Donald Trump’s Cabinet Is on Track To Be the Least Diverse This Century

Donald Trump’s new Cabinet is on track to become the least racially diverse administration since the start of the 21st Century.
Since winning the race for the White House last week, Trump has turned to the transition and appointing members of his new Cabinet, most of which so far have been been white men.
When Trump was elected president in 2016, his Cabinet included 18 white men, making it the least racially diverse Cabinet since former President Ronald Raegan’s time in office in 1980, the New York Times reported.
A U.S. government Cabinet has 24 number of positions in total and the Vice President, with 15 different departments among other Cabinet-level positions.
Of the 15 different departments, Trump has appointed six new heads, and five of those so far have been white and four of those have been men. Senator Mark Rubio is currently the exception as he would be the first Latino Secretary of State.
Of the other Cabinet-level positions, another five have been appointed, four of which are white, with the exception being Tulsi Gabbard, who was the first American-Samoan and Hindu member of Congress.
This means that out of the 25 positions in Trump’s wider Cabinet, of the 11 he’s already chosen, nine are white. His vice president JD Vance is also white.
This leaves Trump’s Cabinet to date at around 81 percent white, while his previous Cabinet in 2016 was 75 percent white male.
The Trump administration has been contacted by Newsweek via email for comment.
Trump has been tapping more millennials into positions in the Cabinet than Joe Biden did in 2020, with five members of his wider Cabinet being born between the years of 1981 and 1996.
Biden’s Cabinet had only one millennial when it was first assembled, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who is now 42-years-old.
Racial diversity was established as important in government when Biden entered the White House in 2021, as it was stated by the administration that “on his first day in office,” he signed the Executive Order 13985, which ensured that “advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our Government.”
The release added: “The Federal Government should have a workforce that reflects the diversity of the American people. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible workplaces yield higher-performing organizations.”
Elsewhere in U.S. politics, racial diversity has been improving, as Pew Research found in 2023 that a quarter of voting members of the U.S. Congress identified their race or ethnicity as something other than non-Hispanic White, making the 118th Congress the most racially and ethnically diverse to date.
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