As Hageman pivots to tele-town hall, Dems host in-person event

Yahoo

31-03-2025

CHEYENNE — When U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., decided earlier this week to pivot to tele-town halls from in-person events, she blamed the Democratic Party for making the events too unsafe to proceed. In response, the Wyoming Democratic Party and Laramie County Democratic Party put together their own overlapping in-person town hall.
Around 80 people gathered at Laramie County Community College Friday evening, where Hageman's in-person town hall was previously set to be held, to share their concerns and make their voices heard.
Laramie County Democrats Chairman Matthew Snyder said his goal for the event was to give constituents a place to be heard.
'Our interest, as a party, is having an opportunity to organize around these events, or lack thereof. In many ways, I see this as a watershed opportunity to be meaningful,' he said.
His fear is that leaders not meeting face-to-face with their constituents as a national trend will lead to a disconnect between Washington, D.C., and the rest of the country.
Instead of hosting an in-person town hall Friday evening at LCCC, Hageman hosted a tele-town hall meeting that allowed constituents to submit questions online or over the phone to staffers, dial in and listen.
Hageman said more than 100 constituents tuned into the call, down from around 500 who attended a chaotic recent town hall in Laramie that made national news.
Democrat town hall 2
Attendees listen to speakers at a town hall hosted by the Laramie County Democratic Party discussing the actions of Wyoming's U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman at Laramie County Community College on Friday.
In order to get the number to dial in, attendees were required to list their full name, contact information and address in an online form. Some attending the Democratic Party event said sharing this personal information made them uncomfortable. Shortly after the event began, however, automated calls went out to Hageman's constituents, offering them the opportunity to listen in.
Over the course of about an hour, Hageman answered 16 questions that had been previously submitted by those who listened to the live call. At the end of the event, she said she hopes to resume in-person town halls as soon as next month 'if we can get the temperature turned down a little bit and make sure that we can provide for the safety and security of people who attend.'
The questions she fielded ranged from the impacts of reported cuts of up to 80,000 Veterans Affairs jobs to the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education on the state of Wyoming.
She said that Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins is a friend of hers who cares deeply for U.S. veterans. She supported the cuts of the positions, saying that it weeds out waste, fraud and abuse. Hageman said the cuts focus specifically on the administration and bureaucracy, rather than the service providers of the VA.
'We need to have some changes at the VA,' Hageman said. 'We need to go in. We need to be not just tinkering around the edges, we need to go into these agencies, pull up the hood, pull out the engines, start looking at all of the different things that go on in these agencies, find out what works, find out what doesn't work, and focus on the services that we need to provide to our men and women in service, as well as the veterans.'
Hageman also defended the dismantling of the federal Department of Education, saying that education was better off in Wyoming when she grew up and graduated from Lingle-Fort Laramie High School in 1981.
She said she is confident Wyoming will be the best state in education going forward with the federal government out of it.
Attendees at the Democratic event identified these as two of the top priorities they would have liked to ask Hageman about if she had been at LCCC Friday evening.
'Right now, it's very scary to me for my grandchildren,' one attendee, who asked not to be identified, said as she began to tear up. 'Right now, I don't (have hope), but I'm hoping that will change.'
Her husband, who said he is a veteran, said he is concerned with how cuts to the VA may negatively impact veterans.
Perhaps the top concern of those who gathered at LCCC Friday evening was Social Security. One of the three panelists at the event, Ted Hanlon, said he is currently receiving Social Security payments, and he wants to keep it that way.
'I know about Social Security; that's my money, that's not their money,' he said. 'And then somebody tells me they're going to take it away from me. And then they won't even listen to me when I want to talk about it?'
President Trump has said he will not cut Social Security, which has more than 70 million recipients. However, he does plan to cut jobs in the agency. Last month, the Social Security Administration announced plans to cut about 7,000 employees, or about 12% of its workforce.
Hageman addressed Social Security on her call. She said that Congress cannot touch Social Security by law, but she knows that there is an enormous amount of fraud within the program. She said cutting federal spending in certain areas will help strengthen programs like Social Security.
'Someone who has 17 Social Security numbers that he is receiving Social Security on every single one of those, that's fraud. We need to wipe that out,' she said. 'There are a whole variety of things, but I do believe that the President has made clear over and over and over again, we are not going to touch the benefits for Social Security Administration or Medicare, but we're going to have to strengthen those programs if they're going to exist a decade from now.'
Also during the call, Hageman said she supports bipartisan legislation to have at least one United States Post Office Processing and Distribution Center in every state, she has been fighting a mandate on electronic identification eartags for cattle crossing state lines, and she supports most executive orders becoming law.
'We are in the process of, right now, writing the laws and introducing the laws to actually carry out those executive orders that should be written into law,' she said. 'And not all of them should be, but some of them should be ... and they may need some tweaks. We may need to do things a little bit differently than what's going on with the President. But again, the executive orders are directed at the executive branch. They happen to impact us now because the executive branch has become so powerful. That's the problem. That's what I'm trying to take care of.'
At the time of publication, President Trump had signed 103 executive orders since he took office Jan. 20. In former President Joe Biden's four years in office, he signed 162 executive orders.
Snyder concluded by asking his attendees, 'What's next?'
He said he is not hopeless about the future, but he is not optimistic that Hageman will deviate from the party line set by President Trump or listen to her Democratic constituents as the sole U.S. representative for the state of Wyoming.
'This is happening all over the country, where duly elected representatives are not showing up, and that's part of the job. That's a lot of the job, showing up and being responsible and accountable and knowing your constituents in a meaningful way, and addressing issues if they may have them,' he said.
'Not everything is rosy in our country right now, putting it mildly, and there is discontent all over the country, and for representatives, including Representative Hageman, not to answer for those things ... that's problematic.'