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.
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 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.”
Lambert here: Gotta say, though…. Reuters, CNN, and then “We Are Your Neighbors.” Odd.
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