Insight: DOGE job cuts bring pain to Trump heartland [View all]
PARKERSBURG, West Virginia, March 7 (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.
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.
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