WASHINGTON — Democratic lawmakers are staging protests outside federal agencies, holding resistance-themed news conferences back home and taking to social media as they try to combat President Donald Trump’s moves to remake the government with executive power.
Relegated to the minority in Congress and left with few legislative tools to check Trump, Democrats are seeking to rally voters against his push to freeze federal loans and grants, dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and other agencies and allow his government efficiency czar, billionaire Elon Musk, to access Americans’ federal data.
On Monday, congressional Democrats staged a protest outside USAID. On Tuesday, they appeared outside the Treasury Department. On Wednesday, they spoke to a crowd near the Capitol and another outside the Labor Department. It all comes as Democrats seek to find their voice and break through in a cluttered media environment while Trump overwhelms the national discourse with one disruptive action after another.
“This is not America First — this is America in retreat,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said at the Capitol rally. “And we are not going to retreat from American values.”
Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who represents more than 70,000 federal workers in his district next to Washington, said the protests will help mobilize support and sway public opinion.
“People need to know how serious this is,” Beyer told NBC News. “You tear down the federal government, you also tear down our whole society. If you eliminate one of the three branches of government, you can’t run a country.”
He was one of a dozen Democratic lawmakers who tried to enter the Washington headquarters of USAID on Monday, then gathered outside to protest Trump and Musk’s shuttering of the decades-old agency, which is responsible for delivering $40 billion in food and other humanitarian aid overseas.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., at a rally outside of the U.S. Capitol in support of USAID on Feb. 5, 2025.
At some of the protests and online, Democrats have been jeered by anti-Trump demonstrators who believe the party is failing to rise to the moment. “Do you job! Do your job!” protesters chanted at lawmakers at one point at the Capitol rally.
“I hear people are frustrated. And when people are asking us to do more, I think we’re going to do more,” said Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, 35, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “After the election, a lot of Democrats needed some time to soul search and breathe. And now that time is over. The richest billionaire in the world can now take all of our taxpayer money and data and is getting richer off of it. So it’s time for us to get off the mat and get back into the ring.”
“We’re going to fight smarter than last time,” he said. “But we also need to fight harder.”
On Tuesday, a few dozen protesters chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Elon Musk has got to go,” outside the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees executive branch employees. Later, a group of lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Reps. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M.; Veronica Escobar, D-Texas; and Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., protested on the steps of the Treasury Department with scores of activists and supporters.
“When we open up the Senate every single morning, we don’t pledge allegiance to the billionaires. We don’t pledge allegiance to Elon Musk. We don’t pledge allegiance to the creepy 22-year-olds working for Elon Musk. We pledge allegiance to the United States of America,” a fired-up Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told the crowd at the Treasury Department.
“We have to reach out to everyone in this country — conservatives, liberals, Republicans, Democrats — and tell them that we have not months, we have not weeks, but we have days to stop the destruction of our democracy,” Murphy said.
Democrats use limited tools at their disposal
Senate Democrats have a greater check on Trump and his party than their House counterparts. They can use the 60-vote threshold to filibuster GOP legislation and significantly delay Trump’s executive branch and judicial nominees.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, has threatened to put a blanket hold on all of Trump’s State Department nominees, while others have said Democrats should stall all of his picks.
And the party is making a unified stand against some remaining Trump nominees, like Russell Vought for budget director, voting en masse against proceeding to his nomination Wednesday and beginning what they promised would be a 30-hour session that keeps the Senate in all night.
House Democrats are at a greater disadvantage, and not all think the public protests around Washington are effective in stopping Trump.
Progressive Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said that Democrats need better, bolder tactics and that he specifically wants to see the party unify behind a message that it will not vote to raise the debt ceiling unless Trump backs off his unilateral spending cuts.
“They can’t pass a debt ceiling increase without the Democrats. Every single Democratic House and Senate member should say on the record that we will not vote for a debt ceiling increase unless we have an ironclad commitment from President Trump and the Office of Budget and Management to spend every single dollar that Congress appropriates,” Khanna said in an interview.
“That’s pretty simple, and that is Congress asserting our power,” he said. “That is the Democrats not just shouting into the wind but actually asserting with strength our demands for the Constitution.”
Democrats are also eying a key March 14 deadline for Congress to fund the government or shut it down as a mechanism to pressure Trump to spend the money that the legislative branch has directed him to. Party leaders say there is no value to striking a new spending deal if Trump can ignore the part of it that he does not like.
“I don’t think you could ever get a budget again in the United States Congress, under anyone, if we don’t start setting up rules that the law is a law,” Casar said. “How do parties negotiate a law if the president doesn’t have to do it? How could one ever sit down and negotiate anything ever again?”
Grappling with a moving target
Since Trump returned to the White House two weeks ago, Democrats have been grappling with the question of how aggressively to take him on as the party’s progressive base demands action. The debate unfolded behind closed doors Wednesday at House Democrats’ weekly caucus meeting.
Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., the head of Democrats’ messaging operation, told rank-and-file members that when Trump makes news, her team will rapidly send out talking points to make sure the issues “resonate” back home in their districts, said a source in the room.
“We are just 15 days into the Trump presidency, but it is obvious that there are two words that sum up what Republicans are doing: chaos and corruption,” Dingell told her colleagues, according to the source. “The news cycle is moving so quickly that we don’t have time to respond to everything that happens. As Leader Jeffries has made clear, we must be targeted and effective.” (Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., is the House minority leader.)
“When Trump blunders — whether it’s with the funding freeze, with tariffs or with the next big thing, eliminating the Department of Education — we must be ready to pounce and make Republicans pay,” Dingell said, adding that Democrats held nearly 80 events in their districts in response to Trump’s actions. “Let me tell you something else: This nationwide drumbeat works.”
Jeffries has dubbed Trump’s push to unilaterally cut or freeze spending the “Republican rip-off.” But inside Wednesday’s meeting, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., a member of the progressive “squad,” stood up and asked what that broad phrase means, the source said.
In a letter to colleagues last week, Jeffries explained the “rip off” as Republicans’ “stealing taxpayer dollars, grants and financial assistance as part of their corrupt scheme to pay off billionaire donors and wealthy corporations.”
Jeffries and other Democrats have said their party needs to take the fight against Trump to the “streets.” Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., said at the rally outside the Capitol on Wednesday: “We must resist. We must be in the streets.”
Bipartisan members of the House Jan. 6 committee had accused Trump of inciting violence when he told thousands of his supporters to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” as he sought to block the certification of the 2020 election results. On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt sought to turn the tables, accusing Democrats of inciting violence even though all of the protests have been peaceful.
“For Democratic officials to incite violence and encourage Americans to take to the streets is incredibly alarming, and they should be held accountable for that rhetoric,” she said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
