These are truly uncertain times for Pueblo. With the President and Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s point man for downsizing government, hell bent on cutting departments, budgets and workforces, the city has found itself suddenly in a holding pattern and not sure how it will move ahead, said Pueblo City Councilman Dennis Flores.
One of the city’s biggest planned projects for 2025, a multi-million-dollar facelift for Pueblo Memorial Airport, has now been put on hold because it may need to focus more on the city’s nuts-and-bolts priorities. Not knowing, being unable to plan, Flores said, does not stop there.
“This environment that the government has created is unsettling,” said the Pueblo native. It is that way, he said, because with DOGE, the ad hoc undertaking created to carry out Trump’s surreal federal downsizing, no one knows how to proceed. With federal grants and government subsidies now in doubt, plans all across city government are suddenly on hold.
“Uncertainty creates chaos,” Flores said. “Just look at the stock market. There are fluctuations all over the place.” And not unlike the jobs that have already been slashed by Musk and his team, Pueblo may also lose jobs. In that category, no one is safe. Some federal workers in Denver have already been pink-slipped, including IRS and Small Business Administration staffers.
“My concern is the economic welfare of the community,” Flores said. “When you think about seniors losing some Medicaid services, food programs, research, it’s going to hurt everybody. It’s mindboggling how they’re approaching it.” But says the term-limited city official, one group in the crosshairs stands out.
“As a vet, I can’t even see straight,” Flores fumed. “Even if you wanted to do this type of thing (slash workforces), why would you go after veterans right off the bat?”
Musk’s “woodchipper,” the term he uses for the disposing of departments and workers, has set 80,000 as its goal for a down-sized Veterans Administration. Of this workforce, it is estimated that a one third are veterans, many of whom are disabled from injuries—many catastrophic—suffered in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Flores is worried about how the impact of the Trump-Musk quick-strike on the federal workforce will hit two of his city’s big institutions, Colorado State University-Pueblo and the Colorado Mental Health Institute.
While many of Trump’s targets for downsizing will be invisible, Pueblo’s airport renovation was a wholesale, five-million-dollar facelift. “The foundation of this project is to expand the concourse,” Pueblo Director of Aviation Greg Pedroza told LaVozColorado last month. The project also included airport security upgrades where passengers are screened. The plan also included improvements that would improve comfort and convenience for travelers, including “new and modern restrooms.”
But beyond the airport upgrades is another of the city’s concerns, air service. Currently, Southern Airways serves Pueblo under the government’s Essential Air Service program. EAS is a program designed to serve smaller, sometimes rural communities across the nation. Carriers using smaller aircraft are paid a stipend to ferry passengers to hub cities where they can connect for their final destinations.
Because EAS is provided across both red and blue congressional districts, it is doubtful that Congress would allow EAS from being slashed from the budget. Still, with all that has happened under the Musk/DOGE campaign no one can be entirely confident that it is safe.
“This has all happened so quickly,” Flores lamented. “When it first started you didn’t know it was going to be an on-going thing.” But the Pueblo native is concerned that the final numbers are more the focus for Trump’s downsizing than the people it affects. But, in the end, he said, no one should be surprised.
The plan, Flores said, “was right there in Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for shrinking government. Throughout the campaign Trump said he didn’t know anything about it. “He lied,” Flores says. “He’s following it to a tee, going chapter-by-chapter. That’s his strategy.”
