DOGE job cuts bring pain to Trump heartland
PARKERSBURG, West Virginia (Reuters) -Jennifer Piggott proudly hung a red-and-blue Trump campaign flag outside her one-story home during the November election race. Now, after she was abruptly fired from her civil service job, her days of supporting the president are over.
Piggott is among more than 125 people dismissed in February from the Treasury Department's Bureau of Fiscal Service in Parkersburg, West Virginia, unsettling a community that voted overwhelmingly for Republican President Donald Trump.
"Nobody that I've talked to understood the devastation that having this administration in office would do to our lives," Piggott, 47, told Reuters in an interview, saying she would not have supported Trump if she knew then what she knows now.
"As much as I think that President Trump is doing wonderful things for the country in some regards, I don't understand this at all," she said.
Piggott worked at BFS for five years and had recently been promoted. That promotion made her a target as the Trump administration began firing thousands of probationary federal workers - a group that includes new hires but also existing workers moving from one internal position to another...
… In interviews with three dozen workers, business owners and politicians in Parkersburg, which sits at the convergence of two rivers including the mighty Ohio, nearly all said Trump's focus on cutting government spending was a worthy goal. But most said they knew BFS employees to be hard-working and didn't see them as the right target if the aim was to eliminate waste.
Scot Heckert, a Republican who represents parts of Parkersburg in the West Virginia state legislature, said he was worried that layoffs at BFS, which employs about 2,200 workers in Parkersburg, would "devastate" the local economy because the workers earned higher-than-average salaries, and because of the looming prospect of another round of cuts.
He said his daughter-in-law was among those fired and that he was seeking more information on why so many jobs were eliminated in a seemingly indiscriminate manner before he would commit to backing Trump in the future…
… Roger Conley is a Trump supporter who left the Republican Party last year because he thought it was too liberal. In a Facebook post before BFS workers were cut, Conley said DOGE was acting like any successful business in boosting efficiency and wondered why anyone would question its moves to lower costs.
Then his son lost his job at BFS, according to union members.
In a February 20 Facebook post, Conley said while he still backed Trump, he questioned the need to fire so many people so quickly and whether Musk was the right person to lead the effort…
… One veteran caught up in the BFS layoffs was Chauncy James, who was promoted twice during his 18 months at BFS, the second time to building maintenance.
James, 42, said he too worries about making his mortgage payment and feeding his five children. At last week's rally he marched with a sign criticizing Musk and said he regretted voting for Trump.
"They are pretty much just coming here, chopping heads off, without really doing their homework," James said. "He got elected president and he's doing a lot of things that people never even imagined that he was going to do to us."
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