Georgia Republican Rich McCormick, who faced unruly anti-DOGE protesters at a recent town hall, is urging the administration ‘to be compassionate.’
On February 23, right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk took to X to celebrate mass layoffs at the U.S. Agency for International Development. “To the 2,000 USAID employees getting released today, I’m sure there’s lots of other leftwing NGOs you can find gainful employment at,” he said in a viral post that included a video of USAID employees streaming out of their building, boxes of personal effects in hand. “Oh wait, we’re defunding those too.”
But in Congress, not every Republican lawmaker is hitting the retweet button. Celebrating widespread federal workforce layoffs can carry risk, even in redder-leaning districts where efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to shrink the size of the federal government are championed by constituents.
“I just want to make sure our messaging is clear that we’re trying to be compassionate,” says Representative Rich McCormick (R., Ga.), a self-described “Calvin Coolidge fan” who supports DOGE’s mission and represents a deep-red district. “If you make this about the chainsaw and taking pictures and you think you’re only punishing Democrats, there’s going to be some Republicans that lose some benefits too. There’s going to be Republicans that lose their job too.”
This Georgia Republican is being extra cautious, having been in the DOGE hot seat lately. Over the weekend, video snippets of a McCormick town hall went viral when a series of protesters lambasted the congressman in his home district over their alleged concerns with DOGE’s overreach. Excluded from many mainstream news reports were the details surrounding the protest organizer’s background: a self-described Democratic political activist and donor who later bragged about making headlines, as the Washington Free Beacon revealed.
Similar progressive-led protests have cropped up in swing districts across the country in recent days, many of them organized by George Soros–backed groups like MoveOn and Indivisible.
Speaking with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins earlier this week, Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) dismissed the anti-DOGE protests: “The videos you saw of the town halls were for paid protesters in many of those places. These are Democrats who went to the events early and filled up the seats.”
It’s too early to tell whether the DOGE-focused astroturfing leads to actual and broader grassroots frustration with Musk’s move-fast-and-break-things approach. Democrats are betting big on the anti-Elon strategy ahead of the 2026 midterms, spending every waking moment railing against “President Musk” and his DOGE “minions,” with some even weaponizing a federal government shutdown in opposition to the administration’s efforts to downsize and reshape the federal government.
Looking ahead to Trump’s joint speech to Congress next week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) is reportedly planning on inviting several guests whose livelihoods depend on federal agencies or grants that have been affected by DOGE cuts, including a U.S. Army veteran who got the ax at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and a child who received treatment for a genetic spinal condition from an NIH grant that was just cut.
As New York Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres put it in an interview: “The concern about Musk is he’s taking not a scalpel but a machete to the federal government.”
Variations of Torres’s talking point are making the rounds among congressional Republicans who are worried about DOGE’s overreach. According to Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R., N.Y.), who represents a red-leaning district covering Staten Island and part of Brooklyn, Elon Musk is “doing a good job of highlighting real, egregious, wasteful spending.” That said, she’s also “concerned about throwing the baby out with the bath water” and believes Republicans “need to do this with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.”
In Malliotakis’s view, agency heads need to be more involved in the process and Musk needs to be more thorough in his approach. “When I saw last week that they fired people at the CDC, and then among that group were people who are working in the World Trade Center health-care program, I expressed concern,” she told NR this week. “We got it reversed, thankfully, but it shouldn’t come to that.”
Most Republicans are broadly supportive of DOGE’s mission, with many GOP lawmakers predicting that Democrats are leaning into their obsession with Musk at their own peril. “Everyone who runs a household, anybody who runs a business knows that every once in a while, you’ve got to look at your budget” and “make necessary cuts,” Representative Carlos Giménez (R., Fla.) told National Review earlier this month. If you don’t do that, he says, then you’re not running a very good business. “What makes the federal government any different?”
But others have raised alarm about the speed and indiscriminate nature of some of the firings, with even Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D) suggesting to the Wall Street Journal that cabinet officials should be playing a bigger role in workforce restructuring decisions: “I think that’s why we worked so hard to get these folks confirmed, and they’re now in a position to make those decisions.”
The Trump administration appears to have gotten the memo. Earlier this week, the Office of Personnel Management ordered federal agency heads to submit plans for layoffs and restructuring by March 13. Musk sought to play down some of the intraparty worries this week, reportedly telling senators during a closed-door luncheon on Thursday that DOGE representatives are coordinating closely with agency secretaries as they develop their restructuring recommendations.
Meantime, expect many Republican lawmakers to take a more measured approach to DOGE’s continued efforts. “When I say we need to tighten our belts, the comparison is that you’re going to go hungry, right? And I don’t celebrate you going hungry,” McCormick says. “I should never celebrate that. I should make sure that people understand this is a necessary part of readjusting the federal government being smaller and growing the private sector so that we can all be employed and be happy and be productive.”