MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle will host a primetime special featuring an audience of federal workers whose jobs were slashed by DOGE.
“100 Days of Trump: A Town Hall With Forced Out Federal Workers,” will air Thursday, May 1 at 9 p.m.
“It has been like drinking from a fire hose, whether it’s executive orders, deportations, tariffs, and what’s happened to all the federal workers because of the DOGE situation,” Ruhle tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “We thought DOGE and this enormous impact on federal workers would be a great way for us to press pause and show people what’s happening.”
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Ruhle says that the audience of the town hall will feature a range of former federal workers, including some forced out by Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service, Veterans Affairs and other agencies.
“I’m viewing our audience as part of this conversation, not just there to stand up and ask questions the way you often see a traditional town hall,” Ruhle says. “I see every person in that room as also an important guest, an important voice, because this is not about partisanship. This isn’t about this administration. This is about America, because much of what the President is trying to do right now is reshape the way we live, the way we work, the way we see our country, the way other countries see us.”
Jacob Soboroff, meanwhile, will deliver stories about how the cuts will impact different parts of the country.
He’s headed to West Virginia next week to show what these jobs are and where they are,” Ruhle says. “Think about West Virginia. It is a state that has been crushed in terms of its economy. It’s one of the lowest ranking states in terms of health care, in terms of education, and now we’re going to see massive job cuts.
“Take a state like Alabama, a deep red state, I don’t think people would realize that the largest employer in the state of Alabama is the University of Alabama, which is obviously tied to their hospital system,” Ruhle adds. “It’s why you’ve got Republican senator Katie Britt in Alabama urging the President not to have these sweeping cuts, because when you take cuts like that, you’re going to impact millions and millions and millions of potential lives if we’re cutting off medical research.”
For Ruhle, who frequently covers business and economics given her background as a financial reporter, the cuts are part and parcel of the sweeping tariffs announced earlier this month as part of an effort to reshape the economy. Though she notes that many Americans do want to shake up what had been the status quo.
“It’s a lot of chaos. But there is some boldness to it if you want to shake up the status quo, and most people would argue they have some appetite for shaking up status quo, right?” Ruhle says. “But there’s a difference between shaking up the status quo, optimizing the government, optimizing what we do and how we spend. There’s a large gap between that and where we are right now.
“When people think about federal workers, they just think bloated D.C. And you know, there is a big positive appetite for the idea of DOGE,” Ruhle says. “You can speak to people at any income level, any demographic, any political affiliation, and people will say the government is too big, the government is too bloated, the government doesn’t work for me. And that led way to the openness to the idea of DOGE. Then DOGE came, and what it’s actually doing is having a sweeping effect on all different parts of this country and our economy, and we want to shine a spotlight and show it, because it’s not something that’s just happening in DC.”
