Baltimore, Maryland

Baltimore’s public library system, formally known as the Enoch Pratt Free Library, was in deep trouble when Carla Hayden became its director in 1993. Branches had fallen into disrepair, book loans were down, and repeated budget cuts had left the system struggling to meet the growing demand for computers and Internet access.

By the time she left in 2016 to be the Library of Congress’s first Black and first female Head Librarian, the Pratt Library had redeemed itself, offering a range of digital services and opening its first new branch in thirty years as well an afterschool center that offered homework assistance, college admissions support, and career counseling. In 2015, during the protests that followed the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, Hayden won wide praise for keeping all the city’s branch libraries open, thus providing residents with a safe place to go at a treacherous moment.

As Head Librarian of the Library of Congress, Hayden found new ways to showcase its many treasures, famously inviting Lizzo to play James Madison’s crystal flute. Under Hayden’s leadership, the Library used information technology to make its collections far more accessible to online researchers across the country. At the same time, she launched an “Of the People” initiative to add more works by Blacks, Hispanic and Indigenous Americans to the Library’s collections and to bring more people of color into the Library itself. The American Library Association described her as “a wise and faithful steward” of that institution – a leader whose achievements had “exceeded the greatest expectations of the many advocates who endorsed her nomination in 2016.”

Nine years into a ten-year term, however, Hayden was unceremoniously fired in a two-sentence email. Addressed to “Carla” from the Presidential Personnel Office, the email gave no reason for her dismissal, but White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt later explained that Hayden “did not fit the needs of the American people.” Leavitt alluded to “quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children” — a strange point to be making about an institution that generally isn’t open to children in the first place.

The decision to fire Hayden turned out to have come on the heels of a social media post by a group known as the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), which maintained a “watchlist” of federal employees it viewed as “driving radical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives within the federal government.” AAF’s tweet, sent at 4:44 p.m. on May 8, urged Trump to fire Hayden because she “is woke, anti-Trump, and promotes trans-ing kids. It’s time to get her OUT and hire a new guy for the job!” That same evening, AAF sent another tweet, thanking Trump for heeding its advice.

A February 2025 article in The Guardian noted AAF’s ties to other right-wing groups, including the Conservative Partnership Institute, which, among its activities, conducted trainings for young Republican Congressional staffers. Hayden was just one of a number of prominent black women targeted by AAF in a watchlist that included their photos, names, titles, salary, work history, and political contributions. In August 2025, Reuters reported that 88 federal workers named on watchlists like AAF’s had either been dismissed or placed on administrative leave. In June 2025, ProPublica reviewed employment terminations across government agencies, and found a disproportionate impact on Black women and women of color. That seems to have been another consequence of the watchlists.

Many of the people interviewed by Reuters said they had felt obliged to take measures to protect themselves and their families; those measures included heightened home security, dropping off social media, and, in two cases, fleeing the country. Stefanie Anderson, a CDC specialist in infectious disease control, recalled that her “heart [had] dropped” upon seeing her name and picture on the AAF list. It reminded her of fugitive slave advertisements. “It made me feel like a criminal on a wanted poster,” she said.

Posted on January 23, 2026