Editor, News-Register:

I worry about the indiscriminate cuts the Trump Administration is making to our federal workforce and what it will to our state and city. It is true that this country has to trim our trillions of dollars in national debt.

Yet a multi-trillion dollar tax cut, which will add more trillions to the debt, does not seem the smart way to go.

And nickle-and-diming programs without a comprehensive, sensible plan will not get the job done.

Yet these smaller programs, such as PBS, NPR, the West Virginia Humanities, libraries and museums, Americorps, Headstart and on and on, will have a real impact on our lives.

Some of these areas operate under the radar.

People in Wheeling may not realize Americorps members have done great work at the public library, Wheeling Heritage and throughout the city. The West Virginia Humanities is an invaluable resource to our state and receives almost a million dollars in federal funds. As a historian, I worry about its future.

The mantra of the administration is to root out fraud, waste and abuse in the workforce, and eliminate “anti-American programming.” Does that include wiping out the achievements of women, African-Americans, Native Americans and others, as they did by sanitizing the website of the Defense Department? They renamed the Tuskegee Airmen and Native American code talkers of World War II, among others.

This is scary.

Our government is us. Denigrating the federal workers of West Virginia and eliminating hundreds of good jobs in our needy state will surely not make West Virginia greater, but weaker and poorer.

Margaret Brennan

Wheeling