'Real voter concern': GOP lawmakers privately worry constituents will rebel over DOGE

12 February

Although some prominent figures in the MAGA movement are voicing their disdain for Elon Musk — most notably, "War Room" host Steve Bannon — President Donald Trump is showing no signs of losing patience with the billionaire SpaceX/Tesla CEO.

Musk now heads the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE (which is not yet a Congressionally authorized federal agency), where he is pushing for steep budget cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and other agencies. And Trump is encouraging Musk to keep moving ahead with DOGE's work.

But according to Columbia University political science professor Elizabeth Saunders, some GOP lawmakers fear that their voters may be becoming worried about Musk.

During an appearance on The New Republic's podcast "The Daily Blast" posted on February 12, Saunders told host Greg Sargent that lawmakers are seeing "real voter concern" about Musk and DOGE. And Sargent pointed out that Republican members of Congress are sending out letters trying to calm down worries about Musk.

"These constituent letters are very interesting," Saunders told Sargent. "They're getting picked up by the media now, and it's very interesting that CNN and The Bulwark have analyzed them, but they're not the first line of getting these sentiments into the public discourse. If you wanted to do that, you would make a speech on the Senate floor, you would give a press conference, and you would make sure that it got on the six o'clock news; or you would go on CNN during prime time or a Sunday show and give a quote live on TV that would then be repeated elsewhere. "

Saunders added, "That's a much more effective way to do it if you want everyone to hear it all at once. This is a little bit on the down low."

Nonetheless, Saunders warned that Musk's attacks on the federal government could do a lot of harm.

The political science professor told Sargent: "Government is not something that when you find a problem with it, you just unplug it and plug it back in a minute later. This isn’t a unplug-and-plug-it-back-in situation. By the time everyone really wakes up to this, it is possible that people will have been severed from the government in a way that makes it really hard to reconnect them. People will die."

Listen to the full New Republic podcast at this link or read the transcript here.

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