Representative Magaziner holds a town hall-style meeting in East Greenwich

"These are difficult times. These are challenging times. I recognize that," said Representative Magaziner. "I’m doing my best to fight for Rhode Island and everyone here."

Apr 04, 2025

United States Representative Seth Magaziner (RI-02) held a town hall-style meeting on Thursday at Swift Community Center in East Greenwich. Over 200 people attended, and Representative Magaziner answered questions from his constituents.

“Meeting face-to-face with Rhode Islanders is the most important part of my job—especially at a time when so many are rightfully concerned about the dysfunction in Washington,” said Representative Magaziner. “I’m glad to have this conversation with hundreds who are ready to show up, get involved, and make their voices heard on the issues that matter most – including the cost of living, protecting Social Security and Medicaid, and protecting our democracy.”

Here’s the video:

For easy access to the questions constituents asked and the answers Representative Magaziner provided, I’ve provided a brief explanation of the question’s topic and a direct link to that place in the video:

Question 1: Authoritarianism is here, and we have to fight for our future
Question 2: Student Debt and Resisting the Trump Agenda
Question 3: Knowing that Project 2025, why are Democrats so flat-footed?
Question 4: Supreme Court ethics - is it too late?
Question 5: Democrats need a message, and they need to take action
Question 6: Tariffs tanked the stock market and are ruining my retirement benefits
Question 7: Palestine, Israel, and Not in My Name
Question 7a: Using opposition to antisemitism as an excuse to commit atrocities
Question 8: What happened to due process?
Question 9: Wearing a MAGA hoodie, she expressed concern about Representative Magaziner’s attacks against President Trump and gun rights
Question 9a: Dial back talking about Trump for 30 days
Question 10: My family is hurting financially, and I’m worried about my children’s rights - especially around education
Question 11: What are you doing about this?
Question 11a: Is Congress loyal to its party or loyal to the people?
Question 12: Concerns about two bills: The SAVE Act, which will disenfranchise millions, especially women, and a bill to limit the power of Superior Court judges
Question 13: Concerns about legal residents and green card holders - What can be done?
Question 14: A scientist lost her funding, and her research was a net positive for all of us
Question 15: At 60 years old, student debt is ruining her life
Question 16: USAID cuts are already hurting people worldwide
Question 17: Electric bills are too high, and vaccine mandates should not be imposed on anyone, including healthcare workers

Here are Representative Magaziner’s opening remarks, edited for clarity and content:

That you are all here tonight means that you care about our country and state, and I want to thank you for that engagement. I also want to thank you for the trust that you have put in me to represent you in Washington. It’s a responsibility I take very seriously. Whether you voted for me or not, I represent you and’ll do my best for you. My North Star is to fight for the middle class and those working hard to join it, which means working across the aisle whenever possible but standing up to bad policies and extremism whenever necessary.
I will discuss some of the current events in Washington, including the unprecedented and, in my view, sometimes dangerous actions of the Trump Administration and how those actions impact Rhode Island.
I’m aware of the fact that I represent a very diverse district. It is diverse demographically. This district includes Olneyville and Burrillville. It includes West Warwick, Block Island, and, of course, East Greenwich. It’s also diverse politically. In this district, Kamala Harris won 52% of the vote. Donald Trump won 46% of the vote.
I’ll never be shy about expressing my point of view and what I think is right, but I want you to know that whether you agree with what I say or not, I respect your point of view and want to hear from you. We’re living in unprecedented times, not just because we have an administration that I have some policy disagreements with but because, in my view, President Trump is taking an alarming array of actions to expand his executive power at the expense of the checks and balances that our country was founded on.
It began, in my view, on the first day of the administration when he pardoned the January 6th rioters who assaulted police officers and began firing staff attorneys at the Department of Justice who had worked on those January 6th cases. In the last two months, he has abused his power, in my view, by withholding funding appropriated by Congress to the point of virtually eliminating agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and USAid that were created by Congress and exist in the law, and also firing thousands of people from agencies including the Social Security Administration, the Veterans Administration, the FDA, the Department of Health, the Department of Education, and more - already causing significant service disruptions. He has given Elon Musk and an unvetted and untrained group of employees access to the agencies’ databases that include the personal data of every American, including health information through HHS and personal financial information like bank routing numbers through the IRS. This is unprecedented.
He attempted to end the independence of law enforcement functions at the Department of Justice and the FBI, as well as regulatory agencies like the FTC and NLRB, which were designed by Congress to be independent and apolitical. In my view, he has abused his authority by calling a national emergency and claiming that doing so gives him the right to aggressively raise broad-based tariffs without the consent of Congress.
Now understand, in the Constitution, it is Congress and not the executive who has the right to levy tariffs. Congress passed the law giving the executive the authority to do that without going through Congress only in case of emergency. In my view, the legal basis for these across-the-board tariffs is flimsy at best, but even if it is legal, it is certainly, in my view, dangerous, and I’ll explain why in a moment.
He’s also used this National Emergency Authority to detain and deport people with no due process. I’m a member of the Homeland Security Committee in Congress, and I believe that anyone who is here illegally, who has committed a violent crime, does not have the right to be in this country. However, under our law, there has to be due process, and the administration has already admitted to accidentally deporting legal residents with no real plan for returning them.
The impacts of all these actions have been significant. Here in Rhode Island, the tariffs that were announced yesterday will have a significant impact on our state. When I go around Rhode Island, the number one issue that I hear about from people is the cost of living. The cost of living is too high, and these tariffs will raise the cost of energy, food, and healthcare goods. They represent the largest tax increase on the middle class since 1968.
By way of example, 99% of the coffee we drink comes from somewhere else because we do not have the right climate in the United States to grow coffee. What possible good could come from imposing a 20 or 30% tax on imported coffee? I can go through a list of agricultural products, rare earth minerals, and other things that do not exist in the United States. Putting an import tax on those only hurts U.S. consumers and raises costs. As designed, these tariffs will also hurt the manufacturing sector here in Rhode Island. Tariffs on aluminum and steel impact the defense industry. Last week, I had meetings with executives from Electric Boat and Textron, and they told me how these tariffs will hurt their ability to continue doing business competitively.
Tariffs on metals and stones from Canada and other places will impact the jewelry industry in Rhode Island. Fifteen percent of our electricity in Rhode Island comes from Canada, and electricity tariffs will impact the entire manufacturing sector - and every resident of our state. I’m also concerned that these tariffs and the general posture the administration is taking will hurt the tourism and hospitality industry here in Rhode Island. I’ve already seen data that, compared to March last year, incoming travel from Canada to the United States is down 75%. I’m very concerned about the impact of tariffs.
On the job cuts at state and federal offices, we have already had firings at the Providence VA Hospital, the University of Rhode Island, and the NOAA Research Lab in Narragansett has been shut down, among many others. Wait times for the Social Security Administration telephone line were already too long. Still, now Elon Musk and the DOGE office are talking about eliminating the phone line for the Social Security Administration and requiring people to either go into an office in person or navigate a website. But the reality is, as you all know, that social security exists to serve people who are either disabled or elderly. Expecting someone in their nineties or someone who’s very disabled to be able to navigate a website or go into an office is not reasonable.
Our state has lost $30 million at the Department of Health to help administer vaccines for children and provide research to understand future pandemics, $125 million for energy efficiency and renewable energy rebate programs, and $3 million for a USDA program that bought food from Rhode Island farmers and fishermen to deliver to school districts and food pantries.
Right up the road from here in North Kingstown is Edesia, a factory that manufactures something called Plumpy Nut. It’s a nutritional paste. It’s like peanut butter but fortified with extra nutrients. Edesia manufactures this paste in North Kingstown, and this paste is used to save the lives of children around the world who are suffering from malnutrition. Last year, Edesia helped save the lives of 4.9 million children. They have not been paid for their USAID contract in almost three months and have been required to lay people off.
I want to be clear. Many of the administration’s actions are wrong and illegal. Under the Constitution, Congress has the power of the purse, not the Executive. Congress appropriates funds to federal agencies, and it has been established in the courts for decades that the Executive branch does not have the authority to cut off funding over policy disagreements.
If the President, Elon Musk, or anyone else has ideas for how to do things differently or better, the right way to handle that is to take those ideas to Congress, and it’s a Republican-controlled Congress, by the way. Take those ideas, present them, and make the case. [What the president is doing] is called impoundment, and the Supreme Court ruled on this back in the 1970s. I imagine this will return to the Supreme Court again soon, but it’s already been ruled on. Congress has the authority to appropriate funds.
All across the country, courts have been ordering the administration to halt much of this behavior, and in some cases, the administration has backed off. In January and February, we were getting calls every day from five or six groups in Rhode Island that had had their funding cut off—health centers, nursing homes, head starts, etc.
We and others around the country made a lot of noise, and sometimes the funding came back, and sometimes it didn’t. It’s been a very fluid situation, but in too many cases, like some of the ones I just mentioned, the administration continues to withhold funding illegally.
At the same time, the administration and Republicans in Congress are trying to push through a big budget bill. The reconciliation bill includes four and a half trillion dollars of tax cuts, mostly at the high end, paid for by billions of dollars of cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, education, and more. Medicaid cuts, in particular, would be devastating for Rhode Island. There are 237,000 Rhode Islanders, almost a quarter of our entire state, who get their health insurance from Medicaid, including over a hundred thousand children. Suppose this bill passes and there are significant cuts to Medicaid. In that case, it will probably mean that many people will lose their health insurance, or, for those who have Medicaid, their health insurance will not have as many health services covered by insurance anymore.
The other impact, though, and I want people to understand this, is that even if you are not on Medicaid, you will still be impacted because healthcare providers rely on Medicaid revenue to help keep the lights on. If you have a loved one in a nursing home in Rhode Island, even if they are not on Medicaid, that nursing home might have to shut down if Medicaid funding is significantly cut. Community health centers - same deal. You may not be on Medicaid, but if you go to a community health center here in Rhode Island and they lose a lot of Medicaid funding, they may also have to shut down.
This is a serious situation, and we are fighting back hard and making the case to our colleagues on the Republican side, too. Their districts have nursing homes and community health centers, especially in rural areas. I see some cracks forming, and some of my colleagues on the other side saying, "Maybe we need to rethink the Medicaid part." I’m not declaring victory yet. I’m not taking anything for granted. But I think the realization is starting to hit that deep cuts to Medicaid will create chaos. My north star is that I’ll work across the aisle whenever possible and stand up to extremism whenever necessary. As your representative, it is my job to stand up to many of the administration’s actions.
People who agree with me often ask, "What will we do? What can we do?" I’ll offer a few things. The first is to be vocal about what you think. I’m trying to be vocal, so I’m doing things like this when I’m home from Washington. It feels like almost every day for the last two months that I’ve been in Rhode Island, I’ve done a press conference at some healthcare facility to try to call attention to the Medicaid issue. We’ve done press events at behavioral health centers, community health centers, nursing homes, and hospitals - sometimes by myself, sometimes with the rest of the congressional delegation. There are always healthcare providers there trying to raise the alarm. We’re doing town halls like this one. We’re doing events and rallies and talking to people who may not be sure what to think.
I went on Fox News last weekend to talk about Medicaid cuts. I’m trying to do my part and be vocal wherever I can, and I encourage all of you to do the same.
Second, support the legal process because it is playing out. In many cases, it is working. I’ve been joining amicus briefs along with other members of Congress on a range of issues—opposing the elimination of USAID and the CFPB, for example. We’re also pushing back against efforts to erode the power of the courts through legislation.
The last advice I’ll offer to those who agree with what I said is to find unconventional allies. You’re not moving the needle if you only talk with people you agree with. There are a lot of people out there, and I know this because I represent a politically diverse district, who like some aspects of what Trump is doing but aren’t so sure about others. Those are the most important people to talk with - people who keep an open mind and say, "I voted for him. I like this, I like that, but I’m not so sure about this Medicaid thing." Those are the conversations to have.
I’ve worked closely with a Republican Representative named Austin Scott from Georgia. I mentioned Edesia, the factory in North Kingstown that makes that paste. Only one other factory in the country makes that stuff, and it’s in his district in Georgia, so he understands because he’s been there, seen it, and knows its importance. I went to him, and now he and I are working together to appeal to the administration to bring that funding back for that emergency food aid. We’ve got a verbal commitment from both Marco Rubio and Elon Musk to turn that funding back on. It hasn’t come yet, but find unconventional allies, people who may support some things on the other side but are willing to keep an open mind and who don’t necessarily agree with everything the administration is doing.
We must use every legislative tool to put guardrails around the administration in Congress. That’s why the rest of the Rhode Island delegation and I voted against the Continuing Resolution (CR) bill two weeks ago. I’ll continue to advocate to our leadership teams [to use] every point of leverage we can.
These are difficult times. These are challenging times. I recognize that. I’m doing my best to fight for Rhode Island and everyone here. I can’t promise you’ll always agree with every decision I make - that would be impossible. But I can promise that I’ll always listen. I will always do my best to represent the people of our district, and I ask that you continue to engage with me so that I can be as good as possible at representing you in Washington.