Darnese Foster had the job she wanted, a grant management specialist at the Department of Health and Human Services, and in 2025 it was gone.
“I had finally gotten my dream job. It was devastating to have it snatched from me,” she said.
Foster is 47, a single mother of two, and one of a very large number. A study by Brandon Enriquez, a labor economist at the University of Maryland, found that Black women’s federal employment fell 25 percent after the cuts, and that at its lowest point in April 2025 it was, in the study’s own words, “almost 50% reduced for Black women, with little effect for other groups.” Employment recovered partly in the months after.
That is the number. The year is what the number does not show. Foster has applied for more than a hundred jobs. Her unemployment benefits ran six months and then stopped. “I would go in a corner and cry,” she said of the first weeks. “I’ll drop my youngest off at school and just sit in the car and cry.”
Raquel Martin, a licensed clinical psychologist whose work is on Black mental health, puts the weight of it in order. “It’s the sudden loss of predictability and control, identity, community, and even future planning,” she said. And then the line that moves this out of the personal and back into the policy where it started: “Mental health is affected by policy decisions, economic instability, and access to health care and employment protection.”
The federal government was never an accident for Black women. It hired when other employers did not, it posted its pay scales, and it promoted on a published ladder. A 2025 report by Sarah Javaid at the National Women’s Law Center found that women were 46 percent of the federal workforce in September 2024 and a majority of its probationary workers, which is to say a majority of the people easiest to let go.
Foster is still applying. She is also still saying out loud what a year of it has been, which is the harder of the two.
