Angry Voters Confront Republicans Back Home Over Trump and DOGE

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

The first month of 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 trumpets the rapid change as integral to saving taxpayer dollars, discontent appears to be growing among some American voters, and they are turning up the heat on their representatives in Washington.

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.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that one attendee asked McCormick 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 they were undergoing efforts to rehire them. “Why is a supposedly conservative party taking such a radical and extremist and sloppy approach to this?” the person asked, to applause from the crowd.

McCormick said that he is close with the CDC, and that many of the agency’s probationary workers who were let go were “duplicitous” with AI, an answer that did not impress the audience.

Per the outlet, another attendee professed to be a descendant of founding father Patrick Henry and pressed McCormick on what he was doing to rein in Trump. McCormick was quickly met with boos when he responded, “When you talk about tyranny, when you talk about presidential power, I remember having the same discussion with Republicans when Biden was elected.”

A Wisconsin congressman faced a similar scene in his district Thursday. 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.

The town halls are unlikely to herald serious Democratic challenges for McCormick or Fitzgerald in 2026. 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 could change. On Thursday, 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 are “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.”