Trump's mass firings decimate city's 'largest employer' in deep-red state

While Arizona has evolved into a swing state and California has long since turned deep blue — even though it was a red state back in the 1970s and 1980s — Utah remains overwhelmingly Republican. Donald Trump won Utah by roughly 22 percent in 2024, and a Democrat hasn't carried Utah in a presidential election since President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

In an article published by Mother Jones, however, reporter Stephanie Mencimer emphasizes that Utah's staunch GOP voting record isn't preventing Trump and his allies from killing jobs at one of the state's biggest employers: an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) center in Ogden.

"Before President Donald Trump took office in January," Mencimer explains, "the IRS offices in Ogden collectively employed about 7500 people, making the city economy more reliant on the federal bureaucracy than on its famous powder skiing. Everyone who lives in Ogden knows someone who works for the taxman. Husbands and wives, parents and children — IRS employment is often a family affair. But this Western outpost of the federal government lies deep within MAGA territory."

The Mother Jones reporter continues, "Ogden City, home to 88,000 residents, about 30 percent of whom are Hispanic, makes up a small purple dot in the sprawling Northern Utah metro area that's home to some 700,000 people. But about 60 percent of residents who reside in the greater Ogden area voted with the rest of the state last year, solidly for Trump. That support, however, did not spare the city's largest employer."

The IRS was among the many federal government agencies that the Trump administration, with the help of Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), targeted for mass layoffs. Others range from the National Weather Service (NWS) to the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

"In February, Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency took a chainsaw to the civil service, immediately firing thousands of probationary workers, who had fewer job protections," Mencimer observes. "Then, Musk ­issued his 'fork in the road' e-mail, pushing other federal workers to quit as part of a 'deferred resignation program,' lest they get fired later with no benefits. Those who took the 'fork' were put on administrative leave and paid for not working through the end of September. That attack on federal workers landed heavily on the IRS."

Mencimer add, "By June 4, the agency had hemorrhaged more than a quarter of its national workforce — about 26,000 people. Union officials expected that about 20 percent of the IRS employees in Ogden — about 1500 — would no longer be there by the end of September."

Stephanie Mencimer's full article for Mother Jones is available at this link.