The overflow crowd that gathered to see Representative Harriet M. Hageman at a civic center in Afton, Wyo., on Thursday evening included many of her longtime allies, but the pointed questions started even before she made it to the podium to begin speaking.
“Nobody is touching Social Security,” Ms. Hageman, a second-term Republican, told a retired woman sitting in the front row who blurted out her concerns about potential cuts to the program by the Trump administration.
Things got spicier from there.
The next evening, at another town hall about 100 miles south in Evanston, Scott Flint, a retired miner, confronted Ms. Hageman about how the Trump administration’s cuts had reached his pocket of the state, shuttering a local Mine Safety and Health Administration office that provides crucial support in the area.
President Trump and Elon Musk, he warned, would soon face the same problems that corporate employers do after mass layoffs.
“They come in with the chain saw and then they find out, ‘Oh, there was some value to what they were doing,’” Mr. Flint, 67, said later in an interview. “But those guys are gone. They’ve gone down the road. You’re not going to get them back.”
As Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk continue their push to shrink the federal government at breathtaking speed, defying norms and legal limits, town halls in Republican districts have erupted with an outpouring of anxiety, complaints and outright anger. The backlash has grown so bitter that party leaders have instructed Republican lawmakers to avoid in-person gatherings with voters where possible, wary of providing a venue for an embarrassing spectacle that could circulate widely online or become part of a campaign ad.
They have blamed the irate outbursts entirely on Democratic voters and activists who have made a deliberate effort to show up in Republican districts to rail against Mr. Trump and his G.O.P. allies, and who have a vested interest in amplifying the discontent. But at town halls in two solidly red congressional districts in recent days, there were signs that a growing swath of voters from across the ideological spectrum had at least some misgivings about the Republican trifecta ruling Washington. It has provided an early warning as the party looks to defend both the House and the Senate in next year’s midterm elections.
During the sessions — three in a deep-red district and one in a more liberal pocket of a solidly Republican one — voters raised concerns about the scope and pace of the Trump administration’s sweeping overhaul of the federal government. Whether it was the shuttering of agencies, the influence of unelected power brokers inside the federal bureaucracy or the potential strain on public services, supporters and critics alike questioned the changes being made under the banner of increasing “government efficiency.”
“Why’s a nonelected person running our government?” an audience member in Asheville, N.C., demanded, making an apparent reference to Mr. Musk that drew applause from those who had packed into a community college auditorium to see Representative Chuck Edwards.
The event had started amicably enough, as Mr. Edwards thanked his audience, dominated by gray-haired liberals in a progressive pocket of his district, for encouraging him to do an event at all.
“There are a lot of folks around the country right now that have chosen, for one reason or another, to not do that,” he said.
But roughly 14 increasingly tense minutes later, he seemed to be having his own second thoughts.
“And you wonder why folks don’t want to do these town halls,” Mr. Edwards muttered as the crowd booed his vote for the House budget resolution.
“Are you afraid of Trump?” someone taunted.
Attendees expressed anguish and outrage about Mr. Musk’s efforts to slash the federal work force, putting Mr. Edwards on the defensive as he fielded questions about cuts to areas including the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“There have been no cuts to the staff at V.A.,” he said, before an attendee angrily interrupted.
“I was fired!” a man in the audience shot back, jumping to his feet. “There were people at this hospital that were fired. That’s a lie.”
Many Republicans have taken the advice of party leaders to avoid such encounters altogether.
In Texas, Representative Keith Self canceled a planned “Koffee With Keith” in the Dallas exurb of Greenville the day before it was to be held, citing threats of violence. Critics accused him of dodging accountability after Mr. Self gained national attention for referring to Representative Sarah McBride, Democrat of Delaware and the first openly transgender lawmaker in Congress, as a man.
“In life, as in war, there are times to engage and times to disengage,” Mr. Self wrote in a statement, explaining his decision to “err on the side of caution” and scrap his meeting with voters.
Those who went ahead with them said they considered it part of the job to allow constituents to register feedback on what they were doing in Congress, good or bad.
“If I come here and someone is angry about something that I do or something that’s happening in Washington, D.C., I think it’s my responsibility to hear them out,” Ms. Hageman said in an interview on Thursday before her three-day swing of town hall events throughout the state.
During her gatherings, Ms. Hageman found plenty of constituents who appeared to approve of the way things were going. Applause rippled through the crowds as she rattled off conservative victories since Mr. Trump took office, including stiffer border security measures and rollbacks of Biden-era regulations. A chorus of nods and murmurs of approbation followed her updates on the latest budget standoff in Washington.
“Keep going,” one man urged during the town hall in Afton.
“I really support President Trump,” Karen Henry, 78, a cattle rancher from Robertson, Wyo., said in an interview after the event in Evanston, which she said she attended simply to show support for Mr. Trump and Ms. Hageman. She said she would “stick with them right to the end.”
But there were also many complaints, even from those who said they were generally supportive of the Republican agenda.
“My concern is an unelected billionaire,” one man said, drawing applause from a portion of the room.
Mr. Musk and far-reaching cuts led by his Department of Government Efficiency drew the sharpest reactions. In Afton, half of the room applauded and cheered when Ms. Hageman announced that “DOGE reports that its current savings are at $105 billion,” citing projects shuttered at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
But even some who backed the spending cuts said they were uneasy about their own access to government services.
“It takes months for us to get eye exams,” said a man in a red MAGA hat, a camouflage shirt stretched across his broad frame with a black vest zipped over it. A combat veteran injured in Iraq, he spoke of years of frustration with the local V.A. clinic: soaring prescription costs, long drives required to see a doctor and virtual appointments that felt like a poor substitute for real care.
Marti Halverson, a former chair of the local county G.O.P., said the struggling V.A. facility directly across the street from where the town hall was being held had problems, but argued that the Trump administration would make things better, not worse.
“I do not fear that Donald Trump and Representative Hageman are going to shutter our clinic — I really don’t,” Ms. Halverson said in an interview. Some employees at the V.A. “haven’t answered the phone or returned a message in months. Good riddance.”
Ms. Hageman listened to the range of concerns, nodding as she had during the earlier rounds of praise. When she responded, she was careful — acknowledging the concerns, blaming bureaucratic red tape, promising to push for improvements. The mood never turned hostile, but the underlying frustration was clear.
Her town halls in deeply conservative Wyoming drew a starkly different crowd from Mr. Edwards’s in the liberal enclave of Asheville, N.C. In Wyoming, voters were less concerned about whether Mr. Trump’s agenda should move forward and more about how aggressively it should be pursued — and whether it could end up hurting them personally.
“It’s a pendulum, right?” said Nick White, a 46-year-old Republican from Bear River, Wyo., who said he was supportive of actions to downsize government. “We’ve gone so far one way and it’s going to come back the other.”
“I’m not the only person in America,” he added. “We need to get to that middle ground and stay there somehow.”
Mr. Edwards, on the other hand, faced an audience mostly hostile to Mr. Trump’s agenda, whose frustrations over the administration’s policies boiled over into open hostility.
As he went behind a lectern to read off a recitation of “exactly what’s taken place with DOGE,” ticking through what he said were examples of wasteful spending that had been uncovered and eliminated, the crowd jeered.
Wrapping up the event, Mr. Edwards tried to inject some levity.
“Hey!” he exclaimed. “This has been fun.”
Some in the crowd laughed. Others did not.
Speaking to reporters afterward over the muffled shouts of protesters outside, Mr. Edwards said the pushback had not affected his views and would not discourage him from holding town halls in the future.
“I take away from much of what I heard today that we’re doing exactly what the American people sent us to Washington, D.C., to do,” he said.
The Asheville gathering, he said, “was a little more uncomfortable than some of the others, but that’s OK. Folks should have the right to voice their opinion, and I’m OK to hear that.”
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