DOGE job cuts bring pain to Trump heartland

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.

The renunciation of allegiance to Trump by Piggott, a church-going conservative and three-time Trump voter, comes as political analysts are parsing early signs of a possible backlash in Republican strongholds where the government-slashing efforts of the president and his cost-cutting czar Elon Musk are beginning to be felt.

A White House spokesman told Reuters that Trump had been given a popular mandate to overhaul the federal government to combat waste, fraud, and abuse. Trump edged out his opponent, Democratic former Vice President Kamala Harris, by 1.5 percentage points in the November contest.

"The personal financial situation of every American is top of mind for the president, which is why he's working to cut regulations, reshore jobs, lower taxes, and make government more efficient," Harrison Fields added.

The Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency did not respond to requests for comment.

Spokespeople for Riley Moore, who represents Parkersburg in the House of Representatives, and Senator Jim Justice did not respond to requests for comment. Senator Shelley Moore Capito told Reuters that while she understands the concerns some have about the DOGE cuts, she supports the Trump administration's efforts to "right-size" government.

Trump spoke at length about eliminating unnecessary programs during his address to Congress on Tuesday but made no mention of the mass government firings that have roiled the country. So far 100,000 workers have been fired or taken a buyout.

Reuters/Ipsos polling shows Americans' attitudes toward Trump are so far essentially unchanged since he began firing federal workers in February. As of March 4, his approval rating was holding steady at 44%.

West Virginia is also strong Trump country. He won the state in November with 70% of the vote, among his biggest victories.

Still, the economic impact of the mass dismissals across America may not be felt immediately.

A handful of Republican voters who lost their federal jobs joined Democrats for a rally of more than 100 people protesting the cuts near the two BFS office buildings in Parkersburg last week, cheering on a local union leader as he criticized Trump and Musk while standing next to a large "Fat Cat" balloon.

Support for Trump's shrinking of government can, however, be heard in places around Parkersburg - a middle-aged couple singing DOGE's praises over breakfast at a local diner; a hotel patron saying remote workers deserved to be fired; a young bartender lamenting federal workers' relatively high pay.

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.

"People voted for Donald Trump to make a change," he added. "It's an unfortunate thing in our community that is plagued with many things as it is."

BUSINESS IMPACT

To the residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia's fourth-largest city with 29,000 people and the seat of Wood County, the cuts driven by Musk's DOGE feel like the latest in a series of economic blows.

Parkersburg has lost a third of its population over the past five decades, mirroring a hollowing out of manufacturing across the state. The glass producer Corning sold its Parkersburg factory in the 1990s, and in 2005 a major shovel plant buffeted by Chinese competition closed.

BFS, which manages the federal government's accounting and payment systems, is a provider of stable, solid-paying jobs in Wood County, where the median household income is two-thirds the national average and 14% of the population lives below the poverty line.

The community is now bracing for another round of layoffs, with all government agencies ordered to make plans to cut career staff by March 13. That could mean hundreds more cut at BFS.

Business owners in Parkersburg said they were worried that more job losses would ripple through the economy in the form of depressed spending on everything from clothing to rent.

The owners of the Blennerhassett Hotel, a fixture of downtown Parkersburg for more than 130 years with its turreted brick facade, have already told staff that seasonal hiring will be kept to a minimum for the usually busy summer months.

"It's a major economic disaster for our community," said co-owner Wayne Waldeck, likening the potential scale of the expected job cuts to another factory leaving town.

Parkersburg Brewing, a local bar and eatery, is also worried about a hit to demand. Roughly one-sixth of the brewery's 65 members, who pay an annual fee for a larger pour and other perks, work at BFS, manager Samantha Gibbs said.

"They have the extra money to come spend at places like this and give back to the community, and now a percentage of that is lost," she said. "That's going to affect us tremendously."

West Virginia ranks third among the contiguous 48 states in the percentage of its total workforce — 3.7% — in federal jobs, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows. That's about double the national average. Only Virginia and Maryland, the two states closest to Washington, are higher at 4.6% and 5.9%.

John Deskins, an economics professor at West Virginia University, said he is worried about potential job losses at other large federal facilities in the state.

"We stand to suffer a disproportionate share when those jobs disappear, when that income disappears," he added.

VETERANS CAUGHT IN LAYOFFS

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.

When reached by phone, Conley declined to comment. His son did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story.

Meanwhile Piggott, who like other fired probationary employees received no severance, faces an uncertain future. She said she and her husband, a disabled military veteran, have been discussing ways to make ends meet including selling their home.

She teared up when talking about how many veterans, who make up about 30% of the federal workforce, had lost their jobs at BFS and other agencies.

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."