Federal Job Cuts Hit Black Women Hard--a Year Later, Unemployment Is Up

Losses in government positions are undermining a critical engine of economic mobility for the Black middle class.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/24/federal-job-cuts-hit-black-women-hard-unemployment-is-up/


People wait on the platform at the Metro Center station in downtown Washington. Credit: Alexander Farnsworth/iStock

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.

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