By CASSIDY ROARK
CRoark@DominionPost.com
MORGANTOWN – More than a thousand people marched Saturday afternoon in downtown Morgantown, a city that has experienced recent federal workforce cuts first-hand.
The march, organized by Mountaineers Indivisible, began at the Morgantown Farmers Market on Spruce Street and ended at Ruby Amphitheater, where community members spoke in protest of government downsizing actions taken by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk.
Community members walked together as they chanted, “Hands off” and “People united to never be divided.”
“After another week where Trump and Musk have effectively shut down NIOSH, set crippling tariffs on consumers, cut programs that serve the most vulnerable, and made other attacks on decency and democracy, our commitment is to stand up and raise our voices, rain or shine,” stated Ace Parsi, president of Mountaineers Indivisible Citizen Action, and Shay Nestor, action co-chair.
According to MICA, a bill is currently being fast-tracked through the West Virginia legislature that will end Medicaid expansion if Trump cuts the program’s federal funding. This would leave over 160,000 West Virginians without insurance, with no warning.
Jenna Luthman, a doctoral candidate in the biology department at WVU, also addressed the crowd.
“I worked for six months on a graduate fellowship grant through the National Science Foundation, which is a federally funded program. When the DEI flagged words were instituted, my grant was immediately rejected, due to the use of the word ‘underrepresented,’” Luthman continued. “Now because of this, my funding for the future is uncertain. This new ban disallows words such as ‘women, LGBTQ+, diversity, race, equality’ and many more from being used in applications for funding. Beyond this, the federal fund freeze, though it was reversed, has dramatically shaken the scientific community.
“These issues aren’t just present here at WVU, students and professionals alike across the country are scrambling in fear over the unprecedented era of federal overstepping,” Luthman added. “We rely on science for our health care, our agriculture, our resources, our transportation. Without it, we don’t just become stagnant, we regress as a society.”
Hands Off! demonstrations were organized for more than 1,200 locations in all 50 states by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, LBGTQ+ advocates, veterans and elections activists. The rallies appeared peaceful, with no immediate reports of arrests.
Thousands of protesters in cities dotting the nation from Midtown Manhattan to Anchorage, Alaska, including at multiple state capitols, assailed Trump and Musk‘s actions on the economy, immigration and human rights. On the West Coast, in the shadow of Seattle’s iconic Space Needle, protesters held signs with slogans like “Fight the oligarchy.” Protesters chanted as they took to the streets in Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles, where they marched from Pershing Square to City Hall.
Demonstrators voiced anger over the administration’s moves to fire thousands of federal workers, close Social Security Administration field offices, effectively shutter entire agencies, deport immigrants, scale back protections for transgender people and cut funding for health programs.
Activists have staged nationwide demonstrations against Trump and Musk multiple times since Trump returned to office. But before Saturday the opposition movement had yet to produce a mass mobilization like the Women’s March in 2017, which brought thousands of women to Washington after Trump’s first inauguration, or the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that erupted in multiple cities after George Floyd’s killing by police in Minneapolis in 2020.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
