As President Donald Trump and centabillionaire Elon Musk enact sweeping cuts to federal agencies and mass layoffs of federal workers, some Republican lawmakers from red states are worried about the effects those cuts could have on their constituents.
Politico reported Friday that Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) is particularly sensitive to how the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) hiring freeze will affect the National Park Service. The Gem State is home to 10 national parks, and Simpson said he wants assurances from OPM that the administration's actions won't impact seasonal workers needed during peak tourism months.
"The hiring freeze has been a problem because now’s when we’re hiring seasonal employees for the parks — that’s a challenge,” Simpson said.
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Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-.W.Va.) chairs an appropriations subcommittee that oversees the National Institutes of Heath (NIH), which provides funding for thousands of research projects every year aimed at curing and treating disease. The West Virginia Republican told the outlet she was concerned about how cuts to the NIH could affect projects in the Mountain State.
"I’m hearing from my institutions concerned about it,” Sen. Capito said. “It’s pretty drastic.”
Both Trump and Musk have promised to cut out "waste" in federal agencies. However, they have largely bypassed Congress in doing so, despite Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution explicitly giving the legislative branch sole responsibility for deciding how federal money is spent. One Republican Hill staffer anonymously told Politico that some GOP lawmakers are "chafing about the basis of [the] executive doing it rather than it being done by Congress."
Additionally, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) is worried that farmers in the Sunflower State could be impacted by cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He said that USAID's Food for Peace program has traditionally been a reliable source of business for farmers looking to offload portions of their harvest to be sent overseas to provide food assistance to impoverished communities around the world.
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Click here to read Politico's full report.