Dear Reps. Mike Simpson and Russ Fulcher and Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch,
We hope this email finds you well.
In accordance with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s directives to ensure that the federal government is running efficiently and that no federal employee is wasting taxpayer dollars by sitting around and doing nothing, we are reaching out to you today with one simple question: What did you do last week?
As you may have read in the news (unless your news subscriptions have already been canceled by the Department of Government Efficiency), thousands of federal employees last week received a similar email with the subject line, “What did you do last week?”
We wanted to make sure all federal employees got the memo.
Please reply to this email with approx. (we don’t have time to write out “approximately”) 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week.
Please do not send any classified information, links or attachments. (We don’t want the Russians getting a hold of them — er, we mean Ukraine.)
Specifically, please list what you did last week to honor your oath of office, what you did as a check and balance against a rogue executive branch and what you did to protect democracy and the U.S. Constitution.
In other words, your jobs.
Sen. Risch, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and longtime member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, what have you done in the past five days to counteract the devastating foreign policy reversal of the Trump administration?
Please tell us what you did following an embarrassing meeting in which Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance berated Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and demanded that he thank them.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who you once said was probably your best friend in the Senate when he was a senator, was at that meeting and sat by looking on as if someone had punched him in the stomach.
Can you please tell us if you reached out to Secretary Rubio to remind him that Russia is the one that invaded Ukraine?
Further, what have you done, in your respective roles as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and member of the Intelligence Committee, following the announcement that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered a halt to offensive cyber operations against Russia, as if Russia were no longer a cybersecurity threat.
In your email, please explain why you did not sign on as a co-sponsor of a bipartisan resolution from the Foreign Relations Committee expressing the U.S. Senate’s unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity while condemning Russia’s illegal aggression and attempts to seize Ukrainian territory.
Rep. Simpson, in your email, can you please explain what you have done about the firings of thousands of National Park and U.S. Forest Service employees, jeopardizing our public lands and opening us up to wildfires.
Rep. Simpson, you have been a champion of public lands. You were instrumental in establishing three new wilderness areas in central Idaho: the Hemingway-Boulders Wilderness, the Cecil D. Andrus-White Clouds Wilderness and the Jim McClure-Jerry Peak Wilderness, totaling 275,665 acres.
But why create those wilderness areas if there are no Forest Service employees to maintain and protect those lands?
Sen. Crapo, as the chairman of the Finance Committee, what have you done to assure Idaho businesses that Trump’s tariffs will not hurt them?
What have you done in the last week to push back against President Trump’s damaging rhetoric and actions against Canada and Mexico, our greatest friends and trade partners? Keep in mind, Canada is Idaho’s largest trading partner, with exports totaling over $1.4 billion in 2023, according to the Idaho Department of Commerce.
Rep. Fulcher, as a supposed fiscal hawk, can you explain why you voted in favor of the House budget bill, which not only cuts services to the poor and gives tax breaks to the wealthy but also increases the federal budget deficit?
Your silence and failure to act suggest that you have done nothing in the past week, which would be a gross misuse and waste of taxpayer dollars.
Deadline to respond is this Thursday at 11:59 p.m. MST.
Please respond to this email and cc your managers, i.e., the voters who put you in office.
Statesman editorials are the opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe, newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser and community members Greg Lanting, Terri Schorzman and Garry Wenske.