From George Washington's first cabinet in 1789 until 1933, every person a president chose to lead a federal department was a man. Until 1966, every one of them was white. This page looks at how that changed, appointment by appointment, and how recent presidents compare.
Each nameplate below marks the first time a president picked someone from that group for the cabinet or a cabinet-level post. The party of the president who made the appointment is noted at the bottom, and you'll see the barriers fell under both.
Cabinets only started to vary much in recent decades, so the clearest comparison is between the starting cabinets of the last four presidential terms (Trump appears twice). Each bar shows that group's share of the president's first cabinet, set against its share of the US population, which is the dashed line.
Figures are for each president's initial cabinet. Obama, Trump I and Biden percentages follow an NPR analysis of the three administrations' first cabinets. Trump II figures follow the Washington Post's February 2025 analysis, which counted 9 of 24 Cabinet and Cabinet-level nominees as women (~38%) and 4 as people of colour (~17%); the Center for American Women and Politics instead counts 8 of 24 women (~33%). “People of colour” reflects self-identification or published genealogy. *The ~42% benchmark is the complement of the 58.4% who are non-Hispanic White alone (US Census QuickFacts, 2024); Census has no single official “people of colour” category. No cabinet in US history has yet mirrored the country's overall demographics.
Four presidents have served since 2001, and with Trump twice that makes five starting cabinets. Set against the long climb in Part I, their cabinets rose, then dropped sharply, then reached a high point, then dropped again. Each one either pushed things forward, held steady, or stepped back.
The path of one measure: people of colour as a share of the starting cabinethigher = closer to the country ↑
*Bush comes before the consistent modern dataset, so his figure is an estimate from his first-term cabinet. The others use the sources in Part II.
At the time, Bush's first cabinet was praised as about as diverse as Clinton's. His most senior posts broke real barriers, though the diversity sat at the very top rather than being spread across the government.
The first Black president put together a cabinet more representative than any Republican or Democratic one before it, and carried that record onto the Supreme Court.
The first-term cabinet went the other way, with the lowest share of women and people of colour in decades, though a few high-profile picks stood out.
Biden promised a cabinet that “looks like America”, and put together the most diverse one in US history, with a run of historic firsts. Even so, it still fell short of the country's overall makeup.
The second-term cabinet again fell well short on race, but roughly doubled the number of women compared with the first term, and like the others it still logged a few firsts of its own.
Counting who sits in a cabinet only tells you so much. A few things to keep in mind when weighing up any president's approach.
A headline percentage can look modest and still break real ground. Biden's cabinet had historic firsts that no single number captures: the first Native American secretary, the first openly gay confirmed secretary, and the first woman to run the Treasury.
Even the most diverse cabinet assembled has not matched the makeup of the country. Analysts who track this note that true parity would mean roughly half of any president's picks being women, and about 40% being people of colour.
Presidents also weigh loyalty, ideology, governing experience, wealth, region and party. Some of them, Clinton and Biden among them, set out to build a cabinet that “looks like America”. Others did not treat demographics as a goal at all. Whether it should be one is itself a contested political question.
Race, ethnicity and religion here rest on self-identification or public genealogy, and the boxes are fuzzy at the edges: people of European, North African or Middle Eastern background are commonly counted as white, and some appointees fit more than one category at once.