DOGE is crushing GOP districts, driving backlash

One contract in rural Colorado is a microcosm of failure

Feb 26, 2025

Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.

Elon Musk is starting to experience real pushback from his hangers-on and right-wing groupies for the first time in years, driven in part by the conflict that this newsletter scooped on Saturday night. Such is the power of whistleblowers, so if you’ve got any compelling information that you believe the public should know, please get in touch. Anonymity guaranteed.

Tonight we’re taking a look at the unfolding conflict from the ground level, thousands of miles from Washington. As I’ve been writing and predicting, public opinion was always going to shift when the impact of what DOGE is doing began to hit working people in the wallet, and that’s exactly what’s happening.

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Like Tesla “autopilot,” DOGE is driving the GOP off a cliff

Last year, the Mancos Conservation District earned a contract from the federal government to teach farmers how to work the arid land of southwestern Colorado. Worth $630K, the district’s contract with the USDA was the sort of public works project that nobody in DC would think twice about funding — at least until Elon Musk took over the government.

Like so many other seemingly benign government programs, the sustainable farming program had its grant pulled earlier this month, its execution order delivered within a boiler plate form letter. The Mancos program, the letter asserted, no longer reflected the government’s “priorities regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Why would a dry land farming education project be flagged as a DEI project? Simply put, the program’s official description called for “a higher level of equity” for “underrepresented” farmers, terms that DOGE’s artificial intelligence is trained to detect and obliterate. But any follow-up would have quickly clarified that the conservation board’s work had nothing to do with race, gender, sexuality or any other conservative bugaboos — instead, they were focused on getting important resources to new and less experienced farmers, military veterans, and Utes who could farm the tribe’s reservation lands.

Now that the contract has been killed, the conservation board is going to have to slash its employees’ hours and let a few go. Economic activity for local businesses will be stopped dead in its tracks. And for those impacted, their prospects may be grim: Montezuma County is largely rural, with a tourist economy that depends on visitors to National Parks, which have also shed staff in the DOGE purges.

The all-out assault on DEI was always a thinly veiled attempt to resegregate American society, but the deliriously haphazard approach taken by Musk and his minions has somewhat ironically taken a broader scope: Montezuma County, for instance, has a population that is more than 70% white and voted for Trump by more than 20 points in the November election.

And not only are similar stories playing out all over the country, Republicans can’t pin the blame for the suffering on woke, gender ideology, or even socialism. The firings and defunding aren’t downstream effects of complicated legislation or message-tested policies. They are the feature, not the bug.

Project 2025, as conceived by far-right ideologues like OBM Director Russ Vought, recommended shattering the federal government in similar ways. But as a dense, thousand-page policy manual authored by unrecognizable bureaucrats, it was an abstract specter, primed to absorb public animus. Donald Trump was able to easily disassociate himself with Project 2025 during the campaign, but he has irrevocably tied himself to Musk, who has given an arrogant and aggravating face to the document’s callous attacks on people’s livelihoods and social benefits.

Nobody Voted for This

On Monday morning, I spoke with a retired career Marine who was honorably discharged due to budget cuts during Trump’s first term and then fired from his civilian job with the VA during a mass purge at the beginning of this second term. He explained the difference between the two experiences like this: “I will ultimately always follow orders from the President of the United States, but nobody voted for Elon Musk.”

This is actually a best case scenario for the Trump administration. Most Americans don’t have the patience of an unerringly patriotic, self-sacrificing public servant, and broad opinion is beginning to turn against both Musk and Trump, who continues to back his billionaire benefactor at every opportunity.

Polling for the world’s richest man has hit an all-time low: An Ipsos and Washington Post poll released on Sunday found just 34% approval for what Musk is doing with his nebulous governmental authority, with just about 50% of Americans registering displeasure with his general performance.

That poll left the field on February 18th, so the numbers figure to further diverge in the wake of the “5 accomplishments” email fiasco — Americans were even more negative when asked about Musk’s specific conduct: A mere 26% of respondents said they approved of Musk’s decision to shut down programs that he deemed unnecessary.

Similarly, just 29% said that Trump should have the power to freeze funding for programs without Congressional approval. Nearly nine out of ten Americans said that when ordered by a court to not freeze funding, Trump should follow the law. Imagine that.

There is little pre-existing data on these questions, because “should the president follow the law?” and “should the president allow the world’s richest and least empathetic man to cackle like the Joker as he sets fire to entire communities?” have never really been pressing issues for political pollsters.

Still, the fact that Americans just a few months ago opted to re-elect Donald Trump at all should indicate that this is not a country that is particularly precious about its elites following the rule of law simply for the sake of it. Such a strong response to the question of whether Trump should follow the laws that protect their jobs and life-sustaining programs, then, should not be seen as irrelevant.

Redistributing the Trauma

Russell Vought is best known for saying that he wants federal workers to be “traumatized” by the violence that his project would inflict on the bureaucracy, yet now that his plans are being put into action, the response has been far more complicated.

There has been trauma and paralysis, yes, but federal workers, through their unions and other ad hoc organizations, have also spoken out forcefully and received the kind of national empathy that a guy who has spent the past 30+ years stewing in Koch-bankrolled offices could not have anticipated. The public has also risen up, swarming home district meetings and town halls of their elected representatives, righteously raging about the impact of the firings and cuts.

Georgia Rep. Richard McCormick was assailed by constituents during a town hall that went viral in spite of Musk’s attempts to suppress the posts of the reporter who live-tweeted it, and it was such a traumatizing experience for the right-wing Congressman that he’s begun to urge the White House to hit the brakes.

“I think some of their actions have been too rapid to adapt to for real people. I mean, you're talking about Republicans, too. We're not just talking about Democrats," McCormick said earlier today. “I'm all for trimming the government; I am all for also doing it in a deliberate manner that allows people to adjust to their lifestyles ... We're talking about people who are struggling and have to make big decisions.”

In Missouri, Rep. Mark Alford also received a much-deserved furnace blast of rage from constituents, who shouted over his patronizing message about how being fired was part of “God’s plan” for federal workers. And here’s a tense exchange between a 20-year military veteran and Oregon GOP Rep. Cliff Bentz over the latter’s refusal to stand up to Musk or even answer questions about DOGE’s work.

This sort of backlash is only beginning, because the impact of Musk’s wrecking ball and other GOP policies are just beginning to be felt. There is nothing that the funding freezes and firings won’t touch, and nowhere that won’t be impacted. The only truly nonpartisan thing in this country will be the damage caused by their actions.

The mass firings at the National Forest Service, for example, have already begun to close off land to loggers and miners in Idaho, and the various attacks on the NIH and CDC continue to pause medical research in its tracks. The University of Alabama at Birmingham, the state’s biggest employer and increasingly one of the most important research hospitals in the country, is in danger of mass defunding that would blow a hole in the state’s economy. Federal workers and union members in Iowa rallied at the state capitol, and if you’ll indulge the generalization, they didn’t really give off the Democratic voter vibe.

And earlier tonight, the House GOP voted to pass a budget resolution that would cut $880 billion from Medicaid, the nation’s largest health insurer. It’s a program that is relied on low-income residents of red states just as much as in blue states, and the proposed cuts are already causing serious problems for Republican legislators.

Of course, the wildcard here is just how much this backlash actually matters to Musk, Trump, and the conservative zealots who are driving this agenda. Elon is worth $400 billion and lives inside a Matrix of neo-Nazi cheerleaders who fawn over his every move on Twitter, Trump doesn’t have to worry about re-election, and people like Russ Vought are going to take advantage of every last moment of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bludgeon the nation back into the Hoover administration. The damage that they will do before this is all over — even if it ends with the midterm elections — will be vast and maybe beyond anything that Democrats have the will to repair.

On the other hand, the resistance to this catastrophe isn’t coming from Democratic leaders anyway, and polling has shown that base voters and Democratic-leaning independents are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the party’s response. It doesn’t take any great political insight to understand why, either: Hakeem Jeffries is spending his time defending Eric Adams and trashing the left, fossils like James Carville are publishing guest essays urging the party to give up on resistance, and more than a dozen Democratic senators are still voting to confirm unqualified GOP cronies to positions of power.

While they’re surrendering, DOGE is inadvertently making the affirmative case for government that Democrats have been unable to articulate since Ronald Reagan swept to power. It’s a pretty thin silver lining, but perhaps enough to begin a push for real change — starting with primary challenges.

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