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“I Had to Get My Mind Right”: The Challenges to Loving Relationships After Being Laid Off by DOGE

After the federal firings, Black women felt betrayed and disillusioned. One longtime federal worker learned from experience the importance of community.

On April Fool’s Day last year, Philadelphia federal worker Darlene Tart-Scott arrived at work only to find out she had been laid off. Minutes later, she was on a train home, carrying the items she had been allowed to scoop up from her office.

“Once I stepped off the train and saw my husband, I cried so long and so hard,” Tart-Scott, 65, remembered. “I have never cried like that before in my life, including the death of my parents. It felt like my soul had been snatched right from under me, and by a committee of people who didn’t know anything about my work or my office or how we work. That just hurt so bad.”

She was comforted by her husband, George, who she says is her best friend. “I’m not a crier, but I have to admit, he saw more tears from me in one week than he had in our 10 years together,” Tart-Scott said. “He didn’t know how to handle that, so he just held me until I was finished.”

But in the months after Tart-Scott was fired from her job at the Administration for Children and Families regional office in Philadelphia, she was so “mentally overwhelmed and disillusioned” that it began to cast a shadow over their relationship. She also lost weight and her hair started falling out. Her doctor diagnosed her with hypothyroidism. But Tart-Scott believes her health decline was a result of the stress from the firings. She sought counseling after noticing that she was not treating her husband, a 1990 Iraq War veteran, with her usual kindness.

“I had to get my mind right. I was really struggling,” Tart-Scott recalls. “My patience was very, very thin.”

Tart-Scott sought to move on, but it was hard to forget the day she lost her job. She had arrived at work at her usual time at 6:45 am. She waved her electronic key card in front of the sensor, but it didn’t work. She knocked on the door and a staff person let her in the office.

Tart-Scott sat down, turned on her computer, brought up her e-mail and learned that she had been fired.

“The letter basically said to gather up what you can and go on about your business, which is what I did,” Tart-Scott said of the e-mail. “It was heartless, just heartless.”

For some Black women who lost their jobs in the government, the federal firings could be described as institutional betrayal, said Seanna Leath, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

“I think some Black women have learned that exceptional performance provides at least some type of protection within racist and sexist institutions, like, ‘Work twice as hard, get the credentials, don’t give anyone a reason to question you,’” said Leath, an applied developmental psychologist and community-engaged scholar. “Being fired after following those rules can be psychologically destabilizing.”

Black women often did far more than the work described in their job descriptions, Leath added.

“Some Black women may have spent years performing invisible labor,” Leath said. “We know that Black women oftentimes take on more work within a workplace, particularly around caregiving, emotional labor—you’re mentoring other Black employees, maybe serving on diversity committees, or you’re starting new programs, community partnerships, changing policies, creating spaces where others could belong. They didn’t just lose a position. It’s also all of these things they were building up.”

Tart-Scott had been with the department for more than two decades and had just received a promotion........

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