In Their Own Words: Black Workers Reflect on Federal Service Amid Shutdown

Photographs by Kuwilileni Hauwanga, Capital B

As the government shutdown nears a month and the furloughs continue, hundreds of federal employees are lining up to get food and other items at local pantries. If the work stoppage persists, more than 40 million Americans could be denied food assistance benefits.

The tumult facing furloughed employees illustrates just one of the many challenges that Black federal workers have experienced this year.

Long before the shutdown started on Oct. 1, the Trump administration began to signal its intentions to scale back the federal workforce. In February, it eliminated hundreds of thousands of positions, including many that were viewed as having a focus on diversity. The mass layoffs disproportionately impacted Black communities because while Black Americans make up 14% of the U.S. population, they make up approximately 18% of the federal workforce.

Then, those employees who weren’t dismissed and didn’t resign were confronted with one of the longest government shutdowns in U.S. history. Though offering back pay once the government reopens is standard practice, the administration has threatened to deny it to the employees who have been furloughed. (In 2019, President Donald Trump signed a measure guaranteeing this compensation.)

Some two dozen states have sued to prevent the White House from suspending food stamp benefits during the shutdown.

Black workers are hit especially hard during a shutdown, explained Michael Neal, an economist at the Urban Institute. Neal previously told Capital B that, generally, Black employees don’t have “as much savings, on average, to replace their lost income.” White households have $8,100 in liquid assets, while Black households have $1,500, according to 2019 data.

The uncertainty within the federal government may also be contributing to the growing Black unemployment rate, according to a New York Times analysis. Over the past several months, the Black unemployment rate has climbed from 6% to 7%, while the white unemployment rate has dipped slightly to 3.7%.

“I think the speed at which things have changed, in such a dramatic fashion, is out of the ordinary,” Valerie Wilson, the director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, told the news organization. “There’s been such a rapid shift in policy, rather than something cyclical or structural about the economy.”

To capture the widespread impacts of the administration’s overhaul of the government, Capital B interviewed several Black employees who, in a variety of ways, are continuing to navigate the loss of their positions — and threats to their livelihoods.

“Federal work came with a deep sense of pride”

Tony Brown said the colleagues he left behind at the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment are still under pressure: “After I left, I heard from people still there that everything is tense now.”

Tony Brown, 36, had been working as a data scientist at the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment — an office under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — for just a couple of months. Then, he learned in February that his role was being cut.

Brown was devastated. The news was delivered via a letter that he said felt impersonal. The note claimed that his work wasn’t up to snuff, though he hadn’t been at the agency long enough to have a performance report, he said.

It was Brown’s self-esteem that took the biggest hit when he was laid off. For more than a decade, he aspired to work for the federal government: Brown was previously employed at the Maryland Department of Health and the South Carolina Department of Public Health.

“Federal work came with a deep sense of pride,” Brown told Capital B. “To contribute to the national well-being, I was excited about that.”

He found work in the private sector within a couple of months, and said that he can’t imagine going back to work for the federal government — at least not during the current administration.

Brown said that his former work environment was already starting to feel toxic before he left. Colleagues had been told to remove pronouns from their email signatures, and workers couldn’t really discuss issues pertaining to transgender Americans, he said, noting that the intensity of this environment appears to have ramped up.

“It just doesn’t seem good,” Brown said. “After I left, I heard from people still there that everything is tense now. There’s so much pressure. The supervisors and the leaders and the managers and the directors cut so much of the staff, but then still want results and work done. That falls on the remaining people.” 

He added: “I have the privilege of being able to maintain my integrity. But some people don’t have that luxury and must take what they can get.”

“I relocated my life for this role”

Regina Fuller-White said it has been disheartened to hear comments by President Donald Trump disparaging federal workers. “The rhetoric hurts. … I’d never done so much work in my life,” she said.

For more than a year, 37-year-old Regina Fuller-White submitted application after application, hoping to land a role at the United States Agency for International Development.

In 2024, she finally secured a contract-based position as a monitoring, evaluation, and learning adviser with USAID’s gender equality and women’s empowerment hub. She started her job in October of that year, but by the end of February 2025, the rug had been pulled from under her: The administration dismantled the agency. She was left without work.

Fuller-White said that the cuts were particularly destabilizing to her because of how much time and money she had sacrificed for a job that made her feel as if she had just “won the lottery,” she told Capital B in October. She had hired a career coach to help her to navigate the byzantine application process. She and her husband also moved from Wisconsin to Maryland so that she could begin her work at USAID.

“I relocated my life for this role, and the agency doesn’t even exist anymore,” she told Capital B in April. “It’s been gut-wrenching. This is the career I’ve spent my entire life preparing for. If I don’t do international work, what am I supposed to do?”

Fuller-White said that the Trump administration’s messaging hasn’t made the upheaval of the past several months any better.

Trump and his allies have frequently characterized federal employees as lazy and have cited an untrue statistic that only 6% of them work full time in their offices.

“The rhetoric hurts. I remember my workload and my team’s workload. I’d never done so much work in my life,” Fuller-White said. “We had the internships. We had the degrees. We had all the things that Black people, especially, are told to have to get these roles.”

“I’m hearing a lot of distress from my Black members”

Sheria Smith’s job as a civil rights attorney at the U.S. Department of Education was the perfect marriage of two of her interests: teaching, and the law. A former fifth grade educator who grew up in a low-income family in Gary, Indiana, 42-year-old Smith was passionate about using her position to protect the fundamental rights of students.

But in March, she learned that she was one of the more than 1,300 Education Department employees whose roles had been eliminated.

Even in the face of the layoffs, Smith continued to advocate for affected workers. She was the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, a union representing employees at the Education Department, until October. She told Capital B in April that Black members, in particular, were drowning in the chaos of the cuts.

“I’m hearing a lot of distress from my Black members,” Smith said. “They’re asking: ‘Well, if the federal government can do this — make arbitrary decisions about leave and termination — what hope do we have in the private sector?’”

While she’s no longer at the Education Department, Smith’s concern for those who rely on the agency’s services, especially Black students, continues: The layoffs are having an impact not just on the fired workers, but also on the students who benefited from the jobs those workers used to do.

Administration officials want to shutter the Education Department. As a part of that effort, they have closed more than half of the agency’s Office for Civil Rights locations, where employees hear claims from students who argue that their rights are being violated.

Smith had been assigned to the Dallas office, which served Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas and was handling cases that frequently involved potential abuse by school officers.

“We were very busy because those are states that have often been hesitant to follow Brown v. Board of Education,” Smith told Capital B in July. “We’re hearing from people in the remaining offices that their caseloads have exploded. They’re saying that the workload is impossible — they’re going to do their best, but it simply isn’t humanly possible, and cases are getting dismissed.”

“Why would you create mass unemployment?”

After her roller coaster of a journey with the federal government, Cornelia Poku, 34, was “sad and anxious and angry” for months.

She had worked at AmeriCorps, an agency focusing on community service, until February, when she was informed that she was one of the many probationary employees who was being cut.

But her layoff saga wasn’t linear: Her position was reinstated weeks later, but then she decided to participate in the deferred resignation program after she learned that more downsizing was imminent.

One way Poku said that she coped with the unpredictability of her professional life was by leaning into her passion for content creation. Under the TikTok handle @blackgirlsexploredc, she produces videos that typically highlight Black-owned establishments in the D.C. area, from restaurants to historical sites.

“Content creation helps to distract me,” she told Capital B in April.

Poku said that the frustration she felt was immense. She didn’t see the logic of the layoffs. She worked as a marketing and communications specialist at AmeriCorps Seniors, which organizes volunteer opportunities for people 55 years old and older.

“Why would you create mass unemployment?” she asked. “Why would you dismantle a program that helps people give back to their communities?”

The post In Their Own Words: Black Workers Reflect on Federal Service Amid Shutdown appeared first on Capital B News.