convergence of historic inequities and new federal policies that threaten to unwind decades of civil rights progress. While the country’s overall job market shows signs of resilience, the gap between Black and white Americans is once again widening, and the rules of economic opportunity are being rewritten in ways that risk freezing longstanding disparities in place.
According to The New York Times, Black unemployment has risen sharply, climbing from 6% to 7.5% over just four months. By comparison, the unemployment rate for white workers has edged down slightly to 3.7%. This pattern is hardly new. Since the federal government began tracking unemployment by race in the 1970s, Black joblessness has consistently hovered at twice the rate of white workers, a stubborn gap fueled by unequal access to quality education, the enduring legacy of mass incarceration, and systemic discrimination stretching across generations.
But recent policy shifts have added new hurdles. The Trump administration’s efforts to pare back diversity programs and trim the federal workforce have hit Black employees especially hard. For many, the expiration of pandemic-era public subsidies in 2024 marked a turning point. While those emergency measures had cushioned the initial economic blow and helped speed up hiring, their end left Black workers exposed just as the labor market began to slow. Last year, Black households were the only racial group in which median income fell and poverty rates rose, according to the US Census Bureau, as reported by The New York Times.
Job losses have been particularly acute among Black women in professional services, including human resources, as federal layoffs and hiring freezes disproportionately gutted roles long occupied by African Americans. According to data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute, these setbacks are not just a matter of lost paychecks—they threaten wealth accumulation, professional advancement, and the promise of upward mobility for future generations. Persistent joblessness, after all, doesn’t just sap current income; it perpetuates intergenerational inequality.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s policy changes have reached deep into the realm of federal contracting and civil rights enforcement, sparking alarm among minority and women-owned businesses nationwide. On October 6, 2025, new guidelines were issued that require nearly 2,000 such businesses at St. Louis’s Lambert International Airport to prove—often with evidence locked in their competitors’ private files—that they’ve been victims of discrimination, or risk losing their ability to bid on federal contracts. Contractors must now submit personal narratives detailing specific economic harm compared to “non-disadvantaged” businesses and demonstrate, by a “preponderance of evidence,” that they were denied financing on terms their white competitors received.
But as Ray Hartmann’s Soapbox reports, this requirement is nearly impossible to meet. Bank loan terms are confidential. Competitors’ financing deals are private. Contractors are being asked to document discrimination they cannot possibly access. And, as critics see it, that’s precisely the point. “By shifting the burden of proof onto minority and disadvantaged business owners with these deeply subjective requirements, the federal government risks reviving old discriminatory barriers under the guise of ‘neutrality,’” Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis City NAACP, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The timing of these changes couldn’t be more consequential. Lambert Airport is embarking on a $2.8 billion terminal renovation—the largest construction project in the region in decades. From 2015 to 2019, disadvantaged businesses accounted for 28% of contract participation under the old program. Those contracts represented not just jobs, but real wealth-building opportunities in communities long excluded from economic prosperity. Now, as the money arrives, the rules are changing.
The new guidelines are part of a broader national campaign to dismantle diversity initiatives. On his first day in office, President Trump revoked the 1965 executive order requiring federal contractors to maintain affirmative action plans, a foundational policy of the civil rights era. In May 2025, the Department of Justice moved to dismantle the $37 billion Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program, which serves 49,000 contractors nationwide. All federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) staff have been placed on leave for eventual termination.
It’s a dramatic reversal of a program first created in 1983 during the Reagan administration—a bipartisan acknowledgment that discrimination in contracting was real and required remedy. Now, federal officials estimate the new rules will cause a 10% drop in certified firms nationwide and cost $92 million to implement. But as Hartmann notes, the true impact will be far greater, as these changes follow the blueprint laid out in Project 2025, which calls for prosecuting governments, universities, corporations, and other employers with DEI programs.
John Bowman, president of the NAACP St. Louis County and an airport commissioner, described the situation bluntly to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “The political scapegoating … will have a devastating impact on minority and women-owned businesses.” For many, the message is clear: the very programs designed to level the playing field after decades of exclusion are being dismantled just as they are needed most.
The historical context is impossible to ignore. In 1973, the Nixon administration’s Department of Justice sued Donald Trump and his father for refusing to rent apartments to Black families across dozens of New York buildings. The government charged that Trump Management discriminated “because of race and color,” imposed different rental terms based on race, and misrepresented apartment availability. Trump’s response to the federal lawsuit was unequivocal: “They are absolutely ridiculous. We never have discriminated, and we never would.” The case was settled without Trump admitting wrongdoing, paying a fine, or having to prove his innocence—even as the Justice Department had amassed evidence of discrimination.
Now, five decades later, President Trump’s administration demands that minority contractors prove they’ve been discriminated against with documentation he himself never had to produce. As Ray Hartmann’s Soapbox puts it, “Discrimination you can deny, even with the Justice Department’s lawyers and evidence arrayed against you. Oppression you must document in triplicate, with impossible proof, or lose everything.”
Some economic indicators offer faint hope. The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in September for the first time this year and signaled that further cuts could follow, potentially making it easier for businesses to borrow and hire. Yet, as The New York Times cautions, as long as structural policy barriers remain, Black workers and minority-owned businesses may never fully benefit from such macroeconomic shifts.
Ultimately, the rise in Black unemployment and the dismantling of civil rights programs reflect not just the ups and downs of economic cycles, but the enduring power of policy to shape who gets a fair shot at the American dream—and who gets left behind. Without targeted interventions that address both historic and emerging barriers, the communities most in need of opportunity risk being locked out for another generation.
The story unfolding in 2025 is a stark reminder: progress, hard-won over decades, can be undone in the space of a few policy decisions. For Black workers and minority-owned businesses, the challenge now is not just to weather the current storm, but to fight for a future where opportunity is truly shared.