photo: Raw Story

What do we owe the people who dedicate their lives to public service? Should the security of their jobs—and by extension, their families—be subject to the whims of those in power? Across the country, federal workers were preparing for the fallout of a sweeping purge of the federal workforce by the White House, but Ryleigh Cooper didn’t figure it would include her.

Working for the U.S. Forest Service in Baldwin, Michigan, Cooper spent her days marking trees for loggers, a steady job in a world that seemed anything but. While the media churned out headline after headline on President Trump and Elon Musk slashing thousands of jobs, Cooper figured the storm wouldn’t reach her. She figured wrong.

At 24, Cooper and her husband were trying for a baby, and IVF seemed their best chance. Trump had promised to make it free. That’s what she thought about when she voted for him.

Now, DOGE—the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, a close advisor to the President—had turned its sights on the Forest Service. Probationary employees, those still within their trial period, were the first to go. Cooper’s union rep didn’t mince words: she was likely out.

This isn’t about waste, fraud, or abuse. It’s about government workers who believed their jobs were secure—for themselves and their families. But what happens when the policies we support come at a cost we never saw coming?

However, Cooper wasn’t the only casualty of the Trump Administration’s cuts: 6,700 I.R.S. employees were fired. . . in the middle of tax season. According to the U.S. General Services Administration, 110 I.R.S. offices with taxpayer assistant services will be shuttered.

Seven former I.R.S. Commissioners from both Republican and Democratic administrations were appalled. “If you were to ask the top chief executives in the world to name the best strategy to attack waste in their organizations and balance the books, there is one answer you would be very, very unlikely to hear: Take an ax to accounts receivable, the part of an organization responsible for collecting revenue.”

In a letter to The New York Times, retired vice chair of Chevy Chase Bank and a member of the leadership council at the Tax Policy Center, Alexander R.M. Boyle, doesn’t call the action a “huge mistake,” he calls it “madness.”

“Cutting the I.R.S. budget,” Boyle writes, “will damage the area with the most potential for revenue: tax enforcement. I.R.S. studies have carefully documented that about $700 billion per year (and growing) is being lost through tax evasion, largely by upper-income taxpayers. Over the next 10 years this “tax gap” will amount to $7 trillion to $8 trillion in lost revenue.”

Ryleigh Cooper and the town of Baldwin who voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, never anticipated that Trump’s policies would affect them . . . until they did. How many other towns are facing that reality?

Update: “U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the Office of Personnel Management to rescind its previous directives to more than two dozen agencies, including the Department of Defense, the Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Science Foundation and others identified in a lawsuit. The ruling — a temporary restraint on the government that will be revisited in the coming weeks.”

What happens next is anyone’s guess.