This time last year, Victoria Chege’s career with the federal workforce ended nearly as soon as it had started.

Chege took her role with the Department of Health and Human Services in December 2024. By February 2025, she became part the “Valentine’s Day massacre.” That’s what some federal staffers call the weekend when tens of thousands of them got emails saying they were being let go.

The Trump administration was starting to cut down the federal workforce through its new Department of Government Efficiency, and they were some of the first to go.

Among those disproportionately impacted were Black women, who make up 12% of the federal workforce (almost double their 7% share in the overall U.S. workforce) and experienced the largest federal employment losses between 2024 and 2025, says Valerie Wilson, a labor economist and director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy.

The DOGE cuts, which continued for several months, contributed to a disturbing trend: Black women’s unemployment rate skyrocketed to a high of 7.5% in September 2025, compared to 4.4% unemployment among all U.S. workers at that time.

The overall net loss in employed Black women in 2025 was driven entirely by public-sector losses, with most job losses in federal government, according to research from Wilson. Among Black women, the largest losses were for college graduates.

In the year since the beginning of the DOGE layoffs, some Black women tell CNBC Make It they’ve been turning to their peers, sharing resources and building community to figure out what their careers and lives look like after working in the federal government.

The government sector announced over 308,000 job cuts in 2025, up 703% from 2024, and made up the bulk of layoff announcements for the year, according to data from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

As part of those layoffs, Chege, now 25, says she spent the first few days processing tough emotions. Like many people who start working for the federal government, she hoped to build a career there. She’d gotten her master’s degree in public health and says she hoped to make a difference by working on health initiatives in the public sector.

Days after getting her notice, Chege sprang into action. Chege started posting information about DOGE layoffs on TikTok to help make sense of the confusion. People included in the mass firings, many of them probationary workers new to their federal jobs, were told their official end date would come in mid-March; as court cases piled up against the Trump administration’s actions, that end date kept getting pushed back.

There was a lot of back and forth about what was legal and what wasn’t, what employees were owed, and what timeline to expect. Chege says she tried to break it all down for herself and her colleagues.

Her viral videos led to meetings with Congressmembers who advocated on behalf of federal workers. Chege says building a platform gave her a sense of purpose.

“I was really happy to share my story with others,” Chege says. She says she heard from other federal workers online who said they were glad she was being vocal about what they were going through, and that seeing her videos made them feel less alone.

Some online communities are becoming real-life support groups.

Nneka Obiekwe, 37, is the founder of Vanede, a social impact group, and creator of Black Women Rising, a community referral network she started in September 2025 for Black women impacted by job loss, including in the federal workforce, Obiekwe says.

Obiekwe isn’t a government employee but, as a consultant based in the Washington, D.C., area saw how hard the federal layoffs hit her network.

Many departments targeted by DOGE cuts had even larger shares of Black women compared to their share in the overall federal workforce, including the Department of Education where Black women made up more than a quarter of workers.

Obiekwe says she spent the spring and summer of 2025 flexing her contacts to get people connected to new jobs; by September, she’d exhausted her network and created the Black Women Rising WhatsApp group chat to bring more help in. She says more than 500 women joined the initial group within a day of posting it to Instagram Threads.

Shortly after, Obiekwe says she transitioned the effort to a Discord group, where members complete an intake form to better connect with one another based on industry, experience level, and where they are in their job search.

Black Women Rising currently has over 400 active members across the U.S. primarily in D.C., Atlanta and the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, Obiekwe says. The group forum offers channels to vent, but it’s also a place to spark real action. Obiekwe says members are encouraged to share opportunities they’ve heard from people in their own networks where they can make a direct referral.

Strategically building a secondary network could be key to getting these women into new jobs. Research from Stanford, MIT and Harvard scientists found that “weaker ties” on LinkedIn (think secondary connections, like an old coworker’s friend from college) lead to more job opportunities than a direct connection by nature of an expanded network.

Then, there’s the emotional benefit of a group like Black Women Rising, Obiekwe says. Members in D.C. and Atlanta recently organized their own meetups in February to provide real-life camaraderie and support. Women braved unseasonably cold weather to connect over coffee and Obiekwe says they sent messages along the lines of “I really needed this,” “I really feel seen” and “I feel energized again.”

The members of Black Women Rising are often highly skilled mid- to senior-level women, Obiekwe says, adding that among the roughly 100-person D.C. cohort, more than half are former federal workers now taking part-time or contract work, or starting their own businesses.

Those on the job market are now in the throes of figuring out how to translate their long public-sector careers to an impactful private sector role. That often means translating the skills and responsibilities on their resume to fit private-sector jobs, and adjusting to a new workplace culture, structure, pace and mission.

It’s a challenge Monique Fortenberry is facing head-on, and she’s helping other former federal workers do the same.

Fortenberry, 55, is a lawyer by trade and spent the majority of her career in the federal sphere working her way up to senior executive roles. She says she was placed on administrative leave when her office was “abolished” in January 2025. By late February, she was faced with the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” severance package offer and decided to take it, along with an early retirement package.

Though she could lead teams through structural changes on a professional level, Fortenberry says it was hard to navigate the shift on a personal level.

She says she messaged her network: “I don’t know if you’ve been impacted by recent events, but I have been, and I’m struggling a bit. If you are too, I’m pulling together a support circle, and please feel free to join me and share this information with other people.”

Around 20 people attended that first virtual meeting in March 2025; it energized Fortenberry to plan new sessions for the next several months.

Some attendees were federal workers on administrative leave, while others were still with the government and trying to find a way out. “The thing I remember most is that all of us were experiencing a great loss, but we were doing it alone,” Fortenberry says.

The sessions were an especially crucial resource for other senior women leaders who didn’t have another outlet to process their grief and emotions, Fortenberry says.

Black women make up a larger share of the federal sector compared to the overall workforce, but that representation decreases with each step up toward leadership. Though they comprise nearly 12% of the federal workforce, Black women make up 10.4% of supervisors, 9.6% of managers and 7.3% of executives within the federal government.

From Fortenberry’s perspective, “If you’re leading in a humane and mature way, you’re not necessarily going to your team to grieve about what’s happened to your job,” she says. By leading those group sessions, Fortenberry says she was able to tap into her values around community building, connection and engagement.

In January, Fortenberry launched her own consulting business, where she offers one-on-one strategy sessions for those looking for new professional roles.

The unemployment rate for Black women ticked down slightly in January but rose again to 7.1% as of February (compared to the overall unemployment rate of 4.4% for the month). That’s up 2.6 percentage points from the Black women’s unemployment rate in February 2024 and up 1.7 percentage points since January 2025 when President Trump took office.

Fortenberry hopes to help “members of the broader former federal community figure out their next chapter and make really intentional, empowered decisions about their life.”

She’s also learned a lot about herself in becoming her own boss: “What I craved in government was mission, but it was also stability. And what I learned is that I can thrive even when the foundation shakes.”

As for Chege, the former HHS worker, she spent the bulk of 2025 looking for new work in addition to her social media advocacy. By December, she landed a new job, roughly a year since her time in the federal workforce began and ended prematurely.

Her new role in the private sector involves working in government relations to advocate for health care organizations. Chege adds that many of the peers she was terminated alongside who’ve found new jobs are now working outside the government, including at nonprofits or universities.

She says she’d consider working for the federal government again “under an administration that does not cause so much uncertainty.”

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When Gabriela Nguyen wanted to do some spring cleaning as a teenager, she’d organize the apps on her phone.

“That was cleaning; it would make me feel better,” the 24-year-old tells CNBC Make It. “My actual room was in complete disarray, but it would feel better because my life was on my phone.”

Conflating her real and online lives was one of “a series of cracks” signaling her technology use had gotten out of hand, she says. “The apps became the center of gravity of my life in which the other things would orbit.”

Today, Nguyen has no personal social media. She practices what she calls appstinence, a play on “app” and “abstinence” that refers to “a firm push for young people to remove social media from their personal lives,” according to the website for her advocacy group of the same name, where she and other members of Gen Z help their peers take the leap. Founded in 2024 as a student organization at Harvard, the group encourages what it calls the 5D method: decrease, deactivate, delete, downgrade and finally depart social media.

But appstinence is not “a hard and fast line,” Nguyen says. “The idea is that you’re moving in that direction.”

Nguyen’s own road to appstinence was winding. She grew up in San Jose, steeped in the “techno-optimism of Silicon Valley,” she says. “It’s the local culture.”

She got an iPod Touch when she was 9 and her first social media account at 10. Her “trinity,” as she calls it, was Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. Instagram was your “public-facing portfolio,” she says. Snapchat was “where the business really went down in the day-to-day.” And TikTok was the “the maximal brain rotty thing.”

Nguyen felt like they degraded her attention span, sleep, energy, self-esteem and confidence, she says.

Social media companies have fought back against accusations over the years that their platforms are harmful to young people’s mental health.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified in February, as part of an ongoing, landmark social media trial, that he doesn’t think people can be clinically addicted to social media. However, he said some people may experience “problematic use” of Instagram, including “spending more time on Instagram than they feel good about.”

In response to a lawsuit in 2024 alleging TikTok had “addictive features” and was “harming young people’s mental health,” TikTok said it was “proud of and remain deeply committed to the work we’ve done to protect teens,” citing “safety features such as default screentime limits, family pairing, and privacy by default for minors under 16.”

In 2024 testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in prepared remarks, “We want Snapchat to be safe for everyone, and we offer extra protections for minors to help prevent unwanted contact and provide an age-appropriate experience.”

But Nguyen says her experience on the three apps had a harmful domino effect in her life. “It’s not just that the scrolling itself gets worse; your perspective on the world gets worse as the doomscrolling keeps going,” Nguyen says. Still, she felt, “You can’t lose the only way that you know how to find out things that are going on or things that you like or keep in touch with people.”

A straight-A student in high school, Nguyen’s final straw was when she “couldn’t focus.” She recalls doing an assignment at 14 that took much longer than expected because of this “technological distraction,” she says.

Nguyen tried temporary digital detoxes and screen time limits for years; none worked. So she cut back more drastically. Early in college, she deleted Instagram, thinking, “This is kind of nice.” But then she spent more time on Snapchat. For a while, she says she had “a toxic relationship” with Snapchat and TikTok, repeatedly deleting and redownloading them.

She had a realization that “my real life had to outweigh the draw” of those apps, Nguyen adds. That meant “pursuing what I felt like they were giving me, but in the real world,” so she joined more clubs and student communities in her senior year.

Over time, she says, she got off social media for good.

One initial challenge was convincing friends she wasn’t cutting ties with them by going offline but rather that she wanted to invest more time and attention in her relationships in real life, Nguyen says.

“Me not wanting to Snap you anymore doesn’t mean that I feel like we’re drifting or you’re a bad friend or whatever,” she explains. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite.”

After getting off social media and being better for it, Nguyen says, she wanted to help others do the same. She and her appstinent colleagues offer what they call “digital lifestyle planning,” or peer-to-peer coaching to help people “re-design [their] relationship with technology,” the website says.

Nguyen says they’ve seen “overwhelming” demand for the service, with “several hundreds of people” reaching out to express interest in appstinence and roughly 2,000 people attending the organization’s in-person events worldwide.

One key element of it is that the coaches are digital native Gen Zers. “It’s not, ’Okay we’re here on the top of the hill preaching down to you,” she says. “I know how it is; I was literally there as well.”

And sometimes Nguyen still struggles with it. Her own de-entrenchment, as she calls it, will likely be lifelong, she says.

Today, she uses a “dumb” phone, which can call and text but has no internet, and she’s dropped streaming services. (It’s okay if a friend puts on a Spotify playlist when they’re together, she says, but otherwise, to listen to music, she has her car radio.) She uses ad-free browsers, keeps her bedroom screen-free and only checks email at a computer.

To talk with friends or family, she calls or texts. That way, she says: “There’s no ads, no algorithms, no AI slop.” Nguyen says she now has “much deeper relationships with a lot fewer people” than before.

Many of her friends today are off social media, too. “If we were all to suddenly make an Instagram, that would just be redundant because I already see them and talk to them on the phone,” she says. “What else could we possibly do on Instagram?”

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Young people are faring better in countries like Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya than they are in the U.S., a new Sapien Labs study of 1 million people ages 18 and older in 84 countries found.

Researchers based their results on what they refer to as “mind health,” a metric reflecting people’s ability to function in daily life based on cognitive, emotional and physical abilities. They found that on a mind health quotient (MHQ) scale of -100 (distressed) to 200 (thriving), 18-to 34-year-olds in Ghana scored 69, while young Americans scored 36.

The top five countries for young people’s mind health were Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Tanzania.

When it comes to well-being and the ability to function, a country’s “wealth was not an indicator at all,” says Tara Thiagarajan, founder and chief scientist of Sapien Labs.

Here’s why they found young people in the U.S. are doing so much worse, and what policymakers and parents can do to improve their ability to function.

Sapien Labs identified four major contributors to higher mind health:

• Strong family bonds
• A sense of spirituality
• Delayed access to smartphones
• Lower consumption of ultra-processed foods

In most categories, practices in the U.S. are counter to what would help young people flourish.

When it comes to family bonds, the American value system is highly individualistic and emphasizes professional and financial success, says Erica Rozmid, clinical psychologist and founder and director of the mental health center the Clarity CBT and DBT Center.

“Parents are working long hours,” often as a result of financial stress, she says. Unlike in other countries, “there’s less of those connected bonds within their family home system.”

Those weaker bonds continue later in life, too. Less than half of 18-to 34-year-olds in the U.S. talk on the phone or video chat with their parents at least a few times a week, according to the Pew Research Center.

Whereas the average age of first receiving a smartphone in Tanzania is 18, according to Sapien Labs, the average age of first getting one in the U.S. is just under 13.

Depending on what a child is doing on that phone, there’s evidence that social media, specifically, “does negatively impact mental health when it comes to social comparisons or doom scrolling,” says Rozmid.

Certain games can also have addictive qualities that rewire a young person’s brain. Some kids who play “lose the ability to regulate themselves and their emotions because then they rely on these phones to do it,” she says. Some of these effects can last into young adulthood, research has found.

Finally, ultra-processed foods comprise more than 50% of U.S. adults’ energy intake, according to a study published in the January 2025 issue of the Journal of Nutrition. Ultra-processed foods are associated with increased depression and diminished cognitive control, according to Sapien Labs.

As far as spirituality in the U.S. is concerned, 70% of Americans do consider themselves spiritual or say spirituality is very important to their lives, according to Pew. “I’ve done a lot of research in suicidality and protectors for suicide,” says Rozmid, “and a huge one is spirituality.”

What can policymakers do to improve some of the conditions in the U.S.? “I think [phone] bans in schools is a great place to start,” says Thiagarajan, adding that “that’s where a lot of the peer pressure to have the phone comes from in the first place.”

A majority of states in the country have enacted full or partial bell-to-bell phone bans, according to the Anxious Generation Movement.

And “the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] needs to wake up and start regulating food,” says Thiagarajan. The amount of chemicals in ultra-processed American foods has an impact on mind health as well, she says.

As far as what parents can do to help their growing kids, “be gentle with yourself,” says Rozmid. America’s individualistic culture doesn’t make it easy to prioritize family, she says.

But ask yourself, “how can you increase connected bonds in the home?” she says. “How can you take a pause before you give a smartphone device? How can you cook a meal together with your family once a week?”

“Even just taking one small change can make a difference,” she says.

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We know that raising emotionally intelligent kids sets them up for future success. The challenge is that many of us were never taught those skills ourselves.

Growing up, many of us heard phrases like “stop crying,” “calm down,” or “be good.” Over time, those messages taught us to suppress feelings rather than understand them. As adults and parents, we often find ourselves trying to teach emotional skills we never had the chance to learn.

But children today can develop emotional intelligence through everyday interactions with the adults around them. The conversations we have, the questions we ask, and the sense of safety they feel at home all shape how they understand emotions.

After years studying more than 200 parent-child relationships, I’ve found that certain questions consistently help children build emotional awareness, resilience and empathy.

Here are nine powerful questions parents can ask:

Children often experience emotions in their bodies before they have the language to describe them. Asking this question helps them begin noticing those signals.

A nervous child may mention a stomachache. Excitement might show up as a warm face or a fast heartbeat. Recognizing these sensations helps children build awareness of their emotional state.

Children start to see that emotions are connected to experiences. Feelings begin to make sense when they can link them to something that happened.

A child might explain that they felt proud after finishing a project or frustrated during a disagreement with a friend. These connections help them understand their emotions and respond to them more effectively.

Empathy grows when children pay attention to the emotions of others. This question encourages them to notice facial expressions, tone of voice and behavior. The hope is that they become more aware that emotions exist not only within themselves but also in the people around them.

Many children associate pride only with winning or performing well. This question helps shift their attention toward their personal qualities.

Children begin recognizing things like kindness, persistence or generosity as reasons to feel proud. That awareness supports a stronger sense of self-worth.

If they have trouble answering, gentle prompts can help:

• “Are you proud of how kind you were today?”
• “Are you proud of how hard you tried?”
• “Are you proud of helping your friend?”

This question encourages children to think about their needs during difficult moments.

A child might say they want a hug, someone to sit beside them or a little quiet space. Expressing these preferences helps them learn that their needs matter and can be communicated.

Emotional intelligence includes learning how to calm the body during stressful moments.

Children begin identifying what works best for them. Some feel better after taking deep breaths. Others feel calmer after talking with a parent, hugging a stuffed animal, moving their body or spending a few quiet minutes alone.

Recognizing these strategies helps children approach strong emotions with more confidence.

This question introduces children to the idea of an inner voice.

Young kids often benefit from hearing examples of supportive self-talk. Parents can model phrases like:

• “You can try again.”
• “Mistakes help you learn.”
• “You’re safe.”
• “You’re doing your best.”

With repetition, children begin using these phrases themselves, which strengthens resilience.

Children learn that empathy involves action. Caring for someone else’s feelings often appears in simple behaviors.

They might mention listening to a friend, asking “Are you okay?”, sharing a toy or sitting with someone who feels lonely. These everyday actions help children practice kindness in concrete ways.

This question helps children think about the qualities that define who they are.

Parents can mention traits like creativity, curiosity, humor, thoughtfulness or bravery and ask which ones feel true to them. Recognizing these qualities supports a healthy sense of identity that isn’t tied to comparison or achievement.

Reem Raouda is a leading voice in conscious parenting and the creator of the BOUND and FOUNDATIONS journals, now offered together as her Emotional Safety Bundle. She is widely recognized for her expertise in children’s emotional well-being and for redefining what it means to raise emotionally healthy kids. Find her on Instagram.

Want to give your kids the ultimate advantage? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course, How to Raise Financially Smart Kids. Learn how to build healthy financial habits today to set your children up for greater success in the future.

During the pandemic hiring boom known as the “Great Resignation,” switching jobs often meant a sizable pay raise.

These days, there’s less financial upside to making the move, and more workers are choosing to stay put — a trend economists call the “Great Stay.”

Workers who switched jobs in January saw median pay increases of about 4%, according to recent Bank of America Institute analysis of payroll deposit data. That’s less than a third of the roughly 14% raises seen at the peak of the pandemic hiring boom in 2022 and less than half of what workers typically gained from switching jobs in 2019. The measure reflects the change in pay in the three months after a job move compared with the same three months a year earlier.

“There was a huge hiring boom in 2021 to 2022 during our pandemic recovery which pushed salaries up quite a bit, even for lateral moves, as employers competed aggressively for talent,” says Bonnie Dilber, a recruiting leader at software company Zapier.

“Now, there’s a huge candidate pool and companies have less reason to compete aggressively on salary,” she says.

The labor market today looks very different from the pandemic hiring boom, when employers were scrambling to fill open roles. Job openings rose from about 7 million in 2019 to a record 12.2 million in March 2022 before falling back close to pre-pandemic levels in recent months, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The U.S. economy lost 92,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate rose to 4.4%, up from a 3.4% low in April 2023, according to BLS data.

Fewer workers are leaving their jobs voluntarily as well. The quits rate — a measure of workers changing jobs — has fallen from about 3% in 2022 to roughly 2% today, per BLS data.

Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta — which tracks overall wage growth for workers who switch jobs compared with those who stay put — similarly shows the job-hopping premium has shrunk.

For much of 2022 and 2023, workers who changed jobs saw median year-over-year wage growth roughly 2 percentage points higher than those who stayed with the same employer, according to the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker. 

That gap largely disappeared through most of 2025 as wage growth for job switchers cooled sharply while raises for workers who stayed put declined more gradually. In the latest reading, wage growth for job switchers was about 4.4%, compared with 3.9% for job stayers — a much slimmer margin than in 2022 or 2023.

“While switching jobs can often lead to a higher salary, the increase is likely smaller than it was a few years ago,” says Christina DePasquale, a professor of economics at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

“As hiring has cooled and unemployment has moved closer to its long-run average,” she says, “workers appear more cautious about leaving their current jobs, which helps explain the recent job-hugging behavior” — where workers hold on to the roles they have instead of changing jobs.

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