Dave McCormick defended DOGE and Trump, and called Signal chat a ‘mistake,’ in first tele-town hall

Maria from Media asked Sen. Dave McCormick how he would protect Medicaid.

Mary Beth from Ridley wanted to know what the freshman Republican senator thought of government layoffs impacting veterans.

Michael from Erie had questions about why inflation hasn’t dropped.

McCormick held his first town hall since becoming Pennsylvania’s senator over the phone on Tuesday, in an hour-long, wide-ranging Q-and-A with residents who were identified like callers on sports talk radio — in a format featuring far less heated debate.

The tele-town hall was advertised 30 minutes before it started via a post on McCormick’s X account.

“Hopefully you guys all found this useful,” McCormick said to what he described as ”thousands” of people on the line as it wrapped up. “If we get good feedback on this, we’ll do it again. …if you’re not getting satisfactory answers, please keep asking.”

Members of Congress have become harder to reach in recent years, but in a moment when government is changing rapidly and constituent complaints are piling up, Pennsylvania residents are finding their lawmakers even more elusive.

For weeks, Pennsylvania constituents have reported answering machines or busy signals when they’ve called their representatives’ offices. U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Bucks), who has not held a public town hall in years, drew protesters at a St. Patrick’s Day parade he attended earlier this month for his lack of accessibility. Video posted on social media shows people dressed like leprechauns surrounding a car bearing Fitzpatrick’s name, shouting “Hold a town hall!” and “Unlucky for Bucks County!”

The visible frustration has left Republicans reluctant to hold in-person gatherings, as across the country they’ve turned into venues for people to vent outrage and fear. But as pressure has mounted to answer to constituents, tele-town halls have become the GOP’s solution: a much more controlled venue for hearing people’s concerns. Republican U.S. Reps. Ryan Mackenzie (R., Lehigh) and Rob Bresnahan (R., Lackawanna) both held tele-town halls this month.

Democrats, meanwhile, have called the phone call gatherings performative and ineffective as they convene in-person town halls across the state in attempts to draw attention to Republicans’ silence on parts of Trump’s agenda. The newly installed Democratic National Committee Chair, Ken Martin, attended one in Bethlehem last week. Former U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, from Western Pennsylvania, is holding an in-person event in Centre County on Saturday.

McCormick’s tele-town hall came four days before a planned appearance to promote his upcoming book in Pittsburgh with fellow Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. Several groups are planning to protest that event to call on both senators to hold in-person town halls.

In the span of an hour, McCormick took about a dozen questions. Callers first shared their question with a screener, according to a caller who got through, before being added to a queue to ask McCormick live.

Here are some other topics covered in the town hall conversation on Tuesday night.

During the telephone event, McCormick said he’s “committed to not reducing benefits, taking away benefits for Medicaid, Social Security, or Medicare.”

At the same time, he said he supports looking for fraud and waste within the system. Republicans in Congress are in the midst of ironing out details of a reconciliation bill that calls for $880 billion in federal budget cuts. Some nonpartisan analysts have warned the only way to achieve that level of savings will be by cutting the federal safety net program.

McCormick defended the cuts that billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have undertaken. Asked specifically about veterans who’ve lost their jobs, McCormick, an army veteran who served in the first Gulf War, said the cuts were necessary to right-size government.

“We’re really in a financial pickle … because we essentially have $34 trillion of debt and the DOGE effort is essentially meant to provide transparency and clarity on where there’s waste,” McCormick said.

“We saw lots of examples where the taxpayer money is being carelessly spent, now, with that said, when you make big changes like this, and that’s what DOGE is trying to do, you’re going to make mistakes,” McCormick said. “ So there needs to be a mechanism where if decisions are made prematurely, or have consequences that weren’t well considered, that there’s a feedback loop to fix those quickly.”

Later, McCormick disagreed with a caller’s description of DOGE as “unchecked.”

“I don’t believe it’s unchecked,” he said. “[Musk] works for President Trump and the actual cabinet secretaries. And the actual cabinet secretaries are the ones responsible for deciding what’s appropriate and not appropriate in terms of the cost reduction.”

McCormick said federal workforce cuts are a “necessity to rein in government and get it under control.”

”We should thank them. We need to treat those folks that are transitioning and looking for new things and new opportunities with respect and dignity and appreciation, even though there’s not, you know, a job for them going forward,” he said.

A caller asked McCormick about the Signal group chat between top national security officials regarding an upcoming attack in Yemen that inadvertently included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. The scandal has dominated the conversation in Washington this week as some Democrats call for dismissals and Republicans downplay the incident.

» READ MORE: Two Pa. lawmakers avoid questioning Tulsi Gabbard about group chat leak controversy

“It was clear, clearly there’s a mistake,” McCormick said. “I mean, those conversations should not be taking place outside, you know, approved secure channels, and they were. I’m sure we’ll learn more in the coming days of how that happened. And I’m fairly confident there will be efforts taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again. "

Several Democrats have called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth or National Security Advisor Mike Waltz. McCormick has not joined them, falling in line with most Republicans who have avoided the topic or defended the administration.

A caller from Edinboro, in Erie County, who described himself as someone who voted for and supported the GOP messaging in the last election, asked when he might see the promise of economic improvements realized.

“When are we going to see it in our gas tax, our grocery prices, our day-to-day living?” the caller asked. “I just think a lot of people are seeing that the common taxpayer, everyday citizen, is still living paycheck to paycheck.”

McCormick said he thinks Trump “is delivering on what he promised,” and cited a drop in border crossings as one promise kept. He also pointed to executive orders on energy production, while acknowledging that those changes will take time to net results. He said he hopes to grow the manufacturing sector in Pennsylvania and make the state a hub for data centers, an industry experiencing explosive growth.

Louis Bergelson, a 39-year-old husband and father of two from Havertown, called into the town hall. He told the screener he wanted to ask about school choice, but when he got on, he instead followed up on McCormick saying he wanted to extend Trump’s tax cuts.

“If you’re worried about taxes, why not tax the insanely wealthy?” Bergelson asked.

“I can sense from your question, we’re probably not going to agree on this,” McCormick, who formerly led a hedge fund, responded. “But if you look at where the large majority of the tax burden of the country is, it’s predominantly on the wealthy.” He said the extension of the current tax bill “would benefit all the people that got that tax cut, so if you don’t extend that tax bill, you are raising taxes.”

Bergelson, who works in genomic data cancer research, said in an interview with The Inquirer that he lost his job following Trump’s cuts to funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Bergelson said he called McCormick’s office and met with a staffer there, trying to encourage McCormick to speak out against NIH cuts. McCormick said on the call he was concerned about the funding cuts, but Bergelson hung up at the event’s conclusion, disappointed with the telephone format.

“I wish he’d had an actual town hall,” Bergelson said, “because having a town hall where you get to choose the questions, and you cut off the people who ask you questions, and doing it without telling anyone until 20 minutes before, he was clearly trying to check a box without actually receiving feedback.”