PARKERSBURG, West Virginia (Reuters)Jennifer Piggott proudly displayed a red-and-blue Trump campaign flag outside her one-story home during the November election. Now that she was abruptly fired from her civil service job, her days of supporting the president are over.
Piggott is one of more than 125 people fired in February from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service in Parkersburg, West Virginia, upsetting a community that overwhelmingly supported 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, adding that she would not have supported Trump if she had known 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 told the crowd.
Piggott had been with BFS for five years and had recently received a promotion. That promotion made her a target as the Trump administration began firing thousands of probationary federal workers, which includes both new hires and existing employees transitioning from one internal position to another.
Piggott’s renunciation of allegiance to Trump, a church-going conservative and three-time Trump voter, comes as political analysts look for early signs of a potential backlash in Republican strongholds where the president’s and his cost-cutting czar Elon Musk’s government-slashing efforts are beginning to be felt.
A White House spokesman told Reuters that Trump had received a popular mandate to overhaul the federal government in order to combat waste, fraud, and abuse. Trump defeated Democratic former Vice President Kamala Harris by 1.5 percentage points in the November election.
“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,” according to Harrison Fields.
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 she understands some people’s concerns about the DOGE cuts, but she supports the Trump administration’s efforts to “right-size” the government.
Trump spoke at length about eliminating unnecessary programs during his speech to Congress on Tuesday, but he made no mention of the widespread government firings that have roiled the country. So far, 100,000 employees have been fired or given a buyout.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, Americans’ attitudes toward Trump have remained largely unchanged since he began firing federal workers in February. As of March 4, his approval rating remained steady at 44%.
West Virginia is also a Trump stronghold. In November, he won the state with 70% of the vote, one of his biggest victories.
However, the economic impact of mass layoffs across America may not be felt immediately.
A few Republican voters who lost their federal jobs joined Democrats for a rally of over 100 people protesting the cuts near the two BFS office buildings in Parkersburg last week, cheering on a local union leader who criticized Trump and Musk while standing next to a large “Fat Cat” balloon.
Support for Trump’s reduction of government can be heard in Parkersburg, including a middle-aged couple singing DOGE’s praises over breakfast at a local diner, a hotel patron saying remote workers deserved to be fired, and 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 confluence of two rivers, including the mighty Ohio, nearly all agreed that Trump’s emphasis on reducing government spending was a worthwhile goal. However, the majority of respondents stated that they knew BFS employees to be hardworking and did not see them as the appropriate target for reducing waste.
Scot Heckert, a Republican who represents parts of Parkersburg in the West Virginia state legislature, expressed concern that layoffs at BFS, which employs approximately 2,200 people in Parkersburg, would “devastate” the local economy due to the workers’ higher-than-average salaries and the looming prospect of another round of cuts.
He stated that his daughter-in-law was among those fired and that he wanted more information on why so many jobs were eliminated in an apparent indiscriminate manner before committing to supporting Trump in the future.
“People voted for Donald Trump to make a change,” he claimed. “It’s an unfortunate thing in our community that is plagued with many things as it is.”
BUSINESS IMPACT
Residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia’s fourth-largest city with 29,000 people and the county seat, see Musk’s DOGE cuts as the latest in a string of economic blows.
Parkersburg has lost a third of its population in the last five decades, reflecting the state’s manufacturing decline. Corning sold its Parkersburg factory in the 1990s, and in 2005, a major shovel plant was forced to close due to Chinese competition.
BFS, which manages the federal government’s accounting and payment systems, provides steady, well-paying jobs in Wood County, where the median household income is two-thirds of the national average and 14% of the population lives below the poverty line.
The community is bracing for another round of layoffs, with all government agencies required to plan to reduce career staff by March 13. That could result in hundreds more cuts at BFS.
Parkersburg business owners expressed concern that more job losses would have a negative impact on the economy, resulting in reduced spending on everything from clothing to rent.
The owners of the Blennerhassett Hotel, which has been a fixture in downtown Parkersburg for over 130 years with its turreted brick facade, have already informed employees that seasonal hiring will be limited during the typically busy summer months.
“It’s a major economic disaster for our community,” said co-owner Wayne Waldeck, comparing the expected job cuts to the closure of another factory in town.
Parkersburg Brewing, a local bar and restaurant, is also worried about a drop in demand. According to manager Samantha Gibbs, BFS employs roughly one-sixth of the brewery’s 65 members, who pay an annual fee for a larger pour and other perks.
“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 told me. “That’s going to affect us tremendously.”
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, West Virginia ranks third among the contiguous 48 states in terms of the percentage of its total workforce employed in federal jobs, at 3.7%. That’s roughly double the national average. Only Virginia and Maryland, the states closest to Washington, have higher rates, at 4.6% and 5.9%, respectively.
John Deskins, an economics professor at West Virginia University, expressed concern 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,” according to him.
VETERANS CAUGHT IN LAYOFFS
Roger Conley, a Trump supporter, left the Republican Party last year because he believed it was too liberal. Conley said in a Facebook post before the BFS layoffs that DOGE was acting like any successful business in terms of efficiency and wondered why anyone would question its cost-cutting efforts.
Then his son lost his job at BFS, according to union members.
In a Facebook post on February 20, Conley stated that while he still supported Trump, he questioned the need to fire so many people so quickly and whether Musk was the right person to lead the effort.
When contacted by phone, Conley declined to comment. His son did not return requests to be interviewed for this story.
Meanwhile, Piggott, like the other fired probationary employees who received no severance pay, is facing an uncertain future. She stated that she and her husband, a disabled military veteran, had been discussing ways to make ends meet, including selling their home.
She burst into tears as she discussed how many veterans, who account for roughly 30% of the federal workforce, had lost their jobs at BFS and other agencies.
Chauncy James, a BFS veteran who was promoted twice during his 18-month tenure, the second time to building maintenance, was among those laid off.
James, 42, expressed concern about making his mortgage payment and feeding his five children. At last week’s rally, he marched with a sign criticizing Musk and expressed regret over voting for Trump.
“They are pretty much just coming here, chopping heads off, without really doing their homework,” Mr. 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.”
