Americans dialing their members of Congress for basic services are going straight to voice mail. Interns and young aides can’t answer the phones quickly enough. And a system that usually handles a few dozen calls per minute is straining to keep up with more than 1,500.
President Trump’s moves to upend the government — and his decision to empower the billionaire Elon Musk to carry out a slash-and-burn campaign inside the federal bureaucracy — are dominating the news and reverberating across the capital and beyond. And nowhere is the impact more readily apparent than the beleaguered congressional phone system, a major conduit for citizens to contact their representatives in Washington that in recent days has been nearly crippled as it absorbs tens of millions of calls responding to the new Washington order.
Congressional phone lines have been jammed to the point of failure, according to lawmakers and officials on Capitol Hill, in a stark reflection of a political system buckling to a breaking point under an emboldened and unbound Mr. Trump.
Calls are pouring in from constituents outraged about Mr. Trump’s unilateral moves and how he has allowed Mr. Musk to gain access to and begin dismantling critical parts of the federal bureaucracy, and demanding that members of Congress take a stand against them.
Others are calling Republican senators incessantly to either demand that they fall in line behind Mr. Trump and his cabinet nominees, or plead with them to break ranks and challenge the president.
The sheer volume of vitriol from both ends of the political spectrum has all but drowned out a core function of Congress: allowing Americans to seek and receive help from their elected representatives interacting with the government for basic needs.
Senators were informed this week that the Senate phone system was receiving 1,600 calls per minute, a sharp increase from the usual 40 calls a minute, according to officials who received the private notification and spoke about it on the condition of anonymity. While the phones had not completely stopped ringing, as they have in the past under heavy loads, members were told that some constituents would be sent straight to voice mail to prevent a complete shutdown.
“I want to thank Alaskans who have been reaching out to my offices in D.C. and across Alaska,” Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, wrote in a recent post on X explaining the overload of calls.
“Thank you for your patience as my staff works to review your messages and share them with me,” she added. “We’re all working to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible.”
An aide for Senator John Curtis, Republican of Utah, estimated that about 60 percent of the calls coming into his office were critical of Mr. Musk, while the other 40 percent concerned Mr. Trump’s nominees. The ratio of favorable to unfavorable calls varied by the day, the aide said. For example, before Mr. Curtis came out in support of Pete Hegseth, now the defense secretary, a majority of the callers were urging the senator to fall in line behind him. But afterward, more calls came in urging Mr. Curtis to change course, defy Mr. Trump and vote against Mr. Hegseth.
“Most of the time, the voice mails are full,” said Janice Germann, a liberal activist and retiree from Florida who said she had called the offices of her state’s two Republican senators, Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, at least once a day since Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Mr. Scott’s staff has answered the phone only twice, she said, and Ms. Moody’s office never has.
On the other side of the Capitol, Representative Becca Balint, Democrat of Vermont, said she normally has two aides monitoring the office phones, enough to handle the handful of calls they typically receive each hour. But since Jan. 20, she has reassigned at least six additional staff members to keep up with a nonstop flood of calls. Most are from constituents outraged that Mr. Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency gained access to personal and private financial information through the Treasury Department’s federal payment system.
“What we usually get in a month, we got in three days,” said Sophie Pollock, a spokeswoman for Ms. Balint.
A junior aide who usually answers the phones and who spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with the office’s policy described the recent influx of calls as “overwhelming,” but also said it was “heartwarming” to see that people were engaged enough to call their member of Congress and share their concerns.
Some offices are encouraging people to share their stories through the member’s website in order to relieve phone line pressure and free up staff members to help constituents with other services, such as navigating the Internal Revenue Service, passport and visa applications, and issues with Social Security or Medicare benefits.
“We’re trying to be creative about how we can be responsive to people’s understandable fear and panic right now, but also still conduct constituent services and have my staff be available to participate in staff meetings,” said Representative Nikki Budzinski, Democrat of Illinois. “They are really overwhelmed with outreach.”
Some House Republicans say their phones are being overloaded by what appears to be coordinated groups of callers who all follow a similar script and “disparage” the members for their support of Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump.
“Many of the people use foul language and disparage the members for existing, so it is a particularly vitriolic set of calls,” said Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California. “It’s a technique that for 25 years I’ve seen, which is, ‘I’m your constituent, you have to listen to me,’” followed by an often profane insult, he added.
Representative Carlos Giménez, a Florida Republican, said most of the calls that have poured into his office in recent weeks have been from people who live outside his district. Those types of coordinated calls from activists, he said, have “very little impact” on him.
“That’s par for the course,” Mr. Giménez said. “We have to take the calls, and we will take the calls, but they are interfering with legitimate calls from my district.”
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