Trump's Firing Frenzy Will Soon Hurt Red States. Will MAGA Care?

As layoffs skyrocket, Trump’s own voters are feeling the pain. Will the backlash begin?

By Joan Walsh, The Nation

Thursday morning opened with the news that Donald Trump says he is cutting the department charged with rebuilding homes and infrastructure after major disasters—think Hurricane Helene and the California wildfires—by 84 percent. An already understaffed agency of 936 employees would be cut to 150.

It’s not the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has already lost 200 staffers, but an office in the Department of Housing and Urban Development that assists FEMA. One of many ironies: The office also helps prevent false claims and abuse of funds. Something you’d think Elon Musk’s DOGE boys would like.

But it’s clear that they’re not about cutting waste but cutting programs in order to fund tax cuts for billionaires and subsidies to Musk’s companies.

In the one month since Trump’s inauguration, at least 200,000 federal “probationary” employees have been threatened with layoffs, but they haven’t all happened yet. Roughly 75,000 employees took a DOGE buyout, though some have found that the compensation contracts they signed are not being honored.

Of course, some mistakes were made during these mass firings. The Department of Agriculture laid off people working on bird flu who had to be hired back, and DOGE dismissed 300 people at the National Nuclear Security agency but had to hire back most of those people because… nuclear security is kind of important. For now.

This will ultimately hurt hundreds of thousands of people—and many of them are Trump voters. It turns out that military veterans are disproportionately represented among the DOGE cuts, because they disproportionately work in federal jobs. Two-thirds of veterans voted for Trump in 2024.

I will forgo jokes about the “Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.” We want to help these people and welcome them into a coalition, not mock them.