When staff at a tax office in Ogden, Utah, arrived at work a few weeks ago to find dozens of their colleagues had been dismissed by Elon Musk’s cost-cutting task force, they swiftly appealed to their Republican congressman.
They hoped that Blake Moore, whose district office is in the same building as the Internal Revenue Service processing centre in the small city in the foothills of the Wasatch mountain range, would be alarmed by the sudden job cuts at the area’s single largest employer.
In a county Donald Trump won by more than 20 percentage points last November, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) seemed to be “actively working to destroy our lives and the livelihood of our local economy”, said IRS employee Torrie, whose mother and grandmother also worked at the agency, and who asked for her full name not to be published for fear of reprisals.
Utah’s first congressional district, where federal employees account for at least 4 per cent of the workforce, is no outlier. Across the country, several heavily Republican districts have been hit by Doge’s lay-offs of health and veterans affairs workers, park rangers and even weather service personnel, forcing their representatives to defend the unpopular cuts.
Moore, in particular, has been forced to walk a fine line in response to the job losses. As a committed deficit hawk, he had not only been a supporter of Musk’s wider efforts, but had in December become the proud co-chair of the Doge caucus in the House of Representatives.
At a virtual town hall last month, at which he was confronted by local IRS employees furious about Doge’s actions, the congressman conceded he had been “frustrated” by the initiative’s indiscriminate methods.
He added that he had been “working very hard to communicate that is not the right approach and that folks want to be a part of the solution and we should not be alienating them at this time”.
Employee representatives were unsatisfied. “He did come out and say he was sympathetic . . . and sent emails to the White House,” said Robert Lawrence, president of the local chapter of the National Treasury Employees Union. “But we need more out of him.”
In-person town halls in Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina and elsewhere have turned so confrontational that the Republican leadership in the House has advised members to hold virtual meetings instead.
Seeking to calm tensions, some Republicans have followed Moore’s example, expressing displeasure with Doge’s tactics while being careful to remain supportive of its overall goals.
Tom Cole, whose Oklahoma district contains a large federal workforce, told local media this week that he had brought “mistakes” to Musk’s attention, and stopped cuts to the National Weather Center and a local social security office, as well as to a local hospital.
“You’ve got to be able to advocate for your constituents to make the case,” said Cole, who is the chair of the House appropriations committee, which controls the government’s purse.
“But at the end of the day there’s nothing wrong with the executive branch looking at every facility,” he added. “We have redundant facilities, we have waste. We’re running a $2tn deficit. So, I’m not going to get mad at somebody who is bringing me ideas about how to save money.”
There is no sign of a Republican member of Congress going further and openly warring with Musk. Aside from the perils of upsetting the US’s richest political donor, representatives fear falling foul of their Trump-voting constituents, who are sympathetic to Doge’s broader mission.
A poll by Harvard CAPS/Harris last month found that 70 per cent of Americans believed government was “filled with waste, fraud and inefficiency”. Roughly 85 per cent of Republicans said they thought Doge was helping to make “major cuts” to the budget.
“If you already disliked Trump, the Doge cuts made you hate him more,” said a Republican strategist who advised House members. “Yet the majority of Americans believe there is significant waste and fraud within government and are exuberant that it’s being tackled.”
Such exuberance was missing among federal workers in Ogden. IRS employees said they were blindsided when a couple of hundred probationary employees — a category that includes anyone who began a new role within the past year, regardless of their seniority or years of prior employment — were let go with no apparent explanation.
In an already understaffed office, “people were gone” overnight, Torrie said, including members of her team who make less than $40,000 a year but collectively recoup millions of dollars for the US taxpayer each year.
According to Doge’s proposals, a further 20 per cent of the IRS workforce is due to be laid off by May 15. In Ogden this would translate to roughly 1,500 more job losses, union organisers said.
Jeremy, who has worked for the IRS in the town for 20 years, said the cuts had been done with “no forethought”. His parents, sister and cousin all work or worked for the service, he added, predicting that further lay-offs would be “an economic disaster” for the area, especially if they spread to the local air force base and veterans hospital in nearby Salt Lake City.
The IRS and a representative for Doge did not respond to requests for comment. Moore’s office declined to comment.
On Saturday, a few dozen workers gathered outside the IRS building in downtown Ogden to protest against the latest cuts. “You can’t meet anyone here who is not touched by a federal employee,” said Krystal Kirkpatrick, a local union official who has worked for the IRS for 12 years.
The IRS in Ogden alone employs roughly 8,000 people, according to Phil Dean, the chief economist at the Kem C Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah. “If you’re looking only at Weber County, where the actual [IRS] facilities are, that is about 6 per cent of employment in that area.”
But few of Kirkpatrick’s colleagues attended the rally. “We are all a little nervous, we all have a target on our backs,” she said.
Rick, a local veteran, said he agreed that the government needed some reform. “There is always going to be something that needs to be made better,” he said. But he criticised the manner in which Doge had approached the firings. Plenty of IRS employees in Ogden voted for Trump, he added, but “they had no idea of the chaos he was going to bring”.
Federal courts have recently ordered the rehiring of probationary employees, including in Ogden, but they may not be able to prevent more comprehensive cuts planned by Doge at the IRS and elsewhere.
“The judicial branch has come through for us,” said Daniel Martinez, a speaker at Saturday’s rally. “We need Congress to act for us as well.”
Data visualisation by Martin Stabe
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