Tuesday’s “Say No to DOGE” protest at the intersection of Keswick Avenue and Waverly Road in Glenside was featured by WHYY today in an article titled “Glenside residents protest DOGE cuts in the aftermath of SPS fire: ‘Who’s going to be keeping an eye out for us?’”.

The story summarizes tensions regarding the Trump administration’s recent federal funding and job cuts as they relate to industrial disaster prevention and response.

“We don’t know what’s in the soil, we don’t know what’s in the water,” Jessica Tkacs, rally organizer and Glenside resident, told WHYY News. “We don’t know what it’s going to be like as they continue the rebuilding and cleaning out effort of SPS, but we know that we need to have our people on the ground monitoring things, people who are not working for anyone but taxpayers.”

According to the story, some protestors held signs with slogans including “Tax the rich” in reference to Elon Musk. Others claimed a direct tie to the SPS fire via assistance received from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Protection.

“If our EPA and DEP employees disappear, who’s going to be keeping an eye out for us? Who’s going to be watching the water and the soil as we clean up SPS?” Tkacs said.

“The reason that gaps like this appear is because of the long-standing attack on our agencies and the defunding of our agencies,” Alex Bomstein, a Cheltenham High School graduate and executive director of Clean Air Council, told WHYY. “What we need is a government that’s focus is on supporting the people and protecting the people. We’ve had a lot of historical disinvestment in that, but this is an entirely different magnitude, an entirely different nature, of assault on our government and the folks who work day in and day out to protect us.”

A local resident shared the following video of the protest:

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Screengrab: Youtube