Representative Richard Hudson has a bold prediction for how Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s purge of the federal government will play out for his party in next year’s elections. “I think voters are going to reward us,” the North Carolina Republican told me. “The Democrats have made a huge miscalculation by establishing themselves as the party defending waste, fraud, and abuse.”
As chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), Hudson is tasked with keeping the GOP in power, and his enthusiasm suggests that the party leadership won’t be backing away from Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency anytime soon. When I asked Hudson whether he had any concerns about DOGE or its billionaire leader, he replied quickly and unequivocally: “Not at all.”
Some of Hudson’s Republican colleagues aren’t so sure. They’ve seen the polls showing how unpopular Musk and DOGE are. They’ve heard from angry voters at town-hall meetings who are worried about the loss of jobs and government services. And now they’ve begun registering their own complaints with the White House and DOGE staffers, both in private and in group meetings that Musk has attended.
The GOP’s fears about DOGE appear to be growing, based on conversations I had with a dozen House Republicans this week. Several of them suggested to me that the Trump administration’s campaign to slash the federal workforce could threaten not only their constituents but also their party’s chance to retain its narrow majority.
“There needs to be more of a strategic approach,” Representative Dan Newhouse, a sixth-term Republican from Washington State, told me. “A lot of the directives seem to be arbitrary.” Newhouse said he had expressed concerns to the White House about agricultural cuts in his district and told the administration that DOGE shouldn’t ignore Congress. “It can’t be just one entity” making spending decisions, he said.
Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, a former chair of the NRCC, told me that DOGE’s leadership had failed to adequately communicate to the public what the agency is doing and why. “It’s been controversial,” Sessions said. “There’s a lot of good that has come from it, but it needs to be more organized, better explained.”
In gently criticizing DOGE, Republicans seem to be weighing their desire to reduce the government’s size and scope—which they have campaigned on for decades—against their unease with the way the administration is going about it. Musk has gloated about feeding entire agencies “into the wood chipper,” and neither he nor Trump has expressed much interest in consulting the branch of government that putatively controls federal spending. (Some Republicans did tell me, however, that in private, Musk has become more receptive to their concerns.) “What people say is Be professional,” Representative Austin Scott of Georgia told me when I asked him what he was hearing about DOGE from his constituents. He repeated the message: “Be professional.”
Even Hudson has sent signals to Republicans that might give them reason to doubt his stated confidence about DOGE’s popularity: Last week he privately urged House Republicans to avoid in-person town halls in favor of teleconferences, which they could more easily control. In our interview, Hudson defended the directive by accusing Democratic activists of “hijacking” public forums in GOP districts. His advice to Republican lawmakers: “If the real people in the district are upset, yeah, you need to take it to heart.”
So far, the Republican gripes about DOGE fall far short of a revolt. Indeed, a revolt hardly seems likely in today’s GOP. In his second term, the president has demanded complete loyalty from Republicans in Congress—“NO DISSENT,” Trump warned on the eve of a vote this week on government funding—and with few exceptions, his party has complied.
When a single House Republican, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, defected on the funding vote, Trump called for him to face a primary challenger and said he’d meet the same fate as former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who lost her seat after turning on Trump. The next day, The New York Times reported that Musk wanted to contribute $100 million to a group backing Trump’s agenda—a sign that Musk might be willing to use his wealth to help the president keep his party in line.
Some of the Republicans I spoke with were all in on DOGE, especially those from districts that Trump easily carried. Representative Andy Harris, the chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told me that voters in his Maryland district “don’t want their taxpayer dollars paying for fraud, waste, and abuse.” “They want the administration to get to the bottom of it,” Harris said. “They appreciate the efforts that are being made.”
Yet because of its proximity to Washington, D.C., Harris’s district includes one of the highest percentages of federal workers of any area represented by a Republican in Congress. I asked him what he’d say to a constituent who had lost their job because of DOGE’s cuts. “I say the same thing to people who are laid off from private industries that have become bloated and inefficient: Look, that’s the way the American economy works,” Harris replied.
Some Republicans began our conversation by voicing unqualified support for Trump and Musk—and ended by contemplating the dangers that DOGE poses to their districts. “I can’t tell you the amount of people that came up to me saying, Keep it up. We want this. We need it. The government has been growing so much,” Representative Juan Ciscomani of Arizona told me. Unlike Harris, who won his reelection easily last year, Ciscomani prevailed only narrowly in one of the nation’s most competitive House races.
But when I asked about his constituents whose jobs could be jeopardized by federal cuts, Ciscomani’s tone shifted. The southeast corner of Arizona that he represents includes the state’s largest passport-processing center as well as a large number of military veterans, who rely on—and in some cases work at—the Veterans Affairs facilities located in his district. Ciscomani would prefer that Trump and Musk not touch those areas. “I will stand the line on that and defend that,” he told me. Ciscomani said he represents nearly 25,000 federal employees; for comparison, he won reelection last year by only about 10,000 votes. “I’ve got a lot of stake in this, a lot of skin in the game for my district to make sure that we protect these areas,” he said.
To the frustration of Democrats, some senior Republicans who communicated their concerns to the White House have won reprieves for federal facilities in their districts that the administration wanted to close. And many GOP lawmakers welcomed Trump’s statement last week indicating that Cabinet secretaries, not Musk, would be in charge of staffing reductions at their agencies—an announcement that followed a reported clash between the DOGE chief and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Even though Republicans are starting to feel more backlash over DOGE, they declined a key opportunity this week to wrest back their spending power. On Tuesday, the GOP House majority passed a six-month government-funding bill that did little to restore (or codify) the cuts that Trump and Musk are making. Republican negotiators also rejected Democratic demands to add language to the legislation that would restrain DOGE. As a result, Democrats said the bill further empowers the Trump administration to make cuts unilaterally—an argument that GOP leaders themselves then used to win the support of conservative hard-liners.
In some respects, the spending bill is an odd proposal for Republicans to rally around. It would extend Biden-era funding levels through the first eight months of the GOP governing trifecta. Republicans have, in effect, voted to keep spending money on agencies, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, that the Trump administration has all but shut down. GOP leaders say the move buys the party time to develop a budget that locks in the cuts that Musk has identified and, in many cases, already made. But it also prevents Republicans from having to take politically difficult votes that they’ve dodged in the past. When I asked Andy Harris why Republicans wouldn’t vote to cut spending on USAID—an agency that no longer exists, thanks to Musk’s wood chipper—he replied, “We don’t have to.”
Hudson said the decision to forgo major cuts in this funding bill was a matter of prudence. “We can’t just cut blindly,” he told me. “We have to know what we’re cutting.” It’s a message that some House Republicans wish he would deliver to Elon Musk.
