Hundreds protest, ask Rep. Blake Moore to stand up to DOGE

SALT LAKE CITY — A couple hundred protesters greeted Utah Rep. Blake Moore as he was set to give the keynote address at a Republican luncheon in Ogden on Saturday, calling for the congressman to oppose Elon Musk’s efforts to gut the federal government.

Many of the demonstrators are federal workers — Moore’s congressional district includes the Hill Air Force Base and an Internal Revenue Service facility. They described living in constant fear of losing their jobs to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

“It’s difficult to get sleep, you know? It’s something that — it’s hard to concentrate on things,” said Steve Oliver, a Layton resident who works for the Department of Defense. “Every day you come into work and you’re not sure what you’re going to hear, what email is going to come through that gives you some new order like the five (bullet points) that we have to do every week. It’s ridiculous. It’s just a waste of time. So, yeah, it’s been very stressful for us.”

Oliver and many other protestors who spoke with KSL.com agreed waste and inefficiency should be cut from the federal government but said the way President Donald Trump and Musk — the world’s richest man who has spearheaded early efforts to cut spending — have done so in a haphazard way that has impacted productive government workers without really addressing waste and fraud.

Early on, the administration went after so-called probationary workers, who were newly hired or promoted and lacked civil service protections. But Oliver said the administration misunderstood the importance of those workers, who are often hired to fill a specific need the government has.

A judge in February ruled the mass firings of probationary workers were likely unlawful.

“They’re able to fire them without any real justification and now some of them are actually told they need to come back to work and get back pay,” Oliver said. “It shows you the chaos of all this. They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have a clue.”

Speaking to a huddle of reporters inside the Timberline Steakhouse where he would address a crowd of Republican Party members, Moore seemed to agree, saying he disagrees with how the administration has handled probationary workers and said he was pleased many of them were rehired.

“One thing that I’m actually impressed with President Trump in redirecting Elon Musk in the DOGE world … he reestablished this is an advisory role,” Moore said. “There’s a ton of good work that can be done on data systems, software programs, the things that there really is a lot of churn and waste within our system, but personnel needs to be directed and handled by secretaries.”

“Again, the probationary understanding right away, I think was handled very well,” he added. “I think they’ve recognized that and have to course-correct some of that.”

The demonstration was organized by 50501, an organization that has held protestsacross the nation opposed to Trump and Project 2025, a policy agenda created by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Moore is also not the first Utah Republican to face anger while in his district during Congress’ recess this week after several hundred people disrupted a town hall hosted by Reps. Celeste Maloy and Mike Kennedy on Thursday.

The congressman faced similar frustration during a telephone town hall meeting last month, when he said he worried about the “demonization” of federal workers and said he understands the anger many are feeling.

Moore is a member of House GOP leadership and a co-chairman of the House DOGE Caucus, so the protesters who lined the street outside the steakhouse on Saturday were hopeful that his position could yield real benefits for Utahns — and angry with what they see as a lack of action standing up to Trump and Musk.

Terry Grant said he voted for Trump and still supports the bulk of the president’s actions but said he’s bothered by Musk’s onslaught through the federal government. Grant is a union employee and criticized what he called attempts to “break unions.”

“The unions are there to help bargain for people. They’re not to take a freebie or let lazy workers stay at work,” he said. “We’re there just to protect their rights.”

Brenda Jaramillo said she is tired of hearing government workers described as lazy.

“Tell him that he’s one of those lazy federal employees,” she said of Moore. “He doesn’t do what he was tired to do.”

While anger at Musk and DOGE was a dominant theme of the protest, many cited other specific issues they care about, including LGBTQ+ rights and the war in Ukraine. Two of Laura Bond’s grandchildren are LGBTQ+ and the Layton resident said hostility toward gay and lesbian people has gotten worse under Trump.

“I wish they understood that they are human beings that have integrity and rights and that they’re not playing games,” she said. “They need the right to love who they want to love. They’re just human beings that need the right to live here.”

Summit County resident Bill Hickey waved a Ukrainian flag and called on Moore to “show some courage.”

“I know he supports Ukraine, but Trump is surrendering to (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and Blake Moore’s got nothing to say about it. He’s not doing anything about it,” Hickey said.

Moore acknowledge that constituents on both sides of the aisle have been angry with him at different times, and he recalled conservative members criticizing him for not “doing enough” to push back on former President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 policies, or for voting against Trump’s proposal to raise the debt ceiling in December.

“There will always be frustrations,” he said. “If people want to understand one thing, all the work that we’re doing behind the scenes, working with the administration to hopefully get all this stuff right and move forward in a way that we can productively look back and say, ‘Hey, we were able to trim our budget and our economy still grew and we were still in a good, powerful spot as the global leader.’ That’s the win that we’re looking for.”

Related: Rep. Blake Moore speaks to frustration surrounding DOGE and mass layoffs