When staff at a tax office in Ogden, Utah, arrived at work a few weeks ago to find dozens of their colleagues had been dismissed by Elon Musk’s cost-cutting task force, they swiftly appealed to their Republican congressman.

They hoped that Blake Moore, whose district office is in the same building as the Internal Revenue Service processing centre in the small city in the foothills of the Wasatch mountain range, would be alarmed by the sudden job cuts at the area’s single largest employer.

In a county Donald Trump won by more than 20 percentage points last November, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) seemed to be “actively working to destroy our lives and the livelihood of our local economy”, said IRS employee Torrie, whose mother and grandmother also worked at the agency, and who asked for her full name not to be published for fear of reprisals.