Georgia Republican faces town hall backlash over DOGE's 'chainsaw approach' to federal cuts

Yahoo

21-02-2025

Rep. Rich McCormick faced an angry crowd Thursday during a town hall in his Georgia district, where many constituents lashed out at the Republican lawmaker over his support for massive federal layoffs and budget cuts by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency.
In video of the event taken by Greg Bluestein, a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and an NBC News contributor, attendees clashed with McCormick, bashing both President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk who is helping lead DOGE's efforts to drastically reduce government spending.
In one instance, an attendee referred to recent cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by asking, 'Why is the supposedly conservative party taking such a radical and extremist and sloppy approach to this?'
McCormick responded that 'a lot of the work they do is duplicitous with AI.'Almost 1,300 probationary CDC employees were removed from their posts as the Trump administration makes efforts to terminate all probationary workers — typically employees who are recent hires.
'If we continue to grow the size of government and we can't afford it, it's going to have shortfalls in your Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,' McCormick added at the event in Roswell, about 20 miles from the CDC headquarters.
The attendee shot back that the administration was taking a 'chainsaw approach' to dismissing its employees and the layoff effort was being 'jammed down the pipe, so rushed and sloppily.'
After McCormick said that a department or agency makes its own decisions about whom to cut from its workforce when given a directive about head count, people in the audience could be heard saying, 'No!' with one person saying, 'Elon Musk is deciding.'
The town hall was also punctuated by constituents saying, 'we're pissed,' and 'don't bend over,' as well as chants of 'shame!'
As McCormick struggled to respond to the interruptions from the crowd and suggested he was offering solutions and people didn't 'want to hear,' one person can be heard shouting, 'We want to work with someone better.'
McCormick handily won re-election last year, winning 64.9% of the vote in a state that Trump flipped after narrowly losing the battleground to Joe Biden in 2020.
One person who raised budget concerns Thursday could be heard telling McCormick that he had done a 'disservice' and had failed to 'stand up for us.'
In another instance, an attendee asked McCormick how he plans to 'rein in the megalomaniac in the White House' following Trump's 'LONG LIVE THE KING' post on Truth Social, a question that was met by cheers and some people rising to their feet.
'When you talk about tyranny, when you talk about presidential power, I remember having the same discussion with Republicans when Biden was elected,' McCormick said, to boos from the attendees.
'I don't want to see any president be too powerful,' McCormick added.
At different points during the town hall, McCormick made attempts to quiet the crowd, saying at one point, 'If you're gonna yell at me, that's not going to be an effective town hall," and later telling attendees, "Nobody can hear when you're yelling."
A spokesperson for McCormick did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday night on the town hall.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com