DOGE protesters to Democrats: ‘Do something!’

The speed and range of DOGE actions, and the gusher of leaks from affected federal workers, have fueled a multi-level resistance — and angst about whether any of it will work.

There is little Democrats can do to slow down Republican legislation on the Hill, and less they can do to exercise oversight if the GOP doesn’t agree with them. They learned that lesson again on Wednesday, when members of the House Oversight Committee bungled a surprise vote to subpoena Musk over the details of his effort to restructure government agencies with semi-anonymous employees. (The vote was not alerted on a group text used by committee Democrats, and not all of them made it back in time.)

At the moment, congressional Democrats are playing a supplementary role in an anti-Trump resistence. They are reacting to the reporting on DOGE’s work and showing up at protests; they are cheering on lawsuits filed by attorneys general and the constellation of liberal groups that plotted out a second Trump resistance after the election.

On Monday, when Democrats gathered outside USAID’s headquarters in solidarity with suspended workers, they were cheered on by a partially-masked crowd as they marched into the building, then were told to leave. By Wednesday, at rallies outside the Capitol and the DOL, the cheers were mixed with interruptions and boos — especially when they mentioned the lawsuits, even though several have already halted some early Trump orders.

“The Democrats are just letting Donald Trump completely control what everyone’s talking about,” said Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief of staff for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who launched a challenge to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week. He did not talk to Ocasio-Cortez before announcing his campaign, he said, and Ocasio-Cortez is not taking a position in the race.

“They’re just on their back foot playing defense,” Chakrabarti argued. “Instead, look at what the Republicans did with something like Hunter Biden’s laptop or Hillary Clinton’s emails — both complete non-issues that they turned into issues. The Democrats have the advantage of having real stuff to talk about – a billionaire, Elon Musk, going in and leaking the information of every CIA employee in an email to the White House, canceling Head Start programs around the country, collecting people’s social security numbers without their consent.”

To be fair, Democrats have been running around screaming about the potential risk to CIA operations from DOGE employees’s access to, and use of, classified information. And every out-of-power party irritates its activist base when it can’t dramatically impede the work of a new administration. Republicans were initially slow to embrace the Tea Party movement organized by libertarian groups and conservative activists in 2009; Democrats were furious that key senators, and even party leaders, provided key support for the early Bush agenda in 2001.

The two basic problems for the congressional opposition are that the real power to slow Musk down resides in the courts, and that the atomized media environment makes it hard for even a news junkie to follow what they’re doing. At one point at Wednesday’s Labor rally, a union organizer pointed across the block to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, informing protesters that all their complaints were being filed there. But this didn’t mollify protesters, a mix of federal employees and local liberals who supported the cause, from demanding that the Democrats walk in the other direction, to the Capitol, and do… something.

Musk’s emergence as a high-powered Trump Inc. CEO is popular with Republicans. They’re very comfortable defending the work of young programmers (young, like the Founding Fathers) and an “unelected” billionaire disrupter (they’ve been saying “unelected bureaucrat” before these protesters were born) over the output of senior federal employees. And they’re having fun with the sound and images of Social Security-aged Democrats doing Mario Savio impressions outside brutalist federal buildings.

What Democrats can’t say — and probably shouldn’t, because it sounds ghoulish — is that the public might not care about this unless something terrible happens, something that wouldn’t if the workers were inside the buildings, and not holding signs and bullhorns outside.

In his Substack, Ken Klippenstein compared the Democrats’ legal fight against DOGE to the investigations of Russian influence in the 2016 election – i.e., a political dead end.

“Instead of making a plainspoken case to the public about how DOGE could negatively affect their daily lives, Democratic leaders conducted astroturfed ‘demonstrations’ in front of USAID, Treasury and other government shrines,” he wrote. “They adopted the conspiratorial tone of the MAGA opposition to the Democrats that they have been so contemptuous of in the past.”

The Trump White House and House GOP leadership has dusted off an old playbook, highlighting the most intense rhetoric from the protests and suggesting that Democrats want a violent insurrection.

“Congresswoman LaMonica McIver says, ‘We are at war,’” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said from the Brady Room on Wednesday. “Ilhan Omar says, ‘We might actually see somebody get killed.’ And Chris Van Hollen says, ‘We have to fight this in the Congress. We have to fight this in the streets.’ So what now? And may I just point out, if you heard that type of violent, enticing rhetoric from our side of the aisle, from Republican leaders on Capitol Hill, I think there would be a lot more outrage in this room today.”

Omar did not suggest that someone would be killed in anti-DOGE protests. In an MSNBC interview, she worried that “an American who works for the American government” could be killed abroad because a USAID app used in emergencies was shut down.