The Biden administration has a new warning for private employers: “We are going to start being a competitor of yours,” said Dr. Janice Underwood, director of the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) at the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM), in an interview with The 19th.
The federal government will fight to attract top talent to its workforce. To that goal, OPM, which serves as the human resources arm of the federal government, has released its first-ever report on diversity across the federal workforce. The 31-page document breaks down hiring and retention across agencies and gives a snapshot of the administration’s efforts to remove barriers for applicants from underrepresented communities. It’s an area where the federal government has historically struggled, Underwood concedes.
In June 2021, Biden issued an executive order directing OPM and other federal agencies to draft a strategic plan for prioritizing diversity in hiring and retention. The February 15 report is a result of that order and offers some of the first simple, publicly accessible demographic data on the federal workforce, with breakdowns by race, gender and disability.
The numbers reflect a federal government that made marginal gains toward racial diversity between 2017 and 2021. Black employees accounted for 18.15 percent of the federal workforce in 2017 and 18.19 percent in 2021, while the percentage of Latinx employees jumped from 8.75 percent to 9.95 percent. Asian workers went from 5.99 to 6.49 percent, and Native American and Alaskan Native workers dipped in representation from 1.69 percent in 2017 to 1.62 in 2021. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders made up 0.51 percent of workers in 2017 and 0.59 percent in 2021.
Women made up 43.38 percent of the workforce in 2017, a number that grew to 44.44 percent in 2021. Nonbinary workers are largely excluded from the tracking, an area that the report and Underwood note will change with future reporting.
“Having this gender binary doesn’t go far enough [and] is not inclusive for our workforce,” Underwood told The 19th. “So OPM and the office of DEIA in particular are really taking the lead and reimagining what that could look like, everything from what it looks like on forms to what it looks like when you apply for jobs.”
Underwood said the government can’t change what it doesn’t measure. Officials add that the tracking effort, in general, is critical to serving an increasingly diverse public and also competing for the top minds in hiring.
“In order to recruit and sustain the best talent, we must ensure every service-minded individual feels welcome and supported in contributing their talents to the Federal workforce,” said OPM Director Kiran Ahuja in a statement.
The first-ever report reflects a government in the midst of cultural change. Last September, OPM launched a council of chief diversity officers across federal agencies. The group has been tasked with setting government goals and benchmarks and identifying obstacles that might keep some groups from applying for jobs.
Among the first changes has been to the federal government’s practices for hiring interns, positions that have historically been unpaid.
“Everybody can’t afford to move to Washington, D.C., for an unpaid internship, and we have amazing talent all over this nation that does not have proximity to Washington, D.C.,” Underwood said. “I’m really excited about the launch of the paid internship guidance that all of our federal agencies have received.”
While the report does not track employees’ LGBTQ+ status, it does emphasize the expansion of LGBTQ+-friendly practices, including increased use of pronouns throughout government to affirm trans and nonbinary colleagues, as well as reiterating that all contracted insurance carriers cover gender-affirming care.
It also offers data on disability hiring for the first time. Efforts to increase disability employment in the federal government are long-standing. Since the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the federal government has been obligated to hire people with disabilities, although the law did not set any particular numbers or benchmarks.
In 2010, President Barack Obama issued an executive order stating that the federal government, as the nation’s largest employer, must “become a model for the employment of individuals with disabilities.” The order directed federal agencies to improve efforts to recruit, hire and retain workers with disabilities, with the goal of hiring 100,000 more people with disabilities into the federal government over five years.
According to a 2015 report from the OPM, the government slightly exceeded that goal, at 109,575 new hires. However, the federal government has struggled with retention. People with disabilities working for the government are three times more likely than their non-disabled colleagues to quit.
In January 2017, before President Donald Trump was sworn in, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released a rule to amend regulations related to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that set a goal for 12 percent representation of people with disabilities among the federal workforce. At that time, 11.1 percent of federal employees identified as disabled.
According to the latest report from OPM, 16.6 percent of federal employees identify as having a disability, surpassing the benchmark set under the Trump administration. The report did not include information on disability representation in leadership.
Biden’s executive order requiring a government-wide strategic plan brought disability employment under the same umbrella as other diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility efforts.
The report is expected to have broad implications because the federal government often sets a standard for the private sector in business practices.
“We endeavor to be the model employer for the nation,” Underwood said. “But we have a lot to learn as well.”
This article originally appeared in The 19th.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.