Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, whose 10th District includes Athens, has refused to hold a town hall meeting here, but he did participate in a conference call with constituents last week, answering mostly softball questions ostensibly supplied by callers from mostly red rural areas like Rutledge and Collins’ hometown of Jackson, but funneled through an aide.
During the hour-long call, Collins excoriated federal employees as lazy and stupid while defending the spending cuts made by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. He also called for more spending cuts as part of the tax-cutting reconciliation bill congressional Republicans are working on. “We have the power to transform this country for generations,” Collins said.
The reconciliation bill—which only needs support from 50 senators because it’s exempt from the filibuster—would make the first Trump administration’s tax cuts permanent. But Collins wants to go further, supporting Trump’s pledges to end taxes on tips and Social Security, and calling for more deep spending cuts. “What we need to do that they didn’t do in 2017 is cut spending,” he said.
Asked about recent stock market crashes, Collins dismissed them, saying that when tax cuts on businesses are passed, it will provide stability. “A lot of it is reacting to just typical everyday movements. But it’s a snapshot. When you look at it in its entirety, this will be just a small blip,” he said. “And a lot of it is people who don’t want to see change… The stock market, what you see now, you won’t be talking about it in a few years. You’ll be smiling about it.”
Collins praised DOGE. “In their right mind, I don’t understand why anybody would be opposed to [cutting] waste, fraud and abuse,” he said.
“We have a bloated federal bureaucracy,” he said, with “no common sense to what these people are doing, and they’re not accountable.” At another point, he said bureaucrats “have no idea what they’re talking about.”
Referring to an email DOGE sent to federal employees telling them to justify their jobs, Collins said they “should want to show they took a 13-minute lunch; they didn’t go to the bathroom all day.”
Asked about specific items he would cut, Collins mentioned culling the endangered species list and cutting back the timeframe for issuing environmental permits. He also spoke at length about energy, calling for more oil and natural gas drilling and coal mining in the U.S. “We’ve got the cleanest coal you could burn ever… We have beautiful clean-burning coal here, and that’s the cheapest form of energy you can make,” he said.
A person identified as “Arthur from Athens” said, according to the aide, that he is a veteran whose friend died by suicide, and that he was having problems with the Veterans Administration. Collins said those problems are longstanding, and that he’s confident new VA Administrator Doug Collins—an unrelated former congressman for the Athens area—would fix them. Then he quickly pivoted to immigration.
“I cannot believe that millions of people flood into this country illegally—not just the thugs and the criminals—and we’ve been putting them up, food in their mouths, clothes on their back, health care, and we can’t take care of our veterans,” he said.
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