The Smithsonian secretary says Trump did not drive him from office. But his departure raises a larger question about the administration's campaign against DEI, Black leadership and representative government.
by Alvin Blackshear | Historian & Researcher <ablackshear@gmail.com>
On September 8, Lonnie G. Bunch III announced he will retire as secretary of the Smithsonian at the end of 2026, closing out nearly 38 years at the institution. Bunch became secretary in 2019, the first African American and first historian to hold the Smithsonian's highest office. Before that, he built the National Museum of African American History and Culture from almost nothing, guiding it to its 2016 opening on the National Mall.
His retirement lands at a remarkable moment. Since early 2025, the Trump administration has pushed to strip what it calls "improper ideology" from the Smithsonian, challenging exhibits on race, slavery and immigration, pressuring the institution's leadership, and, just days before Bunch's announcement, threatening to withdraw federal-agency support altogether. Bunch insists that pressure isn't why he's leaving. But he also says the moment is one "we're at a time when people are challenging that independence," and he has pledged to keep fighting for the Smithsonian's independence until his last day.
Take him at his word. His departure isn't proof of anything by itself. But it's an occasion to ask a bigger question: what is happening to Black leadership inside the institutions of the federal government?
A pattern, not an anecdote
Start counting names. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fired. Carla Hayden, the first Black person and first woman to serve as Librarian of Congress, fired. Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman on the National Labor Relations Board, removed. Alvin Brown, the only Black member of the National Transportation Safety Board, removed. Robert Primus, a Black member of the Surface Transportation Board, removed. Peggy Carr, a 35-year Education Department veteran and Black commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, removed. Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to serve as a Federal Reserve governor, targeted for removal, a move now tied up in litigation.
Rachel Maddow and other reporters have compiled versions of this list since the spring, and in one federal complaint, attorneys for a fired official argued that roughly three-quarters of Black officials serving at independent federal agencies had been removed under this administration. How many names does it take before we stop treating each firing as its own isolated story and start asking whether there's a pattern?
DEI as the operational language of the personnel story
The administration's public rationale is that diversity, equity and inclusion programs themselves constitute discrimination, and that dismantling them restores merit-based, race-neutral government. That's the stated case, and it should be reported accurately. But it's worth asking what "DEI" means operationally once that label gets applied to institutions, personnel decisions and historical exhibits alike. The real question isn't whether the acronym is popular or unpopular. It's this: when an administration defines efforts to broaden representation of historically excluded Americans as discrimination, who loses when those efforts disappear?
Beyond the famous names
The prominent firings may end up being less significant than what's happening to ordinary Black federal employees. Black Americans have long been overrepresented in the federal workforce relative to their share of the population, and not by accident: federal jobs offered access to professional careers, stable pay, pensions and advancement at a time when much of the private economy discriminated against them.
Now consider the scale of the current downsizing. According to the Government Accountability Office, the federal workforce across 22 major agencies fell by nearly 256,000 employees (from about 2.27 million to 2.01 million) between December 2024 and January 2026, the product of roughly 378,000 separations against about 127,000 new hires. That reframes the story. It's no longer just "Trump fired Black leaders." It's a question about what's happening to Black participation in the federal government as a whole.
Inside the Pentagon
The military deserves its own look, because the evidence there is distinct. Gen. Brown's removal as Joint Chiefs chairman was followed by other senior Black military departures and a broader anti-DEI restructuring at the Pentagon. Reporting has also described Black and female officers being disproportionately dropped from promotion lists, and a Pentagon purge of DEI-related content that swept up material on the Tuskegee Airmen, Jackie Robinson and other minority military figures, some of it later restored after public criticism. That raises a sharper question than "Is the Pentagon eliminating DEI programs?" It's whether the campaign is reshaping who advances, who leads, and which chapters of American military history the government is willing to commemorate.
An old American question
America has been here before. When Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913, Black Americans had built a real foothold in federal employment. His administration segregated federal workplaces; Black employees were separated, reassigned, demoted and dismissed. The point isn't that Trump is Wilson. The point is that federal employment can be expanded or contracted as an avenue of Black opportunity through administrative power alone, with no new law required.
Representative government, not just a demographic count
Representation isn't only about whether Congress looks like the country. It's also about whether the institutions that exercise government power (the military, the Federal Reserve, regulatory commissions, the federal courts, the civil service, libraries, museums, scientific and education agencies, national cultural institutions) reflect the population they govern. What happens to representative government when the people making decisions inside it increasingly stop resembling the people governed by it? That's a question about legitimacy and institutional access, not just headcounts.
Back to Bunch, and who tells the story
Which brings us back to Bunch, who is more than an opening anecdote. The fight over Smithsonian exhibits dealing with slavery and race isn't separate from the personnel story; it's the other half of it. The administration has accused the institution of presenting an insufficiently celebratory account of the country; Bunch has defended scholarship that presents accomplishments alongside failures. There are two questions running through this moment: who gets to hold positions of federal authority, and who gets to tell America's history once they're there? Bunch, the Smithsonian's first Black secretary and the historian who built its African American history museum, sits at the intersection of both.
What the evidence supports
I don't believe these developments are coincidental, and I don't think "DEI" fully explains what we're witnessing. When Black leaders are repeatedly removed, Black federal workers disproportionately absorb the consequences of downsizing, programs meant to broaden participation get relabeled as discriminatory, Black military advancement is disrupted, and institutions built to tell Black history come under federal pressure, racial motivation has to be considered as a possible explanation for the pattern. That's a different claim than saying any individual official was fired because he or she is Black; it says the cumulative project and its effects are evidence from which that motivation can be debated. The precise extent to which racial animus drove any single decision remains uncertain. That's not the same as saying there's no evidence to examine.
There's a further question worth sitting with: if the administration succeeds in linking Black advancement itself to "DEI," does every Black official become vulnerable to the assumption that they represent diversity rather than merit? That may be one of the most consequential effects of this campaign, and it deserves investigation rather than assumption.
Lonnie Bunch says Donald Trump didn't push him out, and there's no reason to doubt him. But his retirement is a fair moment to look around Washington and take stock. Who occupies the government's senior offices now? Who is leaving the federal workforce? Who advances through the military? Which histories can still be told, and who decides? Every president dismisses officials; that's not the question. The question is whether the federal government is being systematically reshaped in ways that diminish Black representation, Black institutional authority and Black influence over the American story.
