Republican lawmakers are beginning to ramp up pressure on President Donald Trump to ease off the drastic cuts, spending freezes, and layoffs in the federal government that directly impact their own states, Politico reported Friday.
The news, which follows similar reporting by The New York Times, comes as Trump and his tech billionaire benefactor Elon Musk, through the Department of Government Efficiency task force, are simultaneously fighting a new flurry of litigation from terminated federal employees and other people affected by the cuts.
"Idaho Republican Rep. Mike Simpson, a senior appropriator whose district is home to a number of national parks, 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," reported Ben Leonard and Hailey Fuchs.
Meanwhile, another appropriations lawmaker, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS), "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."
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Another senator now jumping into the discussion is Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), whose state has some of the highest percentages of Trump voters in America. She expressed concern that the recent evisceration of the National Institutes of Health could stall biomedical research in West Virginia.
“I’m hearing from my institutions concerned about it,” she said. “It’s pretty drastic.”
Trump's push to block federal funding in part appears to be a gamed-out strategy to challenge the validity of the Impoundment Control Act, a 1970s good-government reform that prohibits the president from unilaterally withholding funds appropriated by Congress for agencies he doesn't like. If Trump is successful in getting courts to void this statute, it could vastly expand the power of the presidency — although there is a long history of conservative judges disagreeing with Trump on this.
Trump's own executive order-based cuts could just be the beginning, however. Draft proposals from the GOP circulated even before Trump took office propose steep cuts to Medicare as a possibility once Congress begins laying the groundwork to pass Trump's tax cuts, which would stand to harm tens of millions of retirees around the country.