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Shirley Hopkins helped recruit countless Black students in Washington, D.C., for the National Institutes of Health's internship and youth employment programs before retiring to Clinton, Md. Her career in the federal government reflects a generation of Black workers who found stability, purpose and opportunity in public service. Kyna Uwaeme for NPR hide caption
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Kyna Uwaeme for NPR
Shirley Hopkins built careers for herself and countless other Black workers through a federal government job.
While working in the National Institutes of Health's human resources office, she became known as the "recruitment lady." It wasn't spelled out in her job description, but she made it her personal mission to encourage more Black students in the Washington, D.C., area to apply for the federal agency's internship and youth employment programs.
"When I was young, I was not able to find employment," Hopkins says. "I was not going to have it the way it was when I was coming up. I was going to let them be a part of something and let them get a job and work and be responsible."
The 81-year-old retiree, now living in Prince George's County, Md., one of the wealthiest majority-Black counties in the country, remembers how proud her mother was when she secured her first federal job — caring for young cancer patients in NIH clinical trials as a nurse's aide.
Hopkins holds a plaque commemorating her service at the NIH. Kyna Uwaeme for NPR hide caption
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Kyna Uwaeme for NPR
"She didn't say it, but it was like, 'You made it. You moved on up,' " Hopkins says about her mother, who earned money doing hairdressing inside her D.C. home and domestic work at other people's houses. "Some of the people she used to work for, they worked for the federal government, and she knew how important it was."
Working for the U.S. government also came with the kinds of benefits and job stability that have attracted many Black federal employees for generations.
Now, the Trump administration's slashing of government jobs, ongoing hiring freeze and attack on diversity, equity and inclusion programs are upending what has been a longstanding path into the middle class for many Black workers, including some Hopkins helped recruit.
The exact numbers and demographics of the workers affected by the ongoing federal job cuts are hard to come by. But the government's latest public data from September 2024 shows Black people make up 18.5% of the federal civilian workforce, while their share of the general U.S. population, according to the 2020 census, stands at 14.8%. At some agencies, including the Departments of Education, Treasury and Housing and Urban Development, Black employees make up about a third or more of the staff.
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"You're talking about a disproportionate number of Black people who are going to be profoundly affected by these broad brush strokes," says Frederick Gooding Jr., an associate history professor at Texas Christian University, who wrote American Dream Deferred: Black Federal Workers in Washington, D.C., 1941-1981.
The path from a post-World War II boom in federal jobs to today's uncertainty
"It's very difficult to tell the story of the Black middle class without the federal government's role in employing Black individuals," Gooding explains. A major turning point was World War II, when Gooding says "Black Americans for the first time had doors open to them that really weren't open before" under Jim Crow segregation.
"With World War II breaking out and there simply being a supply need for more bodies, many Black Americans took advantage of the meritorious avenues" for employment, Gooding says. "The federal government in many ways became a leader modeling for the private sector what a true, equitable environment would look like. It didn't matter what you looked like. It mattered how fast you could type, then you would get the job."
Calvin Stevens, who worked at the General Services Administration for more than 30 years, says, "Federal employment allowed me to move into the middle class." Eleanor Stevens hide caption
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Eleanor Stevens
Decades later, the federal job for Calvin Stevens was at the General Services Administration, where he built a career spanning more than 30 years that began with inspecting furniture, hand tools and office supplies at a GSA warehouse in Atlanta.
"I was really, truly blessed," says the 78-year-old Air Force veteran. "Federal employment allowed me to move into the middle class. Before this year, these jobs were stable as long as you did your job and performed well."
Stevens says that his federal salary and benefits allowed him and his wife to live a comfortable life and send their three children to college. "We didn't buy extravagant stuff, but we did take the kids on vacations," adds Stevens, who owns his home in Decatur, Ga.
But the most fulfilling part about civil service for him, he says, is that it allowed him "to reach back and help somebody else because I didn't have to worry about where my next dollar was going to come from because I was fully employed."
David Groves, a retired Equal Employment Opportunity officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs, serves as the national president of Blacks In Government, an advocacy organization created by Black federal employees. Trek Powell hide caption
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Trek Powell
Stevens says he took every opportunity the agency offered to advance his career, like fellowships paid for by his employer. And it paid off. Stevens was promoted several times before he retired in 2009 as a GS-14, one of the top levels of supervisory positions in the federal government.
It's one example of long-term career growth that some Black workers have found in the federal sector. Working for a federal agency has offered "clear and structured paths for promotion and professional development" that can be difficult to find at a private employer, says David Groves, a retired Equal Employment Opportunity officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs, who is the president of Blacks In Government, an advocacy organization created by Black federal employees in 1975.
Still, for Black federal employees, trying to advance through the ranks of the civil service can be a bumpy road. Stevens says he endured challenges along the way, including "prejudice and biases."
As Trump officials continue their push at federal agencies to dismantle DEI programs, which the administration has called "illegal" and "immoral," Gooding is concerned Black workers who remain in the federal government will be left in a "very vulnerable position."
"If there's one employer in our country that should feel obligated to uphold these ideas of truth, justice, equity and opportunity, it would be the federal government," Gooding adds. "It really just opens up the door for the private sector not to adhere to the laws that we've agreed to in the first place."
Federal job cuts bring shifting winds for Black families and communities
Kevin Abernathy joined the U.S. Postal Service as a letter carrier in 1994. "I went there because of the stability, and that's why I'm still here," he says. Kyna Uwaeme for NPR hide caption
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Kyna Uwaeme for NPR
Until recently, the instability of many federal jobs today would have been unthinkable for Kevin Abernathy, a nephew of Hopkins, the retired NIH staffer, who was pushed by his aunt to apply for his first summer job with the federal government as a teenager.
For years, Abernathy's career advice to his own four children was consistent: If you don't make millions of dollars catching a football or shooting a basketball, then the government is where you want to be.
Back in 1994, months after the birth of his first son, Abernathy abandoned his dreams of becoming a comedic actor to start work as a letter carrier with the U.S. Postal Service.
"I went there because of the stability, and that's why I'm still here," says Abernathy, who now delivers on what he calls a "retirement route" in Potomac, Md., and serves as a union steward for the National Association of Letter Carriers Branch 3825.
Abernathy checks a cluster mailbox in Potomac, Md., where he is assigned to what he calls a "retirement route." Kyna Uwaeme for NPR hide caption
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Kyna Uwaeme for NPR
To find his own stability, Abernathy's eldest son, however, recently took a turn toward a different career path. Now an adult with his own baby, and facing Trump's calls to shrink the federal workforce, he decided in January to leave a government job to join the private sector. "Things are a little shaky. We don't know what's going to be happening," Abernathy says.
With more firings expected at many federal agencies in the weeks ahead, federal jobs may start to look less attractive to more Black workers. And that could end up hurting their chances of securing positions in the private sector in the long run, says Marcus Casey, an associate economics professor, who researches social mobility at the University of Illinois Chicago.
"A lot of college-educated, Black, white-collar workers often go through the federal service first to gain experience, skills that they can add to their resume and take to the private sector," Casey explains. "If that gets shut off, that might lead to a decrease in the pathways to the private sector. Any time you're shutting off a potential pathway, especially for a group that's historically had more difficulties in moving directly into the private sector, that stands to be important."
Abernathy sorts through letters and magazines on his delivery route. The Trump administration's slashing of the U.S. government has helped push his eldest son to leave a federal job to join the private sector. Kyna Uwaeme for NPR hide caption
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Kyna Uwaeme for NPR
Other ripple effects of the federal job cuts may appear in the D.C. suburbs in Maryland that U.S. government work has helped turn into the country's two wealthiest majority-Black counties, says Kris Marsh, a sociologist and demographer at the University of Maryland and author of The Love Jones Cohort: Single and Living Alone in the Black Middle Class.
"The Black families in Prince George's County and Charles County will look very different. I don't want to be all doom and gloom, but it's probably not going to look as impressive as it looks now, if that's the word we want to use," Marsh says. "There's a lot of research that talks about the fragility of the Black middle class, how the Black middle class in some ways might be one or two paychecks away from poverty, not because they don't save, but because of structural forces."
Trump officials' shrinking of the federal workforce has left Marsh wondering how aware the administration is that it is likely to shrink the Black middle class living in and around the nation's capital. "Is that by design or is that just like a happenstance of what's happening right now?" Marsh asks.
The White House's press office did not respond to NPR's request for comment.
For a Black employee placed on administrative leave and waiting for a potential firing at the Department of Health and Human Services, another question is, what else can this administration do to slash the federal government?
"It feels like my whole world is just knocked off its axis by no fault of mine," says the HHS staffer, who NPR has agreed not to name because she fears retaliation at work.
Worried about how she would make her mortgage and car payments without federal employment going forward, the first-generation college graduate says that, "as a Black woman in America, the 'American dream' always felt like a facade, just knowing how America has historically perceived Black and brown people, people who aren't white and on the top of the food chain."
But with a HHS job that allowed her to make a six-figure salary and send her child to private school, she says it started to feel like she was living an American dream.
"And now it feels like it's being taken away," she adds.
Have information you want to share about changes in the federal government? Reach out to Hansi Lo Wang (hansi.01) or Marisa Peñaloza (marisa.85) on the encrypted messaging app Signal. Please use a nonwork device.
