During a town hall meeting on Thursday, Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) met with hundreds of attendees enraged over his support for DOGE, which is run by Trump appointee Elon Musk.

While he continued to defend DOGE’s overall mission, McCormick told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Politically Georgia podcast a few days after the raucous event that he wished Musk would take a slower approach to slashing the federal bureaucracy. 

“I think we’re just moving a little too fast,” the Georgia lawmaker said. “We should have impact studies on each department as we do it, and I’m sure we can do that. We’re moving really, really rapidly, and we don’t know the impact.”

“The president is obviously very aggressive, so that’s his comfort level,” McCormick continued. “Most of us don’t have the insight or the information to really know how much of an impact it’s going to have, and so I’d rather see us take a deep breath, move a little bit slower and a little bit more deliberately. That’s kind of, generally, the feeling for a lot of people. I want to make sure we’re doing the right thing.”

At the same time, McCormick defended DOGE from criticism that it is being unlawfully run by unelected people such as Musk and that those people have too much power over Washington’s vast bureaucracy. 

“The question is, do they [DOGE] have the power to do this?” the Georgia lawmaker questioned. “They have the power to look into things, just like Digital Services did for other presidents, just like the Grace Commission did for [former President Ronald] Reagan. They don’t have access to information they shouldn’t have. This I’ve looked into exceedingly. I checked with leadership, I checked with the president’s team — I made sure that this is legal.” 

Angry constituents accused the lawmaker during the Thursday meeting of doing them a “disservice” and failing to “stand up” for them. One resident accused Trump of being a “megalomaniac” who is taking a “radical and extremist and sloppy approach” to firing government workers and reducing federal spending. 

McCormick specifically responded to criticism during the Politically Georgia podcast regarding Trump’s authority to lay off federal workers. 

“Do they have the power to fire someone? Well, it kind of comes from the executive branch, especially on new hires. Bureaucracies really belong to the president,” he said. “When you talk about former presidencies and what they’re able to do with Border Control agents — for example, when the president can say, ‘I want you to allow these people in,’ all they have to do is walk across the border with an executive order that wasn’t based on anything that Congress voted on.”

“No laws changed, but yet we had a dramatic change in the way we look at our sovereign border. So that’s just an example of many things that presidents do, no matter if it’s Democrat or Republican,” the congressman added. 

TRACKING WHAT DOGE IS DOING ACROSS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

McCormick said most of the federal employees laid off by the Trump administration were hired in the last year, with them also being known as probationary employees. 

“The second fastest growing sector of job hires in the last four years has been government,” he said. “So we need to do something to trim because we’re in a tremendous amount of debt. If we don’t do something about it, it will affect all of us.”