Red state legislators upset that their constituents’ faces are being eaten

“When we supported Elon being made a king so he could usurp our powers to make illegal indiscriminate cuts to federal funding we didn’t mean that kind of indiscriminate:“

Republican lawmakers are pushing back against sweeping cuts to the federal government launched by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as their downsizing crusade begins to hit GOP constituents.

A growing number of GOP lawmakers are trying to intervene with the Trump administration and are weighing legislation to circumvent the changes. But with the Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget moving at a rapid clip and flouting federal law to carve up the government, the lawmakers face monumental challenges in getting the White House to spare their constituents from the ax.

Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson, a senior appropriator whose district is home to a number of National Park Service sites, said in an interview his staff is talking to the administration about how an OMB-directed, government-wide hiring freeze will affect the National Park Service. The park service fired 1,000 full-time staff Friday but said seasonal hiring is resuming, exempting 5,000 seasonal jobs from the hiring freeze.

Sen. Jerry Moran, another GOP appropriator who represents the agriculture-heavy state of Kansas, has told the White House that DOGE’s dismantling of USAID will impact constituents who have long relied on selling their crops to a government program that fights hunger abroad.

And Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who chairs an appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the National Institutes of Health, said her panel’s funding bill includes language to prevent the White House budget office from slashing billions of dollars in health research grant money. Capito has long been a champion of the NIH, linking the biomedical research agency’s funding to grant opportunities in her small state.

“I’m hearing from my institutions concerned about it,” Capito said in an interview. “It’s pretty drastic.”

I suspect part of the problem here is red state Republicans being high on their own supply about red states funding blue states when the truth is mostly the opposite. Anyway, I have bad news about their “using legislation to rein in an administration asserting that it can simply impound congressional appropriations irrespective of what the law says” plan.

In related news, the “do mass firings and find out what agencies do later” program is going swimmingly:

In addition to being civic degenerates these people are in every case infantile, sloppy and incompetent. Grand flourishes of performative cruelty followed by entitled pleas of "I don't know how to do this. Can you help?"

[image or embed]— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 4:58 PM

If I were them I would be demanding a huge signing bonus to come back.