ROSWELL, Georgia — The crowd packed into City Hall and filled an overflow room with one question, above all, for their Republican congressman: What did he think of Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn mission to shrink the federal government?
Back in their districts, GOP lawmakers get an earful on DOGE and Musk
Town halls from Wisconsin to Oregon grew testy this week as concerned voters showed up to vent
February 21, 2025 The Washington Post
“If you’re going to just yell at me, that’s not going be an effective town hall,” McCormick said, five minutes into defending Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service.
“But we’re pissed!” a woman shouted.
Town halls this week for congressional Republicans from Georgia to Wisconsin to Oregon grew testy as voters showed up to vent, outraged at the firing of workers and the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to sensitive data. Protesters showed up around the country at lawmakers’ offices.
The backlash extends far beyond federal workers in the Beltway, reaching purple districts that will decide control of Congress in 2026 and swing states like Georgia that helped return Trump to the White House. Layoffs just hit the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Funding freezes have halted clean-energy projects championed by President Joe Biden.
The crowd at McCormick’s town hall Thursday night was decidedly liberal. But new Washington Post-Ipsos polling suggests some of Trump and Musk’s moves are unpopular beyond the Democratic base. About 6 in 10 Americans surveyed were opposed to shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Musk bragged about feeding “into the wood chipper.”
Republicans have overwhelmingly backed DOGE’s mission and even moved to replicate it at the state-level, including in Georgia. But they’re also struggling to justify the scope of some cuts and scrambling to get exceptions for their constituents — in some cases lobbying the Trump administration to restore federal funding to their states.
Anna Foy teared up as she waited with her mother to watch McCormick’s town hall from overflow. The 33-year-old Army Reservist said the Bureau of Land Management had abruptly rescinded a job offer wrangling wild horses; she spoke to someone in McCormick’s office, she said, and was here to follow up.
“I’ve worked six years to develop my resume around this job,” Foy said. “I don’t know what to do.” When the town hall finished, she waited to speak with the congressman’s staff.
She didn’t want to talk about politics because of her Army role, she said — she just wanted her job back.
The Bureau of Land Management did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that the Trump administration is “already uncovering waste, fraud, and abuse across federal agencies.”
“Ultimately, President Trump will cut programs that do not serve the interests of the American people and keep programs that put America First, just as 77 million voters elected him to do,” she said.
Around the country, other Republican House members faced sharp questions after heading home for recess. Liberal groups encouraged their members to show up to town halls in deep-red territory.
In rural La Grande, Oregon, attendees of Rep. Cliff Bentz’s town hall erupted in boos and shouted “Tax Elon!” according to local news outlet The Observer. In Ohio, Rep. Troy Balderson acknowledged some limits to Musk’s authority at a luncheon, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
“Congress has to decide whether the Department of Education goes away,” Balderson said. “Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides.”
But Republican lawmakers have mostly defended and declined to publicly criticize DOGE while endorsing its stated goals of rooting out waste in the federal government. And plenty of their base voters are eager for more cuts.
Asked what they liked about Trump’s first month in office, Republican voters elsewhere in McCormick’s conservative district sometimes brought up DOGE unprompted. They rattled off all the things they’d heard their tax dollars were funding, occasionally echoing the White House’s false claim that the government spent millions on condoms in Gaza.
“I am so thrilled with the DOGE and going in and finding all this corruption, and I expect they’ll find about a trillion dollars,” said 73-year-old Peggy Reese. She knew the CDC had just fired “a bunch of people” in Atlanta, and figured some “collateral damage” was inevitable.
Anthony Smith, 65, said he didn’t trust the CDC anyway because of its “totally crazy response” to the covid-19 pandemic.
“I think Elon Musk is one of the best things that’s happened to the country,” Smith said while shopping in Roswell.
Democrats have increasingly focused their opposition to the Trump administration on Musk and DOGE, viewing the billionaire Trump donor as the perfect villain. They say an unelected businessman should not wield so much power over the federal government and accuse him and Trump of illegally usurping Congress’s power of the purse by unilaterally canceling spending.
Protests around the country this week took aim at both Trump and Musk. Lawmakers who didn’t hold town halls were met with protests at their offices. Activist groups helped organize demonstrations outside dealerships for Musk’s electric car company, Tesla.
“I was afraid that after the election people would like, turtle up or pull in,” said Becky Woomer, a vice chair with the Democratic committee for Georgia’s Forsyth County. But the energy now, she said, “is massive. People reaching out, wanting to be involved, wanting to do something.”
“Part of me is like, ‘Where was this energy last year?’” she said. “But for a lot of people who were either younger or maybe more checked out eight years ago, this is their 2016 moment of being, like, what the hell just happened?”
Musk took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week with a chainsaw.
A flurry of pending lawsuits seek to halt or reverse the Trump administration’s moves. “A lot of this stuff will be litigated in court,” McCormick said at one point in the town hall. The crowd erupted in shouting.
A minute later, with interruptions still going, the emcee said they would move on to another person’s question on foreign policy for the sake of time. But foreign policy didn’t offer much of a respite.
“I figured Elon was gonna be the main topic tonight,” the attendee with the foreign policy question said when they stood up. “And he’s gonna continue to be the main topic tonight.”
She asked McCormick about Trump’s suggestions that Ukraine bore responsibility for Russia’s invasion and asked “if you as a congressman will get with your fellow congresspeople and stand up to the lies.”
McCormick won some brief applause when he told the town hall, “I stand firmly with NATO.” But he stopped short of criticizing the political figure upending the alliance: Trump.