The Unseen Toll: Depression, Anxiety Plague Black Women a Year After Being Fired by DOGE

Darnese Foster remembers the day she learned she was fired from her federal government job. “I was off that Friday, which was Valentine’s Day. Then that Monday was the holiday,” said Foster. “I went to log in that Tuesday, I couldn’t get in.”

Foster thought her password had expired and needed to be reset. She called the help desk to submit her request. Then someone from the IT department called her back.

“He said, ‘You didn’t get a phone call from your supervisor?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, unfortunately, your name was on the list of names that was denied access.’ I didn’t know what that meant. I called my supervisor. He said, ‘Well, let me call you back. Let me talk to (the IT) supervisor to see what’s going on.’”

Later that day, they both called back to tell her that she was on a list of employees on probation that were being terminated during the mass firing.

Foster’s initial reaction was numbness, then panic and dread. She had a child in private school and rent and a car note to pay.

“I would go in a corner and cry,” Foster recalled.

Now, more than a year after being fired from her position as a grant management specialist in the Department of Health and Human Services, Foster is struggling, not just financially, but to cope: struggling to stay strong, struggling to keep the faith. The constant strain, she says, has taken a toll on her mental health.

“I thought I would have a job a year later,” Foster, 47, said. “The worry of where I’m going to get the money to do what I need to do and how long will I be out of work, it’s mentally draining.”

When Trump eliminated diversity, equity, and inclusion programs by an executive order in January 2025 and empowered Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to gut the federal workforce that February and March, thousands of Black women lost their jobs. But the job cuts did more than just dismantle a longtime pipeline that helped lift DC’s majority-Black community into the middle class; it also gutted the well-being of the Black women who hold up that community.

A recent study by University of Maryland labor economist Brandon Enriquez found that DOGE cuts “disproportionately affected” the federal employment of Black women compared with other demographic groups. The study estimated that while DOGE “did not have statistically significant effects for any other race, gender, education, or age group,” it reduced Black women’s federal employment by 25 percent. 

“At its lowest point in April 2025, employment was almost 50% reduced for Black women, with little effect for other groups,” Enriquez noted, although there was a partial rebound in subsequent months. Given the overrepresentation of Black workers in the federal government, Enriquez concluded that the layoffs increased racial inequality.

In many of the agencies that were targeted for massive staff reductions, women and people of color made up the majority of the workforce, according to a 2025 report by Sarah Javaid for the National Women’s Law Center. Javaid wrote that “while women made up 46% of the total federal workforce in September 2024, they represented the majority of the workforce” in the departments of Veterans Affairs, Education, Health and Human Services, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development.

People of color—including Darnese Foster—made up 46 percent of probationary workers, according to the report, including 65 percent of those at the Department of the Treasury, 55 percent at Housing and Urban Development and at Homeland Security, and 53 percent at Health and Human Services.

Like some of her federal colleagues, Foster’s probation was for two years. After years of contracting, first with companies in the private sector, then with the State Department, Foster had finally landed a permanent position at Health and Human Services.

A single mother of two, she’d been in her job for a year and seven months when she got the shocking news that she had been laid off.

“It was always my goal to try to get into the government,” said Foster. “My parents always said: ‘Get with the government, it’s stable. You can grow. You can move up.’”

Foster had been excited about her new job and working with her new co-workers. And she was proud that despite struggling with a learning disability and adult ADHD, she’d recently gotten a raise in her pay and job grade.

Her work felt important to her, too. As a grant management specialist, her responsibilities included working with organizations such as hospitals or construction companies seeking government funding. If a hospital wanted new X-ray machines or a therapy facility wanted equipment, she helped them navigate the application process.

“I had finally gotten my dream job. It was devastating to have it snatched from me,” said Foster. “I had things in my life that I was putting in order, and goals that I wanted to do. This is where I was going to retire from.”

At the time of her firing, Foster’s oldest daughter was a senior in college and her youngest daughter, who was 9, was in private school and an avid dancer who took part in competitions. Since the firings, her daughter has continued to dance, but Foster can’t afford the cost of competitions.

“I try not to take too much from her because she’s 10,” says Foster. “I did keep her in dance, so she doesn’t lose all that she’s learned, so she won’t feel like, ‘Oh, I can’t do anything.’”

Foster says she has not been coping well. She received unemployment benefits for only six months. She lost the items in her storage unit because she couldn’t afford the fees, and she has struggled to pay for her daughter’s private school tuition.

She feels like she’s in a “sunken place.”