Federal Job Cuts Hit Black Women Hard—a Year Later, Unemployment Is Up
This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. It is co-published here with permission.
Kerene Tayloe is still unemployed a year after leaving what she thought was her dream job in the federal government.
The 45-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based lawyer is navigating a tight job market, competing against the 271,825 other federal sector employees who have also been pushed out or fired during President Donald Trump’s second term. At the same time, the Trump administration’s opposition to environmental justice efforts, her area of expertise, has halted federal funding to private entities while making donors more reluctant to fund such initiatives, drying up an already limited pool of jobs. “If you don’t have the connections with someone at an organization to have them flag your application you’re not going to move very far,” she said.
Her struggle is not just personal. For decades, the federal government has helped build the Black middle class, offering a relative refuge from pay discrimination by providing transparent wage scales and codified rules on hiring and promotions. But the second Trump administration has sought to significantly reduce that workforce through mass firings and repeated offers to resign. Government agencies have abandoned work they have historically undertaken and, in many cases, are being redirected to further Trump’s priorities—from mass deportation to pursuing his political rivals—a shift that has forced many to leave their posts. These actions, done in the name of cutting costs, as well as promoting Trump’s agenda, have saved little money.
But they’ve been costly for those who lost their jobs. Black women have been the group most heavily affected by the whittling of the federal sector, with their unemployment rate up more than half a percentage point since Trump took office. In March, it stood at 6.1%, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to the country’s overall rate of 4.3%. Tayloe, like other current and former federal workers interviewed for this story, fear losing their tenuous grip on middle class life and falling down the economic ladder. Their fall will reverberate widely: Black women are more likely to be the breadwinners in their families than their white counterparts and support extended family members.
Tayloe was on her way to becoming a homeowner before Donald Trump took office last year. She had been working at a nonprofit focused on environmental justice when she was asked to join the Biden administration’s Department of Energy in 2021 in a job she said was perfectly aligned with her expertise. It represented a huge financial step up: an $80,000 pay boost over what she had been earning at her previous job. The extra money and “the stability of having a government job” gave her the confidence to start talking to a real estate agent and tour houses in the Washington, D.C. area, she said.
She saw a long future for herself in the federal government. “I was committed to staying,” she said.
But the work she did at the department was based on an executive order, not law. That meant that when Trump took office, “My work disappeared. It literally just didn’t exist anymore,” she said. Soon after taking office, Trump issued a series of executive orders rolling back environmental justice initiatives. “The stability that I had hoped for was gone,” she said.
When the first deferred resignation offer arrived—promising continued pay and benefits in exchange for leaving her job—she didn’t take it, fearful that she wouldn’t actually get paid. But after watching the number of department staff rapidly dwindle, and those who remained assigned two or three additional roles, she decided to take a second offer last April. She received her last paycheck at the end of September.
As of 2024, Black Americans made up about 19% of federal sector employment despite comprising about 14% of the general population. The decimation of the federal sector—the workforce shrunk by 12% between September 2024 and January 2026—has therefore taken a heavy toll on Black workers. But it’s Black women who have taken the biggest hit: They lost 95,371 federal government jobs in 2025, about a third of the total contraction. The Trump administration has attacked federal diversity and equity programs where Black women were more likely to work and that had helped them advance. The biggest federal employee cuts have occurred in agencies with the largest shares of nonwhite and female workers.
“Most of the increase in the Black unemployment rate over the last year has been due to employment losses for Black women” rather than more of them entering the labor force to find work, said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy.
Black women’s employment rate fell 1.4 percentage points last year, one of the steepest declines in the last quarter century. Black men as well as women of other races have not seen similar declines in their employment rates. “There is something unique happening to Black women in particular,” Wilson said.
This rise in unemployment has been particularly felt by Black women like Tayloe who have higher education. The share of Black women with bachelor’s degrees in the labor force fell by 3.5 percentage points last year, the largest drop for any educational level. About half of Black workers in the federal sector have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Wilson said that even as unemployment has risen, the share of Black women returning to work is declining. “Job seekers aren’t getting new jobs,” she said. The service, manufacturing and finance sectors have also been shedding Black female workers, swelling the ranks of the jobless. If Black women aren’t able to find jobs that pay on par with what they made in the federal government, it “will have a long-lasting impact on the Black middle class,” Wilson said.
SHERNICE MUNDELL WORKED FOR A DECADE at a private health care provider in Maryland before taking a job with the federal Office of Personnel Management in August 2024. It paid nearly double what she had been earning. Only a month in, she was urged to apply for a job in another department. She got it, moving up another pay grade.
Mundell saw no way to advance in her old job; in the federal government, there was “so much room to grow,” she said. Meanwhile, the extra pay “was a big change for me,” she said. It allowed her to travel and save up to buy a new car. In two years she planned to buy a new house. “Everything was looking up for me,” she said.
Mundell, 48 and a member of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 32 union, had never been fired from a job. But when Trump was inaugurated she was still a probationary employee. In mid-February last year, she was invited to a mysterious video meeting. A pre-recorded video told her she was being fired. A half hour later, her access to her work accounts was shut off.
Despite applying for three or four jobs daily, she remained out of work for six months. “I would get, ‘You’re qualified but we’re going to put your application on file,’” she recounted. Then in July, about a week before her unemployment benefits were going to run out, she got a job at a university health system. The pay is less than she had made at OPM and she still hasn’t shaken the experience of getting fired. When she got her new job, “it was just like I was just waiting for the next shoe to drop,” she said.
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAS HISTORICALLY offered financial stability for Black workers trying to climb into the middle class. By 1912, it had become the largest employer for Black Americans, Wilson said. It wasn’t always welcoming; President Woodrow Wilson segregated entire departments within the federal government, going so far as to erect physical barricades between white and Black office workers. But during World War II’s rapid expansion of government employment, Black workers made inroads, and by the 1960s they had secured a solid foothold. They gained 28% of new jobs in the federal government in that decade despite making up 10% of the country’s population.
Meanwhile, civil rights legislation established affirmative action programs in the public sector, and hiring and promotion rules helped curb discrimination. Published pay scales “reduce the chance of someone being paid less than someone else doing the same kind of job,” Wilson said. Federal jobs, often unionized, also offer more job security, as well as benefits like health care and pensions.
The drastic reduction in federal jobs, then, “can have some longer-term impacts if we don’t quickly change course and try to get back on track,” Wilson said.
TAYLOE HAS FOUND HERSELF APPLYING for nonprofit and governmental jobs that would have been a good fit for her 15 years ago, when she was far less skilled. “I want to do work that reflects the years that I’ve put in,” she said. She advanced in the hiring process for a low-level Capitol Hill job, but it would have come with a steep pay cut, returning her to what she made before her federal position.
To get by, she’s had to withdraw funds from a 401(k) account and put purchases on her credit cards. Unable to afford health insurance, she said she is being extra “diligent and careful” with her health. Her dream of homeownership is on hold. “It’s been deferred,” she said.
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