On March 20, 2025, Tom Cole held a town hall for his constituents in Oklahoma's 4th District. It was on the telephone.

Most of the hour went to one subject. NOTUS reporter Em Luetkemeyer, who listened in, wrote that the majority of questions Cole faced were about DOGE — Elon Musk's operation, which was then tearing through federal agencies and cancelling contracts and leases across the country. Callers asked about Social Security. They asked about the Indian Health Service. They asked about federal offices closing in Oklahoma and people losing their jobs.

One caller asked the question that actually matters:

"I'm very concerned about Congress's constitutional duties, that those are being taken over by DOGE. I would like to know what steps you're willing to take to make sure that the constitutional duties of Congress remain with Congress, and not with the executive branch."

Cole is the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Deciding how federal money gets spent is, quite literally, his job. The Constitution gives that power to Congress, and inside Congress it runs through his committee.

Here is his answer:

"I try to do it by pretty aggressively defending congressional power. I think there's a lot of things out there that you hear that may or may not be true."

And then he explained what "aggressively defending congressional power" meant in practice.

The method: call DOGE and complain

Cole told the callers that when DOGE went after something in his district, his office picked up the phone.

"We've found, at least, if you work it just like you would any other government agency, they can be pretty responsive."

His example was a Social Security office in Lawton, Oklahoma, that had shown up on a list of terminated leases. His staff flagged it. DOGE reversed it.

"We think this is a bad decision. And [DOGE] relooked at it and they agreed so. But this is where members have to be pretty aggressive and engaged."

That is the chairman of the Appropriations Committee describing his relationship with an unelected outfit that was cancelling spending Congress had approved: he asks, and sometimes they say yes.

NOTUS also noted that The Atlantic had reported that week that Cole met with Elon Musk over cigars and bourbon, and advised him to consult lawmakers before making cuts. Cole's read on how that went:

"So far, I've found them to be good to their word."

He closed the call by telling constituents to "have confidence in the country's institutions."

What actually happened in his district

Confidence would have been easier if the cuts had stopped.

In February 2025, several employees at the National Weather Center in Norman — inside Cole's district — were fired as part of the mass federal layoffs. On March 3, DOGE cancelled the lease on the Radar Operations Center, the hub where technicians and researchers maintain and improve the country's weather radar. Those are the facilities that keep tornado warnings working in a state that gets a lot of tornadoes.

Cole assured the callers on his March 20 telephone town hall that DOGE had reconsidered and backed off. Then, through the summer, he kept promising. At a Norman chamber of commerce event, he told worried scientists: "You're going to be fine in our bill. We're going to protect it." He said the National Weather Center "is not going anywhere, and it's going to be fully staffed and maintained."

But in the same reporting, Cole acknowledged the limit of his own promise: control of the grants lies with the executive branch. The spending plan his subcommittee produced still cut $380 million from NOAA. NOAA supplies roughly 20% of the University of Oklahoma's research funding and supports more than 900 jobs in the area.

So the chairman's answer to an agency being dismantled was to negotiate with the people dismantling it, one project at a time, and hope the rest held.

And he wouldn't show up

Meanwhile, his constituents were trying to get in the same room with him.

A group in Norman called Women in Action for All held a rally outside Cole's office. "We had about a hundred women there, and we had signs and that sort of thing," chair Rhonda Stock said. They delivered a letter, written by a retired OU history professor, asking Cole to hold a town hall.

When that didn't work, they held one without him. On April 9, 2025, they staged what they called a "Non Cole Town Hall" at the Moore Public Library. Former Oklahoma Gov. David Walters and former Senate president pro tempore Cal Hobson took the questions people wanted to ask their congressman.

Cole's communications director, Olivia Porcaro, explained his absence: "Due to the congressman's busy schedule, he will not be in attendance at the event."

Stock said the group's biggest worry was the National Weather Center. "Oklahoma needs it desperately," she said. "People just need warnings about the weather."

Cole's official website still lists exactly one kind of town hall: telephone town halls. On the phone, staff choose which callers get through. Nobody gets to follow up. Nobody gets to look him in the eye.

He did face people in person once that year. On July 30, 2025, he met constituents at Sonny's Cafe in Purcell — where, as The Oklahoman documented in a photo gallery, he was met by protesters holding signs.

The thing he could have done

There was a straightforward option available to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee: refuse to move the cuts.

He did the opposite. In June and July 2025, Cole's committee advanced, and Cole voted for, the Rescissions Act of 2025 — the bill that cancelled $9.4 billion Congress had already approved. His own office called it a vote "in Favor of Rescinding Wasteful Spending." That bill did not ask DOGE nicely to reverse anything. It wrote DOGE's cuts into law.

You cannot spend the spring telling constituents you are "aggressively defending congressional power" and spend the summer voting to hand that power away.

Ohio's Troy Balderson tried a version of the same two-step and got caught doing it in the space of a single day. Cole took a few months. The result was the same.

Twenty-three years in Congress. The most powerful spending gavel in the House. And when the people of Norman wanted to ask him about the weather center in their own backyard, he sent word that he was busy — while telling reporters that Elon Musk had been good to his word.

Source

The town hall quotes come from Em Luetkemeyer's March 20, 2025 report for NOTUS, Rep. Tom Cole Says DOGE Is 'Pretty Responsive' to His Concerns, produced in partnership with Oklahoma Watch. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP.