 Relations with labor deteriorated, however, especially after WPA funding cuts and policy changes made by Congress in 1939 led to the dismissal of more than half of the city’s WPA workforce.Somervell’s relations with WPA’s arts program were particularly difficult.When Congress in 1940 required all WPA workers to sign a loyalty oath an increasingly anti-Communist Somervell ordered a deeper investigation of even those arts project workers who had signed the oath.