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 footage of the event captured by Greg Bluestein, a reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and an NBC News contributor, attendees clashed with McCormick, criticising both President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk, who is assisting DOGE in its efforts to drastically reduce government spending.
In one case, an attendee questioned recent cuts at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, asking, “Why is the supposedly conservative party taking such a radical, extremist, and sloppy approach to this?”
McCormick replied, “A lot of the work they do is duplicitous with AI.”
Almost 1,300 probationary CDC employees were removed from their positions as the Trump administration seeks to terminate all probationary workers, who are typically recent hires.
“If we continue to grow the size of government and we can’t afford it, it will result in shortfalls in your Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,” McCormick said at the event in Roswell, about 20 miles from the CDC headquarters.
The attendee responded that the administration was taking a “chainsaw approach” to dismissing employees, and that the layoff effort was “jammed down the pipe, so rushed and sloppily.”
When McCormick said that a department or agency makes its own decisions about who to cut from its workforce when given a head count directive, people in the audience shouted, “No!” with one saying, “Elon Musk is deciding.”
Constituents chanted “shame!” and said, “We’re pissed,” during the town hall meeting.
As McCormick struggled to respond to the crowd’s interruptions and suggested he was offering solutions that people did not “want to hear,” one person can be heard shouting, “We want to work with someone better.”
McCormick easily won re-election last year, receiving 64.9% of the vote in a state that Trump flipped after narrowly losing to Joe Biden in 2020.
One person who raised budget concerns on Thursday could be heard telling McCormick that he had done a “disservice” by failing to “stand up for us.”
In another case, an attendee asked McCormick how he intends to “rein in the megalomaniac in the White House” following Trump’s “LONG LIVE THE KING” post on Truth Social, which elicited cheers and some people standing up.
“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, drawing boos from the audience.
“I don’t want to see any president become too powerful,” McCormick added.
McCormick attempted to quiet the crowd at various points during the town hall, 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 McCormick spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday night’s town hall.
