Speaker Johnson tells GOP lawmakers to skip town halls after an onslaught of protests
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., walks through the Capitol, Monday, March 3, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Mike Johnson is encouraging Republican lawmakers to skip town halls that have been filled with protesters decrying the Trump administration’s slashing of federal government, echoing the president’s claims that the demonstration’s are fueled by professional protesters.
The speaker’s advice Tuesday comes as GOP lawmakers often find themselves at a loss to explain the cuts, led by billionaire Elon Musk’sDepartment of Government Efficiency, that are leaving federal workers suddenly out of jobs in communities from coast to coast. Democrats are jumping in to shine a bright light on what is happening.
“We’ve seen this movie before,” Johnson said at a news conference.
“They’re professional protesters,” Johnson added. “So why would we give them a forum to do that right now?”
Johnson was repeating President Donald Trump’s claim posted on social media on Monday that “Paid ‘troublemakers’” are filling the GOP town halls to which the House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries responded: “We don’t need paid protestors. The American people are with us.”
The Republicans are finding themselves in an unusual spot — defending the deep budget cuts they have campaigned on for years, but have rarely been able to accomplish because the reductions cut into federal programs and services Americans in their districts rely on.
Trump and Musk’s DOGE have fired tens of thousands of federal workers as they tear through the federal government in search of what they call waste, fraud and abuse. It’s spiraling at a pace the Republicans in Congress could only imagine when the party swept control of the White House, House and Senate.
Republicans are feeling the heat back home.
Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas was confronted over the week by spirited residents questioning him about the firings of veterans from the federal workforce.
Marshall, too, echoed claims of paid protesters. “Can confirm,” Marshall posted alongside Trump’s comment.
The scenes at the town halls are reminiscent of past moments — from the Obama-era health care battles, when tea party Republicans fought against the Affordable Care Act, and also the George W. Bush era, when Democrats and others protested his proposed changes to Social Security.
But more immediately the town hall outbursts resemble the Trump-era protests of 2017 and 2018 when Republicans tried and failed to repeal Obamacare, and then approved sweeping GOP tax cuts — and Democrats campaign against them, sweeping the midterm elections and reclaiming control of the U.S. House.
The speaker protecting his thin-as-ever majority advised his lawmakers to choose other forums — smaller community gatherings or telephone town halls — to discuss the issues with voters.
“They’re running away from the people because they know how badly people have been hurt by what they’re doing,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.
Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, and the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said, “I think many House Republicans have to make a choice about whether they want to fulfill their job title as representative, where they can have a town hall and actually speak honestly to their constituents, or whether they want to change their job title to Elon Musk employee.”
As Trump and Musk bulldoze through the federal government, Republican leaders are looking to cut even further, enshrining the reductions and other changes to Medicaid, food stamps and other programs into law as part of the budget process. They are hoping to reach some $2 trillion in cuts to help finance some $4.5 trillion tax breaks.
Outside groups, including Indivisible, which led powerful demonstrations during the first Trump turn, are organizing in communities nationwide as voters opposed to the president’s agenda seeks ways to show their discontent.
It has all left rank-and-file Republicans struggling to keep pace with the onslaught.
Asked in recent days what they have to say to fired federal workers, the GOP lawmakers have not always had a ready response.
“No pain, no gain,” Marshall told the Associated Press last week.
Marshall the senator from Kansas said voters understand that the U.S. government is running a nearly $2 trillion deficit, piling onto the debt load and that changes need to be made.
“I think a lot of people understand that there’s going to be some short term pain for the opportunity for long term gain,” he said. “I think people overall very happy to see the cut, in the federal spending.”
Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming said she’s supportive of Musk and his team, “but I still feel sorry for people who are losing their jobs.”
Her message to those fired federal workers was to think about the other Americans who are also struggling to get by. “You’ve got to think about the people who are paying for all this government,” she said. “We have too much government.”
Republican Sen. Rick Scott said, “That’s what President Trump got elected to do.”
Asked about his message to those who’ve been fired and are out of work, Scott said that “I’ll do everything I can to be helpful to them.”
Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas said he supports DOGE, “as a concept.” But he said, “I think you got to be careful as to how you do it.”
His advice to fired federal workers? “Just be patient.”
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said while government funding remains important in particular areas, for cancer research and the National Institutes of Health, “I think Elon Musk’s leadership and Doge has been terrific.”
“It has been refreshing. It has been desperately needed, and I am cheering him on each and every day.”
Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
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DOGE firings provoke heated confrontations, shouts of ‘Nazi,’ at Republican town halls
YUCCA VALLEY, Calif. — By the time U.S. Rep. Jay Obernolte, a Big Bear Lake Republican, tried asking for unity at his “community coffee” event, his audience had screamed, cussed and called him a Nazi.
“We’re not on team liberal or conservative; we’re not on team Republican or Democrat. We all play for team United States of America,” Obernolte told the overflow crowd last month at the Yucca Valley Community Center.
Boos drowned him out.
Obernolte told constituents to call his office “when you have problems with your government.” A woman in the audience responded by singing, to the tune of the “Ghostbusters” theme song: “Who ya gonna call? The fasc-ists!”
The crowd was furious that Obernolte had defended the Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers. They yelled when he said he was glad billionaire Elon Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was “looking at all of the waste” in the federal budget.
And in reference to Trump, they shouted: “No king! No king! No king!”
The scene in the solidly conservative, mostly rural 23rd Congressional District was mirrored in communities across the country over the last two weeks, from California to Texas to Wisconsin and Georgia, as Republican lawmakers returned to their home districts prepared to tout the Trump administration’s first month of accomplishments at town hall meetings.
Instead, many of those gatherings erupted in confrontation and reproof, much of it focused on the power Trump has ceded to Musk as the administration takes a jackhammer to federal employment, eliminating tens of thousands of middle-class jobs, seemingly without regard to salary or what service a given employee provides.
The pushback has been particularly heated around cuts to the National Park Service, which is losing nearly 10% of its workforce to federal buyouts and layoffs. The jobs eliminated include rangers, wildlife researchers and maintenance staff, and last weekend prompted protests at roughly 140 sites across the nation, including Joshua Tree National Park near Yucca Valley.
Republicans have dismissed the testy town halls as having been orchestrated by Democrats: “Paid ‘troublemakers’ are attending Republican Town Hall Meetings,” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social, adding, “It is all part of the game for the Democrats, but just like our big LANDSLIDE ELECTION, it’s not going to work for them!” On Tuesday, Republican campaign officials urged GOP members of Congress to hold town halls in a virtual setting.
In an interview with CNN, House Speaker Mike Johnson blamed the blowback in red districts on “paid protesters” and “Democrats who went to the events early and filled up the seats.”
But at the town halls themselves, while some speakers identified as Democrats, others identified as Republican. And at the Feb. 22 Yucca Valley event, it was clear from interviews that the audience included plenty of local residents; at least one wore a Trump hat and some in attendance were clearly displeased by the outspoken attendees.
In a statement to The Times, Obernolte’s office downplayed the Yucca Valley gathering as “an anomaly,” and said he held six other gatherings in the district that had “more constructive discussions.”
Although there “were some animated voices” in Yucca Valley, the statement read, many in the audience “attended with the intent to disrupt rather than engage in a productive conversation.”
Obernolte, the statement continued, “maintains that our $36 trillion national debt is an existential threat to our nation and he supports efforts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars.”
Obernolte was reelected in November during a rightward swing in California, which has nine Republican U.S. House members and more than 6 million Trump voters.
California was home last fall to some of the nation’s most competitive congressional races, giving the state an outsize role in determining the balance of power in the House. The GOP has one of the slimmest majorities in history, holding 218 seats while Democrats hold 215.
But because Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House, their honeymoon is already over, said Shaun Bowler, a political scientist at UC Riverside.
“They’ve had the photo ops. They’ve had the press releases. They’ve had their 15 minutes on Fox or talk radio. It’s time to deliver, and there’s no reason not to deliver now,” Bowler said.
Obernolte’s vast district — which stretches across the Mojave Desert and San Bernardino Mountains — includes most of San Bernardino County and portions of Kern and Los Angeles counties.
The high desert towns around Joshua Tree have undergone fundamental shifts in recent years. During the pandemic, city dwellers and remote workers moved to the desert in search of more affordable housing and easy access to nature. Home prices skyrocketed. Properties were converted into vacation rentals. And bumper stickers reading “Go back to L.A.” became a common sight on Highway 62, the main artery through the Morongo Basin.
Voter registration in the district is about evenly split among Democrats and Republicans. But the district, historically, has favored conservatives.
In November, Obernolte won reelection by 20 percentage points. And both San Bernardino and Kern counties, which comprise 92% of the district, voted for Trump.
The district includes both the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms and the Army’s Ft. Irwin National Training Center. It is home to tens of thousands of military veterans.
It is also one of the poorest congressional districts in the state, according to analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
Many of the region’s better-paying jobs are positions with federal agencies. And its small towns rely upon tourism at Joshua Tree National Park.
Park employees confirmed to The Times that at least six full-time workers in the fees division — tasked with collecting entrance and campground fees and staffing the visitor centers — were fired last month as part of the Trump administration’s cuts.
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At his Yucca Valley gathering, Obernolte was peppered with questions about the park service firings, as well as potential cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food assistance for low-income Americans.
Despite his praise for Musk, Obernolte told the audience that he disagreed with the Joshua Tree cuts. “It’s going to create a terrible experience for our visitors,” he said. “It’s going to devastate our communities.”
He lauded the administration’s decision to backtrack on eliminating thousands of temporary seasonal positions at the National Park Service after the cost-cutting move met with loud public outcry. But the administration has forged ahead with firing about 1,000 probationary park service employees — generally people in their first two years of service — as part of a multiagency purge of probationary employees that will eliminate tens of thousands of jobs.
In addition, according to an internal email sent to park supervisors last month, more than 700 year-round National Park Service employees are taking part in the federal buyout program the Trump administration has pushed in its campaign to slash the federal workforce.
Asked about potential cuts to the social safety net, Obernolte said there “has been a lot of angst and consternation about programs that everyone relies on like Social Security, like Medicare, like Medicaid.”
“I want to be crystal clear about this. No one is talking about reducing benefits for people who depend on them,” he said.
The crowd chanted: “Liar! Liar!”
Keith Hamm, a vacation rental host and registered Democrat who lives in Joshua Tree, was among those who attended the event. He said he had expected a sleepy affair, where he would be one of the few people with a dissenting opinion. But then, he said, he started hearing “a lot of build-up,” and expected the meeting could become contentious.
“It honestly was more than I expected,” said Hamm, who described the district as a “deeply impoverished” place where plenty of people rely on food benefits and Medi-Cal.
He said of Obernolte: “It’s just so frustrating to come face to face with guys like Jay. He’s completely out of touch with his constituency.”
Joseph Candelaria, a 38-year-old musician and lifelong Twentynine Palms resident, kicked off public questions by blasting federal job cuts and potential cuts to food benefits in a community he described as “underprivileged, under-resourced.”
“You talk about how the military isn’t paid enough. So let’s take away SNAP benefits? You know who uses SNAP benefits? Military communities, because we don’t pay them enough,” Candelaria said.
Candelaria said in an interview that the outcry at the event was genuine, that the room was filled with locals, and that he was angry about the attempts by Republican leaders to dismiss the blowback in red districts.
“I think that, historically, this community has been taken advantage of because we’re nice people. We’re kind. But we’re not dumb,” he said.
Candelaria said that he is not registered with either major party but that he often attends local political events and has never seen one get so contentious.
He said of his own public comments: “I was told that I cussed too much.”
Not everyone in the crowd expressed outrage at the first weeks under the new Trump administration. Many attendees quietly nodded or clapped as Obernolte spoke.
A few days after the event, Joshua Tree resident Brad Irwin, sporting a well-worn Trump 2024 hat, was vocal in his approval as he left a Harbor Freight in Yucca Valley. Irwin, 75, said he had not attended Obernolte’s event but was glad to see DOGE moving so quickly.
“I wake up every morning and say, ‘Thank you, Lord, for President Trump,’” said Irwin, who worked in the grocery business for 35 years. “We have this once-in-a-lifetime chance to straighten out our country financially, and if we don’t, we’re done.”
Asked about the layoffs at Joshua Tree, Irwin described himself as an “outdoor person” who loves the national parks but believes government agencies need better supervision.
“How many people in the government are on the porn sites when they’re supposed to be on the job?” he said. “How many people are getting transgender changes, when they’re supposed to be actually on the job?”
Branson-Potts reported from Los Angeles; Plevin reported from Yucca Valley.
This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.
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Hailey Branson-Potts is a Metro reporter who joined the Los Angeles Times in 2011. She reports on a wide range of issues and people, with a special focus on communities along the coast. She grew up in the small town of Perry, Okla., and graduated from the University of Oklahoma.
Rebecca Plevin reports on equity for the Los Angeles Times. Before joining The Times, she was an editor at the Fresno Bee, where she oversaw the bilingual Central Valley News Collaborative. She previously reported on immigration for the Desert Sun in Palm Springs and covered healthcare for public radio station KPCC-FM (89.3) in Pasadena. She grew up in the Washington, D.C., area and earned her journalism degree from Northwestern University.
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