Black women were disproportionately impacted by DOGE cuts. A year later, they're rebuilding careers for themselves and each other

This time last year, Victoria Chege’s career with the federal workforce ended nearly as soon as it had started.

Chege took her role with the Department of Health and Human Services in December 2024. By February 2025, she became part the “Valentine’s Day massacre.” That’s what some federal staffers call the weekend when tens of thousands of them got emails saying they were being let go.

The Trump administration was starting to cut down the federal workforce through its new Department of Government Efficiency, and they were some of the first to go.

Among those disproportionately impacted were Black women, who make up 12% of the federal workforce (almost double their 7% share in the overall U.S. workforce) and experienced the largest federal employment losses between 2024 and 2025, says Valerie Wilson, a labor economist and director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy.

The DOGE cuts, which continued for several months, contributed to a disturbing trend: Black women’s unemployment rate skyrocketed to a high of 7.5% in September 2025, compared to 4.4% unemployment among all U.S. workers at that time.

The overall net loss in employed Black women in 2025 was driven entirely by public-sector losses, with most job losses in federal government, according to research from Wilson. Among Black women, the largest losses were for college graduates.

In the year since the beginning of the DOGE layoffs, some Black women tell CNBC Make It they’ve been turning to their peers, sharing resources and building community to figure out what their careers and lives look like after working in the federal government.

The government sector announced over 308,000 job cuts in 2025, up 703% from 2024, and made up the bulk of layoff announcements for the year, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

As part of those layoffs, Chege, now 25, says she spent the first few days processing tough emotions. Like many people who start working for the federal government, she hoped to build a career there. She’d gotten her master’s degree in public health and says she hoped to make a difference by working on health initiatives in the public sector.

Days after getting her notice, Chege sprang into action. Chege started posting information about DOGE layoffs on TikTok to help make sense of the confusion. People included in the mass firings, many of them probationary workers new to their federal jobs, were told their official end date would come in mid-March; as court cases piled up against the Trump administration’s actions, that end date kept getting pushed back.

There was a lot of back and forth about what was legal and what wasn’t, what employees were owed, and what timeline to expect. Chege says she tried to break it all down for herself and her colleagues.

Her viral videos led to meetings with Congressmembers who advocated on behalf of federal workers. Chege says building a platform gave her a sense of purpose.

“I was really happy to share my story with others,” Chege says. She says she heard from other federal workers online who said they were glad she was being vocal about what they were going through, and that seeing her videos made them feel less alone.

Some online communities are becoming real-life support groups.

Nneka Obiekwe, 37, is the founder of Vandene, a social impact group, and creator of Black Women Rising, a community referral network she started in September 2025 for Black women impacted by job loss, including in the federal workforce, Obiekwe says.

Obiekwe isn’t a government employee but, as a consultant based in the Washington, D.C., area saw how hard the federal layoffs hit her network.

Many departments targeted by DOGE cuts had even larger shares of Black women compared to their share in the overall federal workforce, including the Department of Education where Black women made up more than a quarter of workers.

Obiekwe says she spent the spring and summer of 2025 flexing her contacts to get people connected to new jobs; by September, she’d exhausted her network and created the Black Women Rising WhatsApp group chat to bring more help in. She says more than 500 women joined the initial group within a day of posting it to Instagram Threads.

Shortly after, Obiekwe says she transitioned the effort to a Discord group, where members complete an intake form to better connect with one another based on industry, experience level, and where they are in their job search.

Black Women Rising currently has over 400 active members across the U.S. primarily in D.C., Atlanta and the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, Obiekwe says. The group forum offers channels to vent, but it’s also a place to spark real action. Obiekwe says members are encouraged to share opportunities they’ve heard from people in their own networks where they can make a direct referral.

Strategically building a secondary network could be key to getting these women into new jobs. Research from Stanford, MIT and Harvard scientists found that “weaker ties” on LinkedIn (think secondary connections, like an old coworker’s friend from college) lead to more job opportunities than a direct connection by nature of an expanded network.

Then, there’s the emotional benefit of a group like Black Women Rising, Obiekwe says. Members in D.C. and Atlanta recently organized their own meetups in February to provide real-life camaraderie and support. Women braved unseasonably cold weather to connect over coffee and Obiekwe says they sent messages along the lines of “I really needed this,” “I really feel seen” and “I feel energized again.”

The members of Black Women Rising are often highly skilled mid- to senior-level women, Obiekwe says, adding that among the roughly 100-person D.C. cohort, more than half are former federal workers now taking part-time or contract work, or starting their own businesses.

Those on the job market are now in the throes of figuring out how to translate their long public-sector careers to an impactful private sector role. That often means translating the skills and responsibilities on their resume to fit private-sector jobs, and adjusting to a new workplace culture, structure, pace and mission.

It’s a challenge Monique Fortenberry is facing head-on, and she’s helping other former federal workers do the same.

Fortenberry, 55, is a lawyer by trade and spent the majority of her career in the federal sphere working her way up to senior executive roles. She says she was placed on administrative leave when her office was “abolished” in January 2025. By late February, she was faced with the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” severance package offer and decided to take it, along with an early retirement package.

Though she could lead teams through structural changes on a professional level, Fortenberry says it was hard to navigate the shift on a personal level.

She says she messaged her network: “I don’t know if you’ve been impacted by recent events, but I have been, and I’m struggling a bit. If you are too, I’m pulling together a support circle, and please feel free to join me and share this information with other people.”

Around 20 people attended that first virtual meeting in March 2025; it energized Fortenberry to plan new sessions for the next several months.

Some attendees were federal workers on administrative leave, while others were still with the government and trying to find a way out. “The thing I remember most is that all of us were experiencing a great loss, but we were doing it alone,” Fortenberry says.

The sessions were an especially crucial resource for other senior women leaders who didn’t have another outlet to process their grief and emotions, Fortenberry says.

Black women make up a larger share of the federal sector compared to the overall workforce, but that representation decreases with each step up toward leadership. Though they comprise nearly 12% of the federal workforce, Black women make up 10.4% of supervisors, 9.6% of managers and 7.3% of executives within the federal government.

From Fortenberry’s perspective, “If you’re leading in a humane and mature way, you’re not necessarily going to your team to grieve about what’s happened to your job,” she says. By leading those group sessions, Fortenberry says she was able to tap into her values around community building, connection and engagement.

In January, Fortenberry launched her own consulting business, where she offers one-on-one strategy sessions for those looking for new professional roles.

The unemployment rate for Black women ticked down slightly in January but rose again to 7.1% as of February (compared to the overall unemployment rate of 4.4% for the month). That’s up 2.6 percentage points from the Black women’s unemployment rate in February 2024 and up 1.7 percentage points since January 2025 when President Trump took office.

Fortenberry hopes to help “members of the broader former federal community figure out their next chapter and make really intentional, empowered decisions about their life.”

She’s also learned a lot about herself in becoming her own boss: “What I craved in government was mission, but it was also stability. And what I learned is that I can thrive even when the foundation shakes.”

As for Chege, the former HHS worker, she spent the bulk of 2025 looking for new work in addition to her social media advocacy. By December, she landed a new job, roughly a year since her time in the federal workforce began and ended prematurely.

Her new role in the private sector involves working in government relations to advocate for health care organizations. Chege adds that many of the peers she was terminated alongside who’ve found new jobs are now working outside the government, including at nonprofits or universities.

She says she’d consider working for the federal government again “under an administration that does not cause so much uncertainty.”

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