Suhas Subramanyam is about to wear through his fourth pair of walking shoes. The 38-year-old Democrat wore out the first three knocking on doors to convince voters in the Northern Virginia suburbs to send him to Capitol Hill. He’s only been in Congress a month and his current pair have started to fray as he’s paced the Capitol and his district responding to President Donald Trump’s remaking of Washington and the federal government.
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Subramanyam has been moving at a frenzied pace ever since being sworn in on Jan. 6, as Trump and Elon Musk have taken steps to dismantle federal agencies, gut the federal workforce, and, some argue, set the stage for a constitutional crisis.
“Everything so far is so crazy,” says Subramanyam, in an interview in his basement office in the Longworth House Office Building. “We are just trying to adapt to everything that is going on and go with the punches and figure out what our response is.”
In Washington, Subramanyam has been among those Democrats from Congress joining ousted federal workers outside the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Treasury Department to denounce the Musk-led restructuring.
In his district, home to 34,000 federal workers, Subramanyam has been struck by the anxiety of so many of his constituents. On a recent Monday night, he expected his first town hall in Leesburg to draw a few dozen people. Instead the place was packed to capacity. Hundreds filled long benches inside the Loudoun County Government Center to express their concerns about federal job cuts and funding freezes. Hundreds more watched the discussion from monitors in the building’s lobby. Several stood up to express their concerns about federal programs and jobs that were being slashed. One man said his agency was told to cut 50% of its jobs and described how an official sent from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency had started sleeping in the office.
Subramanyam, whose committee assignments include the House Oversight Committee, directed his staff to log the testimony and contact details of whistleblowers and collect details to document the Trump administration’s actions.
He says his concerns are about more than the federal workers in his district losing their livelihoods. He’s heard from food safety experts, crop security specialists, and nuclear scientists who are seeing their work halted. He fears the loss of expertise in the federal government, as people who have worked in their fields for years or decades get pushed out of public service and end up in the private sector. Subramanyam says he’s already seeing a “brain drain” from the federal government. It’s not a downsizing of government, he says, it’s a “dumbsizing.”
“When we talk about Trump getting rid of highly educated employees at federal agencies, that’s not just the income of a working family in our district,” he says. “That is the deterioration of food safety or of security for our country.”
This is not Subramanyam’s first time in the federal government. He served as a White House technology policy adviser in the Obama administration. He then spent five years in the Virginia Legislature. On the campaign trail, he often laid out his entire life story, including his parents immigrating to America from India before he was born.
Last week, Musk announced his Department of Government Efficiency was rehiring Marko Elez, a 25-year-old software engineer who had resigned after The Wall Street Journal linked him to a social media account that had recently posted racist messages including “Normalize Indian hate,” and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” Subramanyam says the incident “shows the values of the people Musk is bringing on.”
“I don’t dwell on it but I see it as a responsibility not to normalize it,” he says. “I’m Indian American and in a mixed-race marriage. It’s deeply offensive, but it’s becoming normal for me to hear things like that—especially over the last couple of years.”
While he spent much of his first time opposing the GOP’s agenda, Subramanyam found at least one moment of bipartisanship. Last month, he was among the Democrats who joined Republicans to pass the Laken Riley Act, which requires immigration officers to arrest and detain immigrants who are in the country unlawfully if they are charged with any of a list of crimes, including minor theft of $100 or more. It is the first bill Trump has signed into law in his second term.
Most of the shelves in Subramanyam’s office are still empty. One shelf has a pair of boxing gloves on it. The person who gave him said it was because he was “a fighter.” He’s put a mini-basketball hoop in the corner. He has a hard time sitting still, he says, so when he’s on a long phone call, he sometimes tosses rubber basketballs toward the hoop.
Given that his party is in the minority in the House and Senate, Subramanyam is well aware his ability to stop Trump’s actions are limited. For the next several months, he says, his priority is shining a spotlight on everything Trump is doing to the American government. “Our job is to educate people about what is going on and be a check on that and then, if we can get back in power in two years, do some real oversight of the Administration,” he says. He won’t have much time to sit still.
