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Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert employed a new tactic during a town hall on Wednesday night to avoid being grilled by her constituents on President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s gutting of the federal government.
Boebert, 38, stuck to the party line, branding Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency handling of highly sensitive information as “careful and responsible.”
The congresswoman held a telephone town hall on Wednesday to discuss her work in the state’s 4th district and answer live and submitted questions from her constituents.
In recent weeks, Republican town hall meetings have descended into chaos, with angry citizens displaying their outrage at the effects of Trump and Musk’s cuts. The chaos reached the point where party leadership was forced to encourage GOP lawmakers not to hold meetings in their districts.
Boebert’s virtual meeting was set up so that constituents could not ask follow-up questions or speak out of turn, which was a far cry from the heckling that her colleagues have suffered at in-person meetings in recent months.
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Along with being probed on how House Republicans could quickly pass President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, Boebert was asked about contentious issues, including Musk’s role in the administration.
The lawmaker, who recently received campaign donations from Musk for expressing support to impeach judges, was first pressed on what a caller deemed the “overreaching of DOGE,” referencing the advisory body’s access to personal information.
Boebert retorted that Musk was being “careful and responsible when it comes to any data,” according to Colorado Public Radio.
She praised the world’s richest man for “exposing the waste, fraud and abuse of our taxpayer money,” drawing comparisons to a “Democrat bill that hired 87,000 armed IRS agents to snoop in your bank account.”
The MAGA firebrand, who was seen leaving a Trump inaugural beside Kid Rock in the early hours, failed to mention that the 2021 Treasury report figure refers to all Internal Revenue System employees, not solely enforcement agents. In May 2021, the Biden administration approved the hiring of 87,000 employees at the tax collection agency over a 10-year period.
The Republican gave a blunt response when quizzed about DOGE’s workforce reductions at the Forest Service, which is bracing for as many as 7,000 employee layoffs in coming months.
“Let’s be clear: we have a bloated bureaucracy, and spending does not equate to better outcomes,” she said.
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Boebert also commented on Trump’s failed attempt to throw out a lower-court ruling that has blocked the administration from deporting immigrants to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
“If someone is in our country illegally, I don’t believe that there is much due process that is afforded to them,” she said. “They do not have American citizens’ rights. And they broke our nation’s laws being here illegally.”
