Republicans are “afraid” to challenge President Donald Trump for fear of “retaliation,” GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski admitted on Wednesday.
“We are all afraid,” Murkowski said before taking a long pause.
“That’s quite a statement,“ she acknowledged. “I’ll tell you, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”
Speaking at a gathering of Alaskan nonprofit leaders in Anchorage, the Senator accused Congress of failing to perform its constitutional duty to protect citizens from overreach by the executive branch.
Murkowski—one of the few Republicans who has shown a willingness to stand up to Trump—told the crowd she will not “compromise my own integrity” by staying silent about Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts.
Despite threats of “retaliation” from the administration, Murkowski said she would nevertheless “use her voice” to criticize Trump. “That’s what you’ve asked me to do, and so I will use my voice to the best of my ability, and sometimes it will be viewed in a way that’s pretty confrontational,” she said, according to the Anchorage Daily News.
During the 45-minute Q&A session, Murkowski fielded questions from public sector workers about cuts to the federal government, Medicaid, and the disastrous impact tariffs could have on Alaska’s fishing industry.
Murkowski spoke of the difficulty her office has faced trying to mitigate or fight back against the “unlawful” cuts, and said it was “head-spinning” trying to keep up with the president’s whirlwind presidency.
“It seems that just when you’ve made a little bit of progress on one issue that has caused so much anxiety, there’s another one,” she said. “It is as hard as anything I have been engaged in, in the 20-plus years I’ve been in the Senate.”
“I share this with you not to say that ‘we don’t know anything,’ but I’m saying that things are happening so fast through this Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE … none of us understand the half of it,” she said. “It’s literally piecing it together.”
After the event, Murkowski told the Daily News that federal workers had come to her “in tears” for fear DOGE would eliminate their jobs without warning.
“They thought they were in a profession they’ve given so much to, thought they were doing well,” she said. “And literally [with] no notice whatsoever [they] are terminated and told their work performance [is] not satisfactory, which was not true, and [they] didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
“The fear I have heard from people that have said, ‘I’m afraid to talk to my co-workers [about] my status … because, will I be viewed as questioning my supervisors or my commitment to the agency here?’” she continued. “These are real emotions, these are real people, these are real fears, and they need to be heard.”
A longtime critic of Trump, Murkowski was one of the few Republicans to speak out against the president in his first term. She was one of only seven GOP senators who voted to impeach the president following the January 6 insurrection based on “clear evidence that he attempted to overturn the 2020 election after losing it.”
“On the day of the riots, President Trump’s words incited violence, which led to the injury and deaths of Americans,” she said at the time. “Such unlawful actions cannot go without consequence, and the House has responded swiftly, and I believe, appropriately, with impeachment.”
She criticized the president again following his decision to pardon the 1,500 January Sixers after being sworn back into office, telling CNN.
“I don’t think that the approach of a blanket pardon that includes those who caused harm, physical harm, to our police officers, to others that resulted in violence, I’m disappointed to see that,” she said. “And I do fear the message that is sent to these great men and women that stood by us.”
During Trump’s first impeachment in 2020, Murkowski voted against convicting him, but condemned his behavior as “shameful and wrong.” In 2024, she said she would not vote for Trump, telling reporters that she was “not satisfied with either choice that we have.”
Trump recently lashed out at Murkowski and three others for “playing with the lives of the American people, and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels” during a rant on Truth Social.
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