Government and Politics
February 20, 2025
AJC: “Top Georgia Republicans cheer Trump’s Washington overhaul”
Georgia Republicans have been among the loudest cheerleaders of Elon Musk’s DOGE, even as the consequences of the so-called “government efficiency” agency’s reckless spending cuts deliver chaos to people all across the country, including Georgia.
Less than five years since the worldwide COVID pandemic began in the last Trump presidency, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had 1,300 employees – representing 10% of the agency’s workforce – laid off last week. Georgia farmers face $393 million in lost food and assistance contracts after DOGE shuttered USAID on Trump’s first day in office.
The extensive loss of jobs and livelihoods for their constituents has not, however, stopped Georgia’s Republican statewide elected officials from cheering on the carnage — and often joining in themselves.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp responded to 1,300 of his constituents losing their jobs — including more than a few working on containing the ongoing bird flu outbreak — by asserting that “government can use a little rightsizing.”
Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a long-time advocate for defunding state government who introduced his own version of DOGE for Georgia, has traveled to Washington, DC twice in Trump’s first month in office to shill for the cut-happy policies.
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr not only refused to lift a finger to stop the Trump administration from slashing the National Institutes of Health budget — costing Emory University, the University of Georgia, Augusta University, and Georgia Tech a combined $780 million — he’s also using his office to pre-emptively shield DOGE from legal challenges.
“As Georgia Republicans fall over themselves to celebrate the ‘rightsizing’ of our neighbors, thousands of Georgians and their families are left wondering what comes next,” said DPG spokesman Dave Hoffman. “This president targeting the CDC as ‘wasteful’ is particularly alarming considering a million people were killed in a pandemic that started the last time he held this job, and Georgians need our so-called statewide leaders to say so.”
In addition to slashing the CDC, DOGE’s indiscriminate cuts to Department of Agriculture employees working on the raging bird flu outbreak and the National Nuclear Security Administration, which secures the country’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, are inviting chaos.