On 30 May 2025, Dr Ravon Alford received an email from leadership at her job that the federal government had chosen to revoke the organization’s active federal grants. At the time, Alford, who’s 33, had been working as a senior policy analyst at a criminal justice reform non-profit organization in Detroit. As a result of the budget cuts, all work related to projects that were funded by these grants ceased. Organization-wide layoffs followed, affecting Alford and 75% of the staff.
Alford is among the nearly 300,000 Black women who exited the US labor force in just three months – a shift tied directly to federal policy decisions. The most immediate cause has been sweeping cuts across public-sector agencies, historically one of the few reliable pathways to middle-class stability for Black women. Though they make up just more than 6% of the overall workforce, Black women account for more than 12% of federal employees. These positions have long offered pensions, benefits and more equitable pay than the private sector, where wage disparities remain stubbornly fixed.
