Parkersburg, West Virginia

A few weeks after Donald Trump regained the presidency, Jennifer Piggott lost her job. She had reason to feel safe in her position at a federal Treasury Department office in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Piggott had worked there for five years, with a recent promotion and, still more recently, a top performance rating. But the promotion turned her, at age 47, into what’s known as a probationary employee, and that technicality set her up to be one of roughly 200,000 government workers axed in the early months of Trump’s second presidency by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Described by Reuters as “a church-going conservative,” Piggott voted for Trump in 2024 as she had in 2016 and 2020. Now she’s feeling “a little bit betrayed.”

In Parkersburg, the Trump-Musk job cuts took out 125 people – roughly five percent of the local staff of a Treasury Department payment and collection center. “As much as I think that President Trump is doing wonderful things for the country in some regards,” Piggott told Reuters, “I don’t understand this at all.”

@cnn

West Virginia civil service worker Jennifer Piggott is one of many federal employees fired by the Trump administration just 3 months after she cast a ballot to help elect him into office. Now unemployed and scrambling to find work, Piggott says she regrets her vote.

♬ original sound – CNN

She’s not the only Trump voter in her neighborhood who’s had trouble processing some of the consequences. Despite broad support for the idea of rooting out waste and fraud, many Parkersburg residents describe the Treasury employees of their acquaintance as hard workers. A Republican state legislator warned that the layoffs – with the prospect of more to come – could “devastate” the local economy. According to the West Virginia Center on Budget & Policy, the federal government currently employs nearly 23,000 residents of the Mountain State, more than its coal mines.

CNN asked Piggott what she would say to President Trump, if she had the chance. Her answer: “I expected better from you… I expected that you would do what was right and cut waste and fraud and all of those things that you promised us before we elected you in office. But you’re not doing that. You’re creating a disaster.”

Posted on 9/10/2025