In late February at a town hall in his suburban Atlanta district, Rep. Rich McCormick faced criticism and boos from constituents over government downsizing actions taken by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
“Tyranny is rising in the White House, and a man has declared himself our king,” one attendee told the congressman, asking what the Republican would do to “rein in the megalomaniac” there. That question prompted cheers from the crowd at the February 20 event where McCormick repeatedly asked the audience to stop yelling.
But he apparently got the message his constituents were sending. Back in Washington, he offered disapproval for some of DOGE’s actions, criticizing an email from billionaire Elon Musk that asked federal employees for five things they had done in the previous week. “I don’t think that it’s good to go over the department heads or the secretaries and say, ‘You’ll give me the reason that you’re here,’ before Kash [Patel], or somebody else in a different department says, ‘I’ll ask that question. Thank you very much,’” he told reporters on Capitol Hill last week. “Now, it doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea, but we just have to make sure it’s gone through the right conduits.”
McCormick was one of the first House Republicans to go on record asking DOGE, which is slashing government contracts and laying off federal workers, to be more deliberate after getting blowback during a town hall meeting, and other GOP lawmakers faced similar treatment in their districts. It seemed that the deluge of negative feedback from those they represent was about to inspire a Republican revolt against the administration’s rapid remaking of the executive branch.
But that mood was short-lived. House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed those leveling complaints as “paid protesters.” Trump followed suit this week, posting on social media that “paid ‘troublemakers’” were attending town halls in districts represented by Republicans. Johnson also doubled down at a Tuesday press conference after National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Rep. Richard Hudson told House Republicans in a conference meeting not to hold the large in-person events. “There are people who do this as a profession,” Johnson said later. “They’re professional protesters, so why would we give them a forum to do that right now?”
Generally, that’s the official Republican line in response to the rowdy town halls, but how accurate is it? In the Trump era, narratives can be exaggerated or misapplied, but usually are based on at least something resembling the truth. Outrage from constituents may be artificially amplified by Democratic activists in some instances, but that doesn’t mean the outrage isn’t there.
Over the weekend, Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas abruptly left a town hall after audience members expressed concerns to him about veterans losing their jobs due to cutbacks, leading to jeers from the crowd. Marshall later endorsed Trump’s claim about “paid ‘troublemakers’” and told reporters that the voices of voters in rural Logan County, which overwhelmingly voted for Trump, were “drowned out by people from urban America.”
There’s no evidence that people at Marshall’s town hall were paid activists, but liberal groups are supporting protests against DOGE. The Associated Press reported that left-wing groups such as MoveOn were encouraging attendance at GOP events.
Republican members of Congress also have received a deluge of phone calls that they do not believe are organic. “When it comes to the coordinated concerns, a lot of them just come in—it’s the same message, same voicemail, same thing over and over,” Rep. Jeff Hurd of Colorado told The Dispatch.
Hurd’s office received several phone calls all matching a script on 5 Calls, a website that encourages progressive advocacy and provides information on how people can contact their representatives. The Dispatch listened to four voicemails, which began with someone saying they were “calling to express my outrage over Elon Musk’s unlawful and undemocratic takeover of the federal government.” Callers asked Hurd to do such things as “forcefully speak out against an unelected billionaire having undue influence on and control over our government’s data, personnel, and payment systems” and “halt all work in Congress until the unconstitutional power grabs stop.”
“It seems a little bit cookie-cutter, and there’s the same tactics and messaging that you see consistently from my district and other districts, and that comes through in a lot of the voicemails and messages that come to me,” Hurd said. “And so, when I see those, it suggests to me that it’s not necessarily organic as much as it is the product of one of these campaigns.”
The freshman House member is not the only Republican to question just how high the level of dissatisfaction with DOGE’s actions are. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, an Iowa Republican who narrowly won a reelection bid this year, likewise met the disapproval she received with some skepticism.
“I think that there are certainly genuine complaints, but we also have email solicitations for people to come to protest rather than asking for a meeting with their congresswoman,” she told The Dispatch. “So, I think it’s a mixture of both.”
Still, there are actual anxieties among GOP members of Congress, despite the potential for the outrage being overhyped. Republicans have leveled specific criticisms at DOGE based on what Musk and his coterie of young engineers are doing, in terms of the speed at which they are working and their encroaching on the authority of Cabinet secretaries. Hurd said there were concerns that are “certainly valid” from county officials he interacted with, naming reductions in public land management agencies that troubled constituents. House Republicans are set to meet with Musk on Wednesday, and Hurd said he wanted the DOGE leader to be more considered in the way he is identifying contracts, people, and programs to cut.
“I am sympathetic to and support the desire to make government more efficient and more effective in the way that we deliver services to our citizens,” he said. “I think the one thing I would say is, it would be great if we could be thoughtful in how we implement these savings. I think one of the things that I’ve heard loud and clear from people that are knowledgeable in Colorado is, yes, there is a lot of fat that can be trimmed from these federal agencies, but let’s just make sure that we’re cutting it in the right spots.”
