Angry Voters Keep Confronting Republicans Back Home

President Trump arrives at the Republican Governors Association meeting at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. Photo: Shawn Thew/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s second term commenced with a series of steep cuts to federal agencies and hastily assembled mass layoffs spearheaded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. Now, as the administration defends the upheaval it has created, some discontented voters are turning up the heat on their representatives in Washington.

After a series of tense Republican town halls last week, the trend continued over the weekend and beyond. On Monday, Missouri representative Mark Alford defended the Trump administration’s federal job cuts to restive constituents, suggesting to voters that there was a greater plan in motion for those affected locally. “I would encourage anyone who finds themselves in this situation to realize that we are going to get this economy turning again. There are jobs available. God has a plan and purpose for your life,” he said, per the Kansas City Star. One woman retorted, “We don’t want your God!”

Voters in Texas representative Pete Sessions’s district confronted him during a town hall Saturday. The New York Times reports that a veteran signaled support for some of the efforts to cut government spending, but raised Musk’s involvement as a problem. “I like what you’re saying, but you need to tell more people,” he said, per the outlet. “The guy in South Africa is not doing you any good — he’s hurting you more than he’s helping.”

At a town hall he held Thursday evening, Representative Rich McCormick, a Republican who represents a solidly red district in Georgia, was met with fierce criticism and, at times, a chorus of boos as he was grilled about the significant cuts undertaken by the Trump administration and DOGE. By Monday, the congressman was publicly advising the White House to slow things down.

“I think we’re just moving a little too fast,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We should have impact studies on each department as we do it, and I’m sure we can do that. We’re moving really, really rapidly, and we don’t know the impact.”

McCormick had been questioned about the recent layoffs of federal workers with the National Nuclear Security Administration as well as employees with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control who were tasked with the nation’s bird-flu response. The agencies were later forced to backtrack, admitting that the fired workers were let go accidentally and that they were undergoing efforts to rehire them. “Why is a supposedly conservative party taking such a radical and extremist and sloppy approach to this?” one town-hall attendee asked McCormick on Thursday to applause from the crowd.

A Wisconsin congressman faced a similar scene. TMJ4, a local NBC affiliate, reports that Republican representative Scott Fitzgerald — who, like McCormick, represents a ruby-red district — was peppered with questions from constituents about the cuts as he insisted that fraud had been discovered by DOGE. One member of the audience asked Fitzgerald if he would force Musk to explain his actions. “Are you going to subpoena him at some point? Are you willing to use your subpoena power to tell Musk to stand in front of Congress and answer some hard questions?” he said.

Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma also faced voters upset about the job cuts. News9, a local CBS affiliate, reports that constituents raised concerns of Musk’s potential conflicts of interest as well as the White House appearing to supplant the legislative branch. “We’re seeing the administration undermine Congress,” one woman told Hern.

Hern defended the government’s intent to decrease waste. “It’s going to impact all of us in this room, regardless of party or whether you like me or not. We’ve got to find a way to pay for and get our fiscal house in order,” he said.

The town halls are unlikely to herald serious Democratic challenges for lawmakers who represent deeply conservative districts. But they do appear to support findings from two polls released Wednesday that Americans are growing increasingly intolerant of Musk and his outsize role in government. A Pew Research poll found that 54 percent of American adults surveyed said that they have an unfavorable opinion of Musk, with 36 percent of respondents specifying they have a “very unfavorable” opinion of him. In a Quinnipiac University poll, 55 percent of registered voters said they think that Musk has too much power in making decisions that affect the United States. Only 3 percent said they believed that Musk has “too little” power.

And while Republicans in the House and Senate have mostly stayed silent as Trump and Musk shred the government, that may be slowly changing. Last week, Representative Troy Balderson, an Ohio Republican, spoke at a Westerville area chamber of commerce luncheon, saying that he felt Trump’s endless volley of executive orders is “getting out of hand.”

“Congress has to decide whether or not the Department of Education goes away,” Balderson said, per the Columbus Dispatch. “Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides.”