A new Reuters article looks at how DOGE cuts have impacted Parkersburg, West Virginia. It is a pure, unadulterated version of the old meme: “I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. In this case, the woman is Jennifer Piggott, a resident who just lost her job with the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service for having the audacity to do a good job and get a promotion. Getting promoted gave her the status of a probationary employee, just like new hires, and DOGE just arbitrarily fired 125 probationary workers at the Parkersburg facility.
Piggott, who voted thrice for Donald Trump and displayed a campaign flag in front of her home last November, is clear on who to blame.
“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, 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.
I don’t know why Piggott supported Trump in the first place, although the article says she religious and that might have something to do with it. It’s unclear what “wonderful things” she believes Trump is doing “in some regards.” It doesn’t really matter anymore, because the leopard ate her face and now she and her disabled husband might be losing their home.
One thing she might have considered before voting for Trump three times is that the reason she had a job with the Treasury Department is because of a Democrat. In 1989, Sen. Robert Byrd did something highly unusual:
In 1989, Byrd surprised official Washington by stepping down as Senate majority leader to become chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. To most political pundits, it was a puzzling move; after all, as majority leader Byrd was a national figure. He was trading in the status of statesman for the grubby world of an obscure committee post, and few outside the Senate saw the logic in it.
Yet Byrd, a senator since 1959 (and a congressman even before that, dating to 1953) understood where real power lay in Congress.
At least the kind of power that was useful to West Virginia.
A master of parliamentary procedure and a self-taught expert on the history of the Senate, Byrd knew that while the highly visible majority leader could control the scheduling and the legislative pace in the Senate, the real substance of the Senate’s business was conducted at the committee level. Arguably the most powerful committee of all was Appropriations; while other panels could create new programs, Appropriations controlled all the money to run those programs.
One of the things Byrd did with his newfound power was transfer a 700-worker office of the Bureau of Public Debt to Parkersburg. In 2012, the Obama administration combined the Bureau of Public Debt with the Financial Management Service to form the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. The local work force grew to 2,200. And these were some of the best jobs in town.
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.”
State Rep. Heckert is correct that Parkersburg already had its problems.
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.
And there are probably more job losses for Parkersburg’s Treasury Department employees on the horizon as DOGE starts to cull non-probationary workers. And this will ripple out to negatively impact other businesses:
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.”
But some folks are slow learners:
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.
Imagine being a bartender who cannot put two-and-two together to realize that the existence of good high paying jobs in your community provides you with more income, too. Resentment is a powerful drug, and it underlies everything with the Trump movement.
Senator Byrd’s aggressive use of earmarks to bring jobs to West Virginia helped him to get reelected even as his state turned more Republican-friendly in each successive election cycle. It was the Republicans who demonized the practice and put a moratorium on it that lasted for ten years until it was rescinded under the Biden administration.
Now West Virginia has two Republican senators and they’re useless. When contacted by Reuters, Sen. Jim Justice refused to respond to the layoffs in Parkersburg and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito said “that while she understands the concerns some have about the DOGE cuts, she supports the Trump administration’s efforts to ‘right-size’ government.”
Sen. Capito didn’t explain how firing her constituent Ms. Piggott for getting a promotion was “right-sizing” anything. But what do you expect from a representative of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party? That she would care about this injustice or that Ms. Piggott and her disabled veteran husband might lose their home?
West Virginia is a poor state with a lot of challenges. Its people would be immeasurably worse off if not for the tireless efforts of former Democratic senators like Robert Byrd, Jay Rockefeller and, yes, even Joe Manchin, to bring home the bacon. The people used to understand this, but they’ve been led astray by relentless appeals to their grievances and insecurities.
Here and there, some folks are seeing the light as well as they can considering they no longer have faces. As Ms. Piggott said “Nobody that I’ve talked to understood the devastation that having this administration in office would do to our lives.”
And one last thing. DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. Here’s the Bureau of Fiscal Services’ mission statement:
Promote the financial integrity and operational efficiency of the federal government through exceptional accounting, financing, collections, payments, and shared services.
Doesn’t it seem like we already had a DOGE and that destroying it will probably not lead to a more efficient federal government?
A side story on Sen. Byrd giving up the majority leadership: the way the story is told by old politicos in Maine is that after the 1986 elections, in which the Democrats flipped 8(!) seats and retook control of the Senate for the first time since 1980, Sen. George Mitchell, who had chaired the DSCC in ’85-’86, told Byrd he wanted to be majority leader, that he wouldn’t run against him this term, but he would in two years if Byrd didn’t step down.
Mitchell was a soft-spoken but fiercely competitive politician who was an excellent vote-counter. Mitchell supported Byrd for majority leader in ’87; Byrd didn’t run in ’89, and Mitchell won easily.
Every single fascist enabling pig deserves every thing they get. Fuck this Piggott in particular.
The bad news is, we’ve had really good times for decades now, even with the Great Recession. Very few have known real hardship and certainly not at the hands of their own government. We’re all about to learn some hard lessons.
Mrs. Piggott was warned over and over again about Trump, as were the rest of the fools who voted for him. She needed to pay attention. It was her responsibility as a voter.
So now she got her face eaten, and I couldn’t care less.
Over and over I’ve heard Trumpers say they understand that we will all need to suffer a little pain in order to achieve Trump’s ultimate wet dream, whatever that might be. And they usually say they are willing to suffer themselves if that is what it takes. Well, a lot of them are finding out that it hits just a little bit differently when it’s not “the other person” who gets the rug pulled out from under their life and financial security. Sure, they’re all willing to keep paying a little more for eggs, and probably for gas or other mundane everyday staples. For most of them it’s often easy to make those sorts of budgetary adjustments and continue to live comfortably. But losing one’s job in a totally unexpected fashion wasn’t even on their radar screens. Just like the eventual effects of a massive dismantling of governmental structure and services are, right now, just imaginary consequences which are far into the future, and most certainly will NEVER impact THEM, whenever they do occur. Why, Trump would never do THAT to his loyal servants!! Well, that rude awakening is coming for them, and probably a lot sooner than they know.
I am a deeply empathetic person, but I have zero empathy for any of these Trump supporters whose lives are going to be destroyed by their cult leader. They truly deserve everything they are going to get. The universe always will eventually exact a price for conscious ignorance. You can’t spend your entire life ensconced in that ignorance, and making decisions, day after day, based on lies and misinformation, and not eventually have the chickens come home to roost. I’ll unashamedly admit, I want them to suffer. I want them to suffer very badly.
There is no doubt we are all going to suffer from the results of this last election. The worst case scenario is that American democracy ceases to exist, probably at least for what remains of my lifetime, and I will spend the remainder of my days living under a fascist regime. Right now, the odds on that happening feel like they are pretty high. Almost all of the boxes are ticked on Robert Paxton’s model for a fascist state. All of them could well be checked off before the end of 2025.
Like a lot of people, I’m not sure exactly what the fuck I need to do right now. There is nothing I can personally do to stop any of this. Hell, our Republican congresspersons and Senators here in Ohio don’t even have anyone answering the damn phones in their offices. Democrat leaders in Washington don’t seem to have a clue what the fuck to do. As is often the case, it seems they are going into their default mode of doing their usual circular firing squad. There are all sorts of small, local protests in which one can participate, but those just feel almost like performative theatrics. It just feels like the moment calls for massive protests, but there is no indication anything like that is in the works. I feel like I am watching the civic equivalent of a Mount St. Helens eruption, in slow motion.
Someone please stop this fucking roller coaster so I can get off before the whole damn thing flies off the rails.
Here’s something I’m going to push back on: liberal civic Democracy will very soon be thought of as the “good times” – “the good ol’ days”. When Fascists and Nazis took over in the 1930s in European countries, times were tough and in some respects the far right delivered for people (“Hitler built the Autobahn!”). Trump ain’t doing shit for people.
It’s going to be very clear to just about everyone why things are taking a downward turn. It’s Trump, it’s Musk, it’s Republicans. Contrary to the European situation 90 years ago, this gives civic Democracy a fighting chance.