Congress was in recess in March 2025. Austin Scott was not at his home office in Warner Robins.

So close to 200 people from Georgia's 8th Congressional District came anyway. They set a folding chair at the back door of his office, draped a blue blazer over it, and asked the chair the questions they wanted to ask their congressman.

That is what a town hall in Austin Scott's district looks like now. He has represented this district since 2011 — 15 years, the most senior Republican in Georgia's entire congressional delegation. The last town hall his own office announced was in August 2015, and it was only for veterans.

That's 11 years.

The questions they asked the blazer

Maggie Boxey is a disabled veteran from Fitzgerald, in South Georgia. She and her husband have 34 years of military service between them. Here is what she asked:

"I would ask the congressman to explain to us, in simple language, why billionaires need a $4.5 trillion tax cut? And how will that benefit my husband and I, who have 34 years of military service between us?"

She kept going:

"I have a disabling chronic illness and our health care is in jeopardy. If Medicaid is cut, Medicare is cut, our hospitals in Fitzgerald, Ga. … we're at risk of losing our providers. Why is it okay for billionaires to get such a huge tax cut when normal people like us are at risk of losing our social safety nets?"

Faye Banks-Anderson of Warner Robins used to work at Robins Air Force Base, about six miles from where she was standing. She asked why Scott wasn't defending the civilian workers there:

"So I want to know, do you believe in the president's haphazard way of just drastically cutting federal workers fighting fraud, waste and abuse without documentation? All this fraud, waste and abuse that they're supposedly cutting? Where is it? Where is it? Where is the proof?"

Marion McMillan of Warner Robins asked about farms. Georgia's 8th is farm country, and tree nuts like pecans are Georgia's second-largest agricultural export, behind poultry:

"Georgia's pecan farms are still recovering from Trump's prior 2017 tariffs. They caused a dramatic drop in Chinese exports. The effect this time on Georgia's biggest agricultural export by Trump's tariffs will be worse. Why have you been silent on this issue?"

Other people, from Moultrie and Valdosta, asked what happens to poor and rural Georgia school districts if the federal Department of Education goes away.

When the permit for the gathering ran out, the people who hadn't gotten to speak wrote their questions down on paper to be handed inside.

Nobody from Scott's office came outside.

He is the guy who is supposed to answer the pecan question

The tariff question wasn't a random gripe. Scott is Vice Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee and Chairman of the Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities, Risk Management, and Credit. By his own account, Georgia leads the nation in peanuts, pecans, and poultry.

He is, in other words, one of the small handful of members of Congress with actual power over what happens to Georgia farmers in a trade war. In March 2026, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock and the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation agreed in a Senate Agriculture hearing that the tariffs are raising input costs and cutting off markets for Georgia producers, with fertilizer prices 10 to 15 percent higher in 2026 than in 2025.

A pecan farmer in Middle Georgia asking Austin Scott about tariffs is asking exactly the right person. She had to ask a jacket.

What he told a reporter instead

Scott didn't skip the day entirely. He emailed GPB.

In that email he said he wished federal agencies had been consulted before the cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency — but that he supports agencies working with DOGE now. He also said he would meet with constituents during the recess. He did not say when. He did not say where.

That is the whole of it: an email to a reporter, expressing a mild procedural preference about how the cuts were rolled out, and a promise of a meeting with no date attached.

Middle Georgians for Democracy, the group that organized the event, told 41NBC that Scott hasn't held a town hall since 2015. Organizer Lynn Snyder told WGXA: "We've been asking for weeks and weeks and we've been ignored." And: "We've been told he is not going to hold a town hall."

This is a strategy, not a scheduling problem

Scott is not an outlier, and that's the point.

In February 2025, another Georgia Republican, Rich McCormick, held an in-person town hall in Roswell and got a room full of angry constituents. Two weeks later House Republican leaders urged their members to stop holding in-person town halls at all — a retreat we wrote about here. Across the country, Republicans swapped real town halls for screened telephone calls, or for nothing.

The math behind it is simple. A member who never has to stand in a room can vote for a $4.5 trillion tax cut and never be asked, out loud, by a disabled veteran from Fitzgerald, why billionaires needed it.

Austin Scott has now gone 11 years without giving the people of the 8th District that chance. He is running for a ninth term this November against Democratic nominee Kelly Esti, a Navy veteran. Scott drew no primary opponent at all.

Maggie Boxey's question is still sitting there, unanswered, at the back door of a district office in Warner Robins. We deserve better.

Source

"People from Austin Scott's district wanted a town hall with the congressman. They had it without him," Grant Blankenship, Georgia Public Broadcasting, March 17, 2025. Photo: Grant Blankenship/GPB News.