Ronicsa Chambers thought she was going to work until her retirement from the federal government.

During her nearly 20 years working for the Federal Aviation Administration, the 56-year-old from Bowie said she excelled on the job, overseeing an air traffic team of six while being named a manager of the year in 2022.

But in February, she essentially lost her job overseeing diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility issues when the FAA put her and much of her department on administrative leave — a decision she is now contesting.

“It’s kind of hard,” said Chambers, who is currently furloughed as part of the government shutdown. “I’m not quite at the point where I’m ready to retire.”

With Black women as a substantial percentage of the federal workforce, the recent shutdown has brought additional pain on top of earlier job cuts. Employment among Black women in the public and private sectors nationwide dropped by more than 300,000 between February — a month after President Donald Trump returned to office — and August, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For Black women, that meant their unemployment rate rose from 5.4% to 6.7% during the same period.

The New York Times earlier this month reported on a “series of firings of Black officials from high-profile positions in an overwhelmingly white administration that has banished all diversity, equity and inclusion programs across the federal government.”

Chambers said she knows many women across the region who have suffered a fate similar to hers. Others have decided to retire. Some are pursuing degrees. A number have talked about entrepreneurship.

Chambers said government work has been seen as a way for Black Americans to be a part of the middle class, which is now under threat.

“I think there is a lot of talent that is leaving,” she said, adding it was an “extremely traumatic” exodus to witness.

Black women are about 6% of the nation’s employed, but account for 11% of all federal workers. Among federal workers in Maryland, the largest share are white men, according to the Banner’s analysis of U.S. Census data. But Black workers make up 36% of the state’s federal workforce, and Black women account for the majority of them.

In Maryland, federal jobs are particularly important to employment for Black women. They made up about 15.6% of all workers in the state in 2023, the most recent year available. But they were overrepresented in the federal workforce, working in 1 out of every 5 federal jobs in the state.

When Paris Cornish lost her job, she had been already planning how to pivot quickly.

In February, the 32-year-old from New Northwood launched WorkFlowe Solutions, a consulting company for entrepreneurs and small-business owners who need administrative support. Cornish said she was put on administrative leave in April two months later from her human resources job with the Internal Revenue Service.

“I was going into work with literally nothing to do,” said Cornish, who had spent three years working at the IRS. She added that the tax agency stopped spending money to support training classes she once helped run.

Although she was initially scared, she said she’s glad now she made the leap into the private sector.

“It was something I had been wanting to launch for the past couple of years,” she said. “I guess this just the lit the fire for me to go ahead and do it.”

Sharon R. Pinder, president and CEO of the Capital Region Minority Supplier Development Council, a leading certification organization for minority businesses, calls the losses part of a dangerous domino effect.

When employment drops by hundreds of thousands for Black women, it can strip away “not only paychecks, but health care, retirement security and the financial stability of entire households,” she said, often leading to “less spending power in our communities, less revenue for local service providers, and more stress on families already struggling with high food and housing costs.”

Pinder said the moment may give rise to a new class of entrepreneurs she calls “layoff survivors.”

“Unless we put real support systems in place, many of these new businesses will be born into crisis and struggle to survive,” she said, adding she worries about the job losses on the broader economy.

The unemployment rate for Black women has historically been about twice that of white women, and it spiked during the 2020 pandemic along with other groups, said Dr. Dina El Mahdy, an associate professor of accounting at the Earl Graves School of Business and Management at Morgan State University.

El Mahdy said the absence of Black women from the workforce could widen wage and wealth disparities, reduce household stability and erode future leadership pipelines — especially if federal government employment remains volatile.

Chrissy M. Thornton, president and CEO at Associated Black Charities, a racial equity organization that provides programming to combat structural racism, said the most recent combination of job losses, restructuring and retirements is staggering but not surprising.

“Black women have been first to be exploited and last to be protected. We’ve always been on the front lines of harm — economically, politically and socially,” she explained.

Many are losing jobs not because they lack talent or ambition, but because they are working in industries that have been destabilized by “political neglect, economic cruelty and a culture that devalues our participation,” she said.

For her part, Chambers is still fighting to stay in the federal government.

She joined an internal complaint in March as part of a group of employees placed on administrative leave seeking to be reinstated.

“Ultimately, we filed these complaints and charges because the president cannot target federal employees simply because of who they are or what the Trump administration thinks they believe,” said Scott Michelman, legal director of the ACLU of the District of Columbia, one of the groups representing workers in the case who alleged people of color were disproportionately targeted by the forced leaves and terminations.

“The Trump administration has made it clear that these firings are not about employees’ roles or positions,” Michelman added." “Instead of identifying positions to eliminate, the Trump administration targeted people who they thought hold politics and values that clash with the president’s extremist agenda.”

If the complaint is unsuccessful, Chambers will have to find a new job because retirement isn’t an option.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m not exactly sure,” she said. “I would dare say I even loved my job. I wanted to continue to do the mission of the FAA, which I believe in.”